Part V: Snakes – Snake #11 (Chapter 94)
“You’re all wet,” Snake says as I sit beside him. He runs his fingers through my wet hair, dividing the back into two parts.
His fingers feel good.
“Everything okay?”
I nod. My pasta with white sauce has arrived, and
it’s still hot. Also, Mother has not yet returned from the house.
Time expanded, exploded.
I stir the sauce and pasta together; I notice
small, white chunks of something. I jab a couple with my fork and hold the
pieces in front of Snake. “What’s this?”
“Clams. Try ‘em. They’re good.”
I’m not so sure. In Sioux City, clams, when you
can get them, come deep fried in batter.
Snake nods. “Go ahead.”
I’m not hungry. I drop the fork to my plate and
grab Snake’s arm. I pull him close to me. “Let’s go away.”
As soon as the words leave my lips, everyone
around us has disappeared, or, at the very least, no longer cares where we go
or what we do.
Snake jumps up from the table and grabs my hand.
As he leads me around the pool and into a small rock garden – an alcove, really
– I groan at the lushness of Monique’s place, the fat palm trees, the plump
cacti with red, white, and yellow blossoms and long needles, the Swedish ivy
climbing the stucco wall, the two orange trees – past blossom by now but the
small green fruit still sweet smelling...
Snake swoops me up and carries me to a small
gazebo – which is tucked away behind a bridal wreath bush, considered a weed
back home – and we lie down together.
Perfect for making love.
I should want to experience some foreplay before
going on to the ultimate act, but my entire life has been about foreplay – in
my dreams, I have experienced wet kisses all over my body, a man’s nibble on my
breasts, a man’s tongue in my ear and in my...I just want to get on with what I
have been waiting for ever since I can remember. I don’t remember a time when I
wasn’t waiting to make love, it just seems like forever when, at Sunday Mass, I
first hungered for a man, and I know it’s going to be any minute now, and that
I should be patient because Snake is going to enter me soon, and I mustn’t rush
him, but still I find myself crying out for him, to please hurry, hurry, hurry,
hurry because any minute now, the fire in my groin is going out of control, and
it’s all going to happen without him –
“YOU
SON OF A BITCH!”
Snake leaps to his feet and faces Johnny Lawrence.
