5

Laura hands me an oversized red-and-pink cardboard heart stuffed with chocolates. “They’re coconut-filled,” she says. “Your favorite, right?”

“Yeah, right,” I say. I think about all those Halloweens waiting for Jeanine and Holly to empty their treat baskets and hand over their discarded Almond Joy and Mounds bars. Have I already told Laura that story? Fuck, what haven’t I told her?

We sit on Laura’s front porch, the two dozen red roses on her dresser visible through her bedroom window. I had them delivered by a local florist, courtesy of the Fitzpatrick Olds expense account. Laura told me the roses were the most beautiful flowers anyone had ever given her. I told her I paid for them with my own money. “Two-dozen roses for two months of being in love,” I said.

Yes, I said it. Fucking goddamn right I said it.

The Valentine’s Day dance was last night. Laura and I were on the dance floor. I floated the word out there for public consumption sometime during Aerosmith’s “Angel.” She floated the word back at me during Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind.” We said it together during George Harrison’s “Got my Mind Set on You.”

The chasm separating the act of love and the act of making love is filled with the nervous sweat and rendered tears of my many unconsummated relationships. I’m turning seventeen in April. Laura’s eighteenth birthday is in June. Up until now Laura and I have acted under the tacit assumption neither of us are virgins.  More to the point, I know she isn’t a virgin, and she has bought into my bullshit sexual history.

 I can’t be faulted for effort. Even if I dismiss my godfather’s prepubescent tutelage, I’ve flirted with losing my virginity for a long time, longer than most. In third grade I got my first pseudo-blowjob when my babysitter locked me in my room with her 10-year-old sister who stripped me naked and asked if she could “kiss it.” Then there was the Illini Swallow incident, a story that through no fault but my own followed me from Beech Grove to Empire Ridge. And let’s not leave out the various Catholic youth group trysts, a litany of sexually repressed trips to second base and third base, all in the name of Jesus.

“You were such a gentleman last night,” Laura says to me.

We ended up in Laura’s basement after the dance, both of us a little tipsy on purple passion, a noxious mix of grape soda and Everclear. I got her completely naked on the old couch. Loose change kept rattling inside the clothes dryer behind our heads. She gave me a hickey and a handjob. I buried my face in her bare chest, squeezed her nipples until they turned red, fingered her until she came. A lesser girl probably would come right out and say, why didn’t you fuck me last night? But for whatever reason, Laura seems intent on mistaking my awkwardness for chivalry.

“What’s all that you’re sitting on?” I nod at the stack of haphazardly opened envelopes peeking out from under her.

“These?” Laura pulls out the envelopes. “Nothing but junk mail. Ever since we booked a room down in Panama City, I’m guessing my name got on a ton of spring break mailing lists. I sift through a half dozen of these things every day.”

“Spring break?”

“Hell yeah! Senior year, rite of passage, the last hurrah.”

“That’s news to me,” I say, snatching one of the envelopes from her. I pull out and unfold a full-color poster of sunburned frat boys with bulges in their pants ogling drunken bikini-clad women.

Laura scoots right up next to me, takes my hand in hers. She kisses me on the cheek. I want to say “I love you” or “don’t go” or something, but anything comprehensible or appropriate defers to an internal reel of Laura climbing out of a pool in a red-string bikini to The Cars’ “Moving in Stereo.”

“Hank?” Laura says. She grabs my chin with her hand, pulls me around until we were facing one another. “You okay?”

If “okay” means watching my girlfriend’s bare breasts burst out of her bikini top while Ric Ocasek serenades her, I’m perfectly fine. I nod but don’t say anything.

I’ve never been jealous. Is this what it feels like? Is this what love feels like? Panic. Mistrust. Paranoia. Life gives you every reason to be happy, and you say, “Fuck it, bring on the misery.”

I stand, taking Laura in my arms. I reach around and grab her ass, pulling her hard into me. I kiss her, my tongue pushing into her mouth, prying open her teeth. It’s an obvious kiss, at least to me. More desperate than passionate.

Whitesnake is in my head as I kiss her. And why wouldn’t Whitesnake be in my head? For one, their ’79 album Lovehunter is graced by the greatest piece of cover art in rock history—a naked, perfectly bare-assed Amazon warrior princess astride a giant snake. For another, it is both a curse and a blessing of my generation that we set our lives to a constantly running soundtrack of suspect music and even more suspect decisions, the 

pitiful made indescribably so by David Coverdale’s cautionary serenade that I should have known better, than to let you go aloooone.

Fuck it. Bring on the misery. And the bare-assed warrior princesses.