Appetizers
By Claudia Schatz
They are driving in the darkness towards her golden box bedroom. The car glides, the night outside reduced to white and yellow lines sharp under the headlights while trees and fields fade to black. Clem drives with two relaxed hands on the wheel and Ada is half-turned to face him, her hips aligning towards his as they always seem to, summer legs bent and sticking to the seat. Her hair is still half damp and smells of the stream they dove into this afternoon. She can’t stop looking at Clem, fixing his profile in her memory, holding it up against the fresh image developing in her mind.
He glances from the road to meet her eyes with the wide gaze that makes all of her limbs move towards him. She stops all but one, lets her left arm rise to tangle in the tight curls falling towards his neck, twines her fingers through the heat of his hair and squeezes gently, pulling and releasing. His eyelids fall slightly under the weight of pleasure and he smiles, a movement that curves his eyes into smaller blue smiles. He reaches a hand across to her leg but the road is curvy and he takes it back a moment later to keep them within the lines.
They know just the right amount of what happens next. They will park in the lot and drench their sneakers in the grass as they walk inside and then take off everything but their socks. This is not quite but nearly known, suspected in the velvet darkness pressing against the windshield and in his hands busy on the wheel and hers busy in his hair. She would like to stretch across their armrests to press her lips and then her teeth to his neck and pull him into her mouth, coax a bruise into bloom to the surface. But she knows him just well enough to know that he likes a light touch, teeth sheathed.
Last time, they ate candied ginger in her bed with just the fan on and she grimaced as the sugared fruit burned her tongue, but Clem closed his eyes and rolled the cubes against the roof of his mouth. He said the string felt warm and good even if it hurt a little. And she sat upright, pressed a hand to his shoulder, said, “That’s what I mean!” because she hadn’t quite been able to explain the hot, sharp pleasure of a well-placed bite, the instant desire it stirred in her. They each savored another piece of ginger and pondered: she, the burn slightly too strong, like the pain he felt from a bite; he, the warm crystallized joy of a mouthful of root fire, the same she felt when he dug his teeth in. A metaphor in reverse. They are finding ways to understand each other.
The car slides downhill and they watch the night come at them, safe in the silent, delicious knowledge that this drive is a non-permanent state of hunger, of cool breeze hissing at the tops of the windows, of gentle fingers tracing spirals down the nape of the neck. They know just enough about each other to send the text and expect a yes, I’m free, let’s go swimming? But not enough to call, not enough to worry about direction, not enough to see past the precipice edge of August from which, every summer, all things fall.
They are still acceptably mysterious to one another: his sweat still smells clean, her silences are still soft and not thorny. The creaky bed that forces them to haul the mattress to the floor is still charming, the sleeplessness hasn’t caught up yet, their silences are still full of the best kind of promise whose content is clear, just not exactly what form it will take, what shapes they’ll make in the lamplight of her room.
But they aren’t there yet. Flowing towards home in expectation, anticipation, hope, will always be better than arrival, destination, end point, better than kissing her way down his ribs, better than feeling him finish, better than watching his body disappear under his clothes as he slowly pulls the outside world back into their privacy. The waiting, the wanting, the knowing of getting, the sureness of possession without yet possessing is sweet and filling, the deep satisfaction of the soon-to-be-had, the sight of fat blackberries proffered on the tongue of a branch.
She lets her head tilt towards him again. They are close now. Goosebumps rise across her shoulders as they pass through the cooler air trapped within the forest by the river where they kissed on a flat pink rock this afternoon, held in the dish-like form that made Clem say he felt like they were two appetizers on a plate. He rolled to the rock’s edge and plunged his head into the icy ripples until the current pulled his curls straight. After he came up for air, they kissed until they had an appetite, or several; until they couldn’t stop shivering, chilled skin pebbled with water under the greying sky. They changed into dry clothes between the doors of his car on the gravel shoulder of the road before driving to his kitchen. There they ate until only one appetite remained, and now they drive towards her bed.
Appetizers—the promise of more to come, flavor without fullness, candied ginger unfurling a layer of fire across the tongue. Clem pulls into the parking lot and Ada lets her fingers make a final loop through his hair. They are held as if on a rock in the middle of a river, safe in not yet knowing each other but knowing what’s next, in knowing even now, without needing to wait for hindsight, that this moment is good.
THE END