How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [41]
Armando. He had the whitest teeth I ever saw and a way of smiling at me that made me forget about the ugly busboy uniform and feel like I was a model—even though he was too old for me and he was flirting with everybody in the whole place.
One of the waitresses, Ginny, a woman with a mouth like a string pulled hard across her face, and acne scars she tried to hide with Cover Girl, started having an affair with Armando. She was too old for him, and she was married, which shocked me, though her husband was a long-distance trucker and not very nice. Part of me was jealous, but part of me was relieved. It didn’t entirely stop me from thinking about him before I went to sleep at night, his long eyelashes and white teeth, his hands. In the darkness I imagined him lying on top of me, kissing me, our chests naked and pressed together, skin slipping and sliding.
When school started, I had to cut back my hours to weekends only. Armando and Ginny broke up, he was promoted to line cook, and I didn’t see him as often.
Until the Christmas party. I wasn’t even thinking about going, because it wasn’t the official party, which we’d had the week before. This one was for the adult people at the restaurant; they had it every year. A server threw it in her house in Old Colorado City, which was a slightly seedy place if you got away from the main drag.
If there were such a thing as a do-over for that night, there is a long list from which I would pick. I wouldn’t go to work on Friday night, because it was snowing so hard and I was staying with my grandma, who wouldn’t be able to drive if it got worse.
I wouldn’t listen to the other bus kids about the party or let them talk me into piling into the car that one of the servers was driving over there. I wouldn’t change into my new blouse, which was green and sparkly and slid off my shoulders to show a lacy strap beneath it, and I wouldn’t wear my tight blue jeans with the fuzzy soft green leg warmers, and I wouldn’t let my hair down so it fell all the way to my butt.
It was new, getting looked at. I liked it.
I would change things now. I wouldn’t go to the party but would ask to be dropped off at home. I wouldn’t give in to the heady, bubbly sense of power that came with the guys coming over to talk to me, and I wouldn’t take a beer to look cool. And when Armando came over to talk to me, I would tell him he was too old for me.
But I didn’t do any of those things. When Armando asked me to dance, I let him teach me a two-step, which put our bodies close together. After a while, somehow, we were making out, and it gave me the hottest feeling all through my body, up and down my spine and at the base of my skull. Everywhere he touched me, little explosions went off. When he skidded his hands up my thighs, I thought I would faint. He kissed my neck and my chest over the top of my blouse, and then he led me into a bedroom.
I made him promise we would only make out, and that’s all we did. For a long time. First in our clothes, and he rubbed my breasts and crotch through them; then he said we should take off just our shirts. I left on my bra, but the heat of his bare skin and his slow, long kisses were more than I could stand, and I took off my bra on my own. That was the moment it was all lost, because his mouth on my nipples was like a comet or an angel coming down with a tablet from heaven—it was the best feeling I’d ever had. I could have stayed there and let him do that forever. Forever.
Then we were both bare, all the way, and he was easing into me, a little at a time, talking to me in a low voice. It was like he always knew exactly when I was going to freak out, because he’d stop pushing into me and kiss me, and lick my neck and stroke my nipples, and I’d relax again.
How long did it take him to get all the way