by R.C. Barajas
Chapter 2
Head and Heel
Her azurite eyes were open wide, his strong arms clasping her to the T-shirt that was straining against the circumference of his muscular arms, and after a quick search, her mouth found his and attached itself like a limpet on a whaler. For a few moments Georgette was lost in the rapture that kindled the flesh-eating hunger of their lips. And then, quite suddenly, she realized there was something in her mouth. Oh Lord have mercy, she thought, it’s his tongue!
Her mind raced. What in the name of all that is holy is it doing in my mouth and when did he put it there? By St. Elmo’s fire he must have slipped it in when I wasn’t paying attention!
She pushed him away and gazed at him in horror.
“Excuse me, but just what do you think you’re doing, Mister? What kind of a gal do I look like? The kind who’d let you stick that-” she pointed at his tongue, which had not yet fully retracted behind his lips, “-into my mouth when we’re not even wed? And not ever likely to be, I might add! Why, I hardly know you!” In her cobalt eyes, tears were sparkling. “How many girls let you do that thing to them and get away with it? It’s unnatural! Is that the tongue you speak to your mother with? The tongue you use to eat ice cream? To say the rosary? To taste the rain drops?” Indignantly she wiped her lips with the back of her hand, glaring at him, her cheeks blazing.
Perry Chinthrust took a startled step back. Then he took an angry step forward. Then an uncertain one back. Then he stayed where he was. His expression was overtly inscrutable, his face half in shadow, half in light, half flushed with the fierce glow of passion.
“There are some who find my tongue not so terribly distasteful, Lady Furious. I am sorry to know that you are not one of them. I’ll not inflict it upon you again.” And with that, he turned and stalked away - from her eyes, her hair, from that patch of grass that would now forever be for him soggy with the memory of her lips. He made his lonely way toward hole 12, knowing that this time, it would take many hours of gazing handsomely into the distance to quiet his troubled heart.
Georgette threw her body onto the grass and her face into her hands. Oh, but it hadn’t been distasteful! Not at all! Nay, if she were honest with herself, it had been so delicious that she’d thought she might never taste anything so wonderful again in her whole life! His tongue was – Oh heavens, it was sweeter than summer turnip honey, juicier even than the sausages her Mam used to stuff and boil for the feast of St Faolán! And how strong it was! She’d never imagined that a muscle could sweep so masterfully across her teeth, probe her cheeks and her gums with such insatiable appetites! If she’d even imagined that young Eoghan had been hiding such a thing in his mouth, she’d have been on him quicker than starch on potato, and would have dragged him under the table like a wolf bitch with a fawn. Auntie Orfhlaith would have slit our throats, I am quite certain! And despite her tears, she smiled affectionately as she pictured the toothless lady’s shrieks and the familiar flash of the sharp knife the old coot always concealed in her woolen shawl. How homesick she felt!
Georgette sat up, then shook her head so hard it made her mane of curls bounce like a barmaid’s blouse. It’s just too pleasurable to be anything but evil. I should have learned that from all those laps around the cistern. Father Flynn was right! Why O why didn’t I pay more attention to his whippings? Wiping her cyan eyes – which were at that moment reflecting the exact blue of the midday sky – she sprang to her feet.
Aloud she cried, “I’ll not let myself feel this way again – not for such a degenerate as that Perry Chinthrust. He can sheath that bedeviling tongue of his – I shan’t give in again!” And she squared her delicately freckled shoulders and marched back to the clubhouse where Tad was surely waiting to go to lunch by now.
Tad was slumped in the desk chair, sucking moodily on a Red Bullsicle and looking exhausted. “Where have you been? It’s been two hours! I had to do the whole lunchtime rush by myself! There was a whole field trip bus, Georgette! Sixty-three eight-year-olds! Then there was that little Chaim monster, who came running up whining about his bubbie sleeping on the 9th and not being able to wake her up or something – I can never understand that weird kid. I told him to go away or I’d give him something to cry about.” He flexed his trapezius muscles menacingly and let out a small bark.
Georgette couldn’t believe the unfairness of Tad’s rebuke. If only he knew what had just befallen her, perhaps he would be less angry. But then, she would never, ever divulge what had happened between her and Perry Chinthrust. Never! It was a secret that would go with her to her grave.
“... and then, when he kissed me, he placed his tongue in my mouth!” Georgette wailed, slumped against the wall opposite the rentals counter. Tad was sitting next to her, patting her shoulder and taking the opportunity to cast a long look at her heaving clavicles.
“Ok, and then what?” he asked breathlessly.
Georgette looked at him, perplexed. “What?”
“What did he do next? The terrible thing you said he did to you! What did he do?”
Her cheeks flushed and her manganese eyes blazed. “What do you mean what did he do, Mr. Hardly?! What are you implying? Are you thinking, maybe, that this Irish girl made herself available to that... that man? That after tasting his tongue I then allowed further liberties upon my flesh?”
“How much flesh are we talking about?” begged Tad.
Georgette stood up abruptly. “I think you had better go to lunch, Tad, before my Irish blood gets the better of me and I box your ears!” She crossed her arms and turned her back on him.
Suddenly Tad was upon her, pinning her arms behind her. “Listen you little tease, I don’t know how they do it in Scotland, but here in America, when we kiss, we mean business. And if a guy feels like going a little farther with that kiss, tonguewise, well, then God bless him, even if he’s a tortured genius like Chinthrust. In fact,” and he pulled her to him, his face close to hers, the stench of his Red Bull breath filling her nostrils. “... I think maybe you and I should do a little practice run right here and now, so you’ll be less of a freakazoid when Chinthrust comes to dip his beak next time.”
Georgette struggled to free her arms but Tad held her slim wrists easily in his steely grip. He pawed her clavicles, and laughed. “Ha, ha! You aren’t really all that cold-blooded are you? Why, I could crush your lips to mine and you’d beg for more!” He leaned in, his ready maw leering.
“Perhaps I could do a little lip crushing for you?” said a deep, mocking voice behind them.
“Perry Chinthrust!” cried Tad and Georgette as one. Tad spun Georgette around and held her in front of him, backing away as Perry Chinthrust walked across the clubhouse floor toward them, his eyes smoldering, his jaw fully erect.
“Look Chinthrust, this is a simple misunderstanding,” Tad spluttered. “I had no idea she meant anything to you! I just have this thing for English chicks, you know? And she’s so hot and I haven’t had a girlfriend in months and I just kinda got going with that whole story about kissing and tongues and all. For the love of Pete, Chinthrust, don’t take it personal...”
The sound of Perry Chinthrust’s right cross was like a cannon blast in Georgette’s ears, and next she knew, Tad Hardly lay unconscious on the floor, his snug shorts askew and his polo shirt torn in five places. She tried to speak, but then the room swam in all the colors of an Irish stew and she swooned.
The first thing her indanthrene eyes saw as she awoke and gazed up was the broad triangular form of Perry Chinthrust, who was standing silhouetted against the afternoon light that streamed in from the open rentals counter. Blearily, Georgette wondered why she so often encountered him in silhouette, but then her mind cleared and she leaped to her feet.
“Is minic a bhris béal duine a shorn!” she shouted at the unconscious Tad, and kicked him soundly in the bladder. She looked hotly at Perry Chinthrust and said, “It means, “It is often that a person's mouth broke his nose.”
My Auntie Orfhlaith taught
me that old Irish proverb and never have I seen it demonstrated so clearly. Oh, she broke a lot of noses in her day, did dear Auntie O.” And a single tear of homesickness slid down her porcelain cheek.
Perry Chinthrust took a step toward her, and gazed into her pthalo eyes, his own verdigris orbs piercing her heart like a skewer through a roasted tomato.
“I didn’t need the translation, Lady Furious,” he said softly. Taking still another step closer to her - and giving his own swift kick at Tad’s kidneys - he smiled. “Never scald your lips with another man's porridge. That’s what my Mam taught me.”
Now it was Georgette’s turn to take a step back. She sat down, then stood up - then sat down again. Her breath seemed to have been knocked out of her as surely as if she’d been butted by a wild mountain ram. “Your... your Mam? But...” She looked him up and down, her ultramarine eyes taking in every inch of his brawny, handsomeness. “By St. Martin’s-in-the-Field, can it be? But you don’t look... I mean, I never imagined that you, of all people... ” She peered into his face. “But your American ways, your roguish boldness, your orderly teeth!” She blushed, her aqua eyes awash in saline. “You... you’re...”
“Irish,” finished Perry Chinthrust for her. “Well, my Mam was, anyway. My father was an American sailor who left us when I was just a baby. But I inherited much from him,” he added darkly. “His rudeness, his rugged good looks, his accent. I didn’t have sixpence to my name, but when I was eighteen I swam to America to begin a new life here.”
“And what about your name?” Georgette asked in a small voice. “Was that your father’s, too?”
Perry Chinthrust laughed hollowly. “No, I wanted no part of him. When I crawled up on the shore of the Outer Banks of North Carolina that early morning, I vowed to make a new man of myself. I found the name Chinthrust by opening a phonebook to a random page, which turned out to be an ad for a maxillofacial surgeon. The name seemed like it might just help me blend in to this strange new world in which I found myself. I thought my fate was sealed. Little did I know how cruel that fate would be, what it had in store for me.” The light went out of his eye quicker than a candle in a drafty privy.
Suddenly the tall, powerful man grabbed Georgette and pulled her roughly to his pounding heart, her feet treading lightly as a kitten’s over Tad’s prone body. “You must forget you ever met me, you must run from me and never allow me to touch you again,” He raked his manly stubble across her soft cheek and snorted deeply the fresh heather smell of her uniform. “I must go – I have a long, over-due date with the mounds at hole 12. Farewell my beautiful Georgette!”
And with that, he kissed her with chastened tongue, and swept from the clubhouse.