The Music of What Happens(52)

I feel that slush again in the back of my throat. And these shakes that start in my legs, like when your teeth chatter after a cold shower, except my entire body. I push it all down. I command my body to stop, and amazingly it does. The chatters go away. The slush recedes. Super Max.

“Did I?”

Under the table, he nuzzles his knee up against mine. “Of course. You sure as hell weren’t stopping me once we got started.”

I am lost for words. I have none. I truly don’t know how to make any sounds from my mouth. I stare at him, utterly confused. Am I wrong? Was it okay?

He smiles again, reaches over and flicks my cheek. “Look at you, and look at me. In what universe could I get you to do anything you didn’t want?”

He’s right. And yet. It’s like I froze. I travel back there in my brain. Him sitting on my legs. My legs wobbling under his butt. My brain and my mouth, kind of like now. Useless. What’s wrong with me?

His face gets close enough to mine so that I can smell past the coconut to get a whiff of his sour breath. “I can tell when a guy is enjoying himself. You really were. Your eyes. Have you ever seen that passion look that a guy gives when he’s, like, blissed? And it’s not like you were soft.”

I try to imagine that look I must have given. And I was hard. I know I was. That was like what was so crazy. How can something feel so good and so bad at the same time? Shit. Am I being, like, a snowflake? Too sensitive? I’m not like that usually. Maybe this is just, like, buyer’s remorse? Am I making it into something it wasn’t?

But didn’t I say no?

No means yes, yes means anal?

“You’re really intense, dude,” he says.

“What?”

“Your eyes. They’re beautiful. You’re one of those guys who really listens and really thinks. I like that. It’s so sexy.”

More leg chattering. No. I put a stop to it. This time, it’s harder. I try harder. Super Max, turning his powers on himself. I can control my own body.

“You want it again,” he says.

“What?”

“I can tell you do.” That uneven smile again, but this time bigger so I can see his bottom teeth, which are small, crooked, and uneven. “The quiet ones always do. C’mon. Come back to my room. I got weed. You ever done it high?”

Before him, I’d never done it at all. So no. There’s so much he doesn’t know about me, and he hasn’t asked. And I’m a guy, so I should want that. No strings attached. Just fun, nothing intense. So why do I feel this way? What’s wrong with me?

I know that nothing that comes out of my mouth now will do anything good, so I stand up, take my iced tea with me, and walk out. I feel his eyes on my back as I walk to my car, and this white-hot something pulses through my veins.

I slam the iced tea down onto the asphalt. It explodes, splashing red liquid onto my bare legs. I stomp down on it. Three times. Flatten the thing. I look back at the coffee shop. He’s in the window, staring, mouth agape. I close my eyes, turn, and walk to my car.

I drive away so he can’t get to me, all the way to the other side of the mall parking lot. Then I put the car in park, close my eyes, and think.

I don’t want to feel bad anymore. I don’t want to waste another minute on that guy. I can do this myself. Warrior up. I sit up taller and clench my stomach muscles, puff up my chest.

In a world where lesser mortals crumble, Super Max stands tall and says, “I’m the decider of my fate. I’m not a victim. Shut the hell up with all that victim shit.”

I’m freakin’ Max Morrison. I carried a dude through the desert in 120-degree heat. No skinny-ass, blue-faux-hawked dipshit has power over me. No way.

I start the car up, turn up the music, loud, and drive off, victorious. Mind over matter.





Things start to get crazy good on the truck. Beyond-my-wildest-dreams good.

Max gets on Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat and shows pictures of his various food concoctions, and suddenly we have regulars who say things like, “This time I gotta try the habanero-peach.” The lemonade isn’t the star, but something about ordering food outside while standing on the surface of the sun makes people of all different shapes and sizes say the same thing each time: “Let me get a prickly pear lemonade too. That’ll cool me down.”

A lot of other trucks take the summer off, I guess. To the victor go the spoils, or more like, to the fools who don’t mind working on a scalding truck all summer goes the cheddar.

“Stop calling it that,” Max says, when I remark that we got hella cheddar after the lunch rush slows down on a Wednesday afternoon. “I’m embarrassed for you, dude.”

“Mo’ cheddar less problems. I got so much cheddar I don’t even care,” I say, and he swats me on the shoulder and paints my face with habanero-peach sauce. Which is seriously delicious.

Hella cheddar, by the way, means our first day of netting a thousand bucks.

No. Really.

Like including our huge shopping to start the day, which cost us four hundred and fifty-three dollars. I keep a running tally in my mind, and when a girl in short gold shorts that let me see all her business orders a mango-cayenne chicken and adds on a frozen lemonade, we hit a thousand and two.

“Ding ding ding!” I yell after I give the girl change for her twenty and she puts a dollar in our tip jar. “You, my dear, are our thousandth customer!”