386

Crystal

Chuck and Crystal were lying in Chuck’s bed, or “rack,” as he liked to call it. “Guess I’ll hit the rack,” he would say to his orange and white cat circa nine o’clock every evening.

Crystal was fast asleep. She had rolled onto her left side, and her left hand was fetchingly draped over her right shoulder. Chuck studied the barely perceptible freckles on Crystal’s back and the graceful contours of Crystal’s fingers and thought that he’d never seen a more exquisitely feminine hand. And he had not noticed until then that her nails cleverly matched the onyx ring on her middle finger. The onyx was square with rounded corners, in a silver or white-gold setting, and had a small diamond inset at about five o’clock. And Crystal’s nails, glossy black, each had a tiny white dot at five o’clock, too.

“Snot,” thought Chuck. “I owe all this to snot.”

Barely over the emotional mayhem of the first episode, which had happened when she was in grade-school, Crystal had experienced another devastating snot-bubble just as she was being introduced to Chuck at Starbucks. It wasn’t a blind date, per se, but it had been orchestrated by Queenie in full-on yenta fashion. Chuck and Crystal were perfect for each other, Queenie thought, and her only regret was that it had not dawned on her sooner.

Crystal had rushed out of Starbucks like the proverbial bat out of hell, clasping her nose with both hands and slamming against the corner of a table with her hip, mid-flight. Chuck would be kissing the resultant boo-boo a few hours later during a languorous session of letting Daddy make it better—which didn’t do much for the woman whose triple-shot Americano got sloshed all over her designer jeans.

Chuck had caught up with Crystal as she was fumbling with the handle of her Camry and had taken her in his arms and said all of the soothingly right things and had even wiped a tiny snot-dot from her upper lip with his thumb.

Now the two of them were ensconced in his bed, the venue for most of his musings, and Chuck was musing about the yin-yang quality of nasal secretions, and the happy promise of helping Crystal get over the yin part, all over again, however long it might take.

# # #