I felt him slide up behind me and place his strong, rough hands on mine.
“Like this, no?” He said in that unmistakably … foreign accent. “You must feel the spirit of love guiding your hands.”
We kneaded the ball of candy corn as though our hands were one. The ball become a molten mass of indistinguishable candy in the heat of our passion. I closed my eyes in rapture, and when they opened I saw that the candy corn had been shaped into the perfect form of a rose. I gasped.
“No, no. It is nothing next to you.” He said, pressing his unshaven, non-Northern-European cheek against mine. His fingers brushed against my lips, down my neck, across my shoulders, and down my back. “Look,” he said. And twisted to the side and saw that there, on the small of my back, he had adhered a temporary tattoo. It was a butterfly. Or maybe a chain. It was hard to see, for he had dimmed the lights.
Or so I thought! I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and saw that he had placed sunglasses over my eyes, and his as well. “Your beauty shines too bright for the nude eye. It is like … how to say … eclipse?” My stomach fluttered at his poor grasp of the English language.
“I have a present for you, my sweet love dream.” He kneeled down. My stomach fluttered again. “Underneath my hat.” I grasped the brim of that large floppy hat he always wore and peeled it back, half excited and half terrified at what this meant. I found … another hat, identical to the first.
“Under that hat, as well,” he said. I pulled the second hat off to find two mugs, shaped like pineapples, resting atop his perfectly shaped skull. Their contents fizzed. “It is … how to say … Martinelli’s sparkling apple juice.”
I gasped. We embraced. We fell to the floor in a passionate heap — the mugs, the juice, the hats, the temporary tattoos, and the rose-shaped mass of melted candy corn.
