Maria:Yes
Peter:Always?
Maria:Always.
19
The next evening, Maria licked her two-scoop cone of mocha macchiato and had to wait for her brain freeze to thaw before continuing to eat. Ambling toward the lakeshore, his arm around her shoulders as they walked side by side, Peter appeared to be having no such trouble. His own overstuffed cone of mint chocolate cookie, also purchased at the university’s Memorial Union, had mostly disappeared, and he was eyeing her remaining ice cream a bit too closely.
If he tried, she’d rip off his arm and beat him with it until he promised not to steal her food again.
Huh. Brain freeze: conquered. Apparently thoughts of justifiable violence warmed her.
After angling her cone farther away from Peter and taking another lick, she thought back on their day. “I have a question, but you’ll probably mock me for it.”
He frowned down at her, the very picture of wounded affront. “I would never.”
“You have. You do. You will.”
“Probably,” he conceded, then dropped the innocent act and grinned at her. “So tell me already, and I can get to the mockery portion of our evening. It’s my favorite part.”
He paused meaningfully, bumping his hip against hers. “No, wait. Mysecond-favorite part.”
They’d made good use of that private hotel room and that wide, gloriously nonsqueaky hotel bed last night, much to her relief. One more night in her parents’ house, sleeping in separate beds and giving each other quickie orgasms in the guest shower, and she’d have tackled Peter and ravished him on the narrow guest room mattress like a Viking of old, Filip’s tender sensibilities be damned.
Given how desperately she wanted him, she also had no desire to pretend in public that they weren’t lovers, and Peter had agreed: Whenever the media and/or fans discovered the changed nature of their relationship was fine by them.
She was hoping forsoon, so everyone would know he was hers.
“What about our frozen custard outing last night?” Dairy products were, she now understood, Wisconsin’s main claim to culinary fame. She approved wholeheartedly. “Wouldn’t that rank higher than mockery too?”
“Fine, you Norse nitpicker.” He crunched the final bite of his cone. “Third favorite.”
“Norseprimarily refers to Norway and Norwegians, rather than Swedes.”
Brow raised, he gave her a long look. “I rest my case.”
“Whatever.” Over the past several years, she’d learned to love that particular English word. It encompassed dismissal and casual scorn soneatly. “Anyway, I wanted to ask about our taste test of famous regional foods yesterday.”
The newspaper had arranged the spread and eagerly filmed Maria’s reactions to all the unfamiliar items. Only to be disappointed, because a woman raised in a country that willingly consumed bothsurströmmingandlutfisk—respectively, salty fermented herringso foul-smelling most people vomited before their first bite, and dried cod reconstituted in lye and cold water until gelatinous—wasn’t going to flinch at various midwestern offerings.
A tuna noodle casserole crusted with potato chips? Delicious.
Some unidentifiable mixture of foodstuffs topped with cheese-blanketed tater tots and called ahot dish?No problem.
An ostensible salad that contained no actual lettuce, but rather pineapple chunks, tiny orange slices, coconut, marshmallows, and sour cream? Sure. Why not? Welcome to America!
Chocolate cheese? Well... the less said about that, the better. Still, it was relatively inoffensive, all things considered.
Oddly enough, the food that had baffled her was possibly the most straightforward of the newspaper’s offerings. It tasted fine, but—
“Were those cheese curds supposed tosqueakagainst my teeth?” She couldn’t hold back a tiny shudder. “Because the sound was incredibly disturbing.”
He stopped in his tracks and scowled at her. “Yes, they’re supposed to squeak. That’s how you know they’re good!”
“I see,” she said with what she considered exemplary diplomacy. “Then those were excellent cheese curds, clearly. Very... noisy.”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t patronize me, Pippi.”