Pandemonium

“Well, you were acting sort of different there,” I said, and laughed, then quickly cleared my throat to stop the laughter. “It’s just that, there’s that vow of celibacy thing.”

O’Connell said nothing. I looked up, and then she laughed. Her own laugh, dry and light. “I never said I was perfect.”

We locked eyes. Maybe trying to figure out if there was anybody else watching. She never looked away from me, but her expression slowly changed.

I could smell her, heady and rich.

I touched her calf, the underside of her thigh. Slid the edge of my palm into the folds of her. She was wet.

I wanted to roll her onto her back right then, but not on that awful carpet. I stood and pulled her to her feet.

I was hard again. So fast, despite all of this. The body has its own imperatives.

She touched my cock through the shorts, ran a fingernail along it, making me shiver. Then she gripped hard and stepped in close, holding me hot against her hip. She spoke softly into my ear. “I don’t want you inside me,” she said, almost whispering. “You have to be all right with that.”

“Okay,” I said, gasping. “Just . . . go easy.”

14

Kansas had the purity of a sixth-grade math problem, an exercise in scale and stark geometry. I couldn’t stop picturing our progress from above: the blue dot of the pickup creeping along a thin black line, bisecting a checkered expanse of barren fields regular as graph paper.

“So, this is Kansas.” It was the first thing O’Connell had said since we’d started driving this morning.

“We’re not in Missouri anymore,” I said. She didn’t get the reference. I glanced down at the map on my lap, then back out through the dust-bright windshield, looking for a mile marker. Playing navigator. Del led, I thought.

Paradoxically, the extreme flatness of the terrain made me acutely aware that we were living on a big round spinning planet. Though the horizon looked as level as a windowsill, I could sense the Earth curving out of sight, the vast sky bending over us. We rode toward an immense wall of clouds, unguessable miles away. My arm rested on the back of the seat. I leaned toward her, started to rub the back of her neck. She didn’t quite flinch, but after a moment she leaned away.