dad and mom, even Dennis. I worked my ass off on it, and it means zero to everybody.'
'It means something to me,' she said softly. 'The effort it took.'
'Yeah,' he said morosely. The passion, the heat, had fled. He felt cold and a little sick to his stomach. 'Look, we better get going. I don't have any snow tyres. Your folks'd think it was cute, us going bowling and then getting racked up on Stanson Road.'
She giggled. 'They don't know where Stanson Road ends up.
He cocked an eyebrow at her, some of his good humour returning. 'That's what you think,' he said.
He drove back down toward town slowly, and Christine managed the twisting, steeply descending road with easy surefootedness. The sprinkle of earth-stars that was Libertyville and Monroeville grew larger and drew closer together and then ceased to have any pattern at all. Leigh watched this a little sadly, feeling that the best part of potentially wondei7ful evening had somehow slipped away. She felt irritated, chafed, out of sorts with herself - unfulfilled, she supposed. There was a dull ache in her breasts. She didn't know if she had meant to let him go what was euphemistically known as 'all the way' or not, but after things had reached a certain point, nothing had gone as she had hoped . . . all because she had to open her big fat mouth.
Her body was in a mess, and her thoughts were the same way. Again and again on the mostly silent drive back down she opened her mouth to try to clarify how she felt . . . and then closed it again, afraid of being misunderstood, because she didn't understand how she felt herself.
She didn't feel jealous of Christine . . . and yet she did. About that Arnie hadn't told the truth. She had a good idea of how much time he spent tinkering on the car, but was that so wrong? He was good with his hands, he liked to work on it, and it ran like a watch . . . except for that funny little glitch with the milometer numbers running backward.
Cars are girls, she had said. She hadn't been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn't always true; she didn't think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford.
But -
Forget it, jet rid of all the hocus-pocus and phony stuff. The truth was much more brutal and even crazier, wasn't it? She couldn't make love to him, couldn't touch him in that intimate way, much less think about bringing him to a climax that way (or the other, the real way - she had turned that over and over in her mind as she lay in her narrow bed, feeling a new and nearly amazing excitement steal over her), in the car.
Not in the car.
Because the realty crazy part was that she felt Christine was watching them. That she was jealous, disapproving, maybe hating. Because there were times (like tonight, as Arnie skated the Plymouth so smoothly and delicately across the building scales of sleet) when she felt that the two of them - Arnie and Christine - were welded together in a disturbing parody of the-act of love. Because Leigh did not feel that she rode in Christine; when she got in to go somewhere with Arnie she felt swallowed in Christine. And the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism - it was like making love inside the body of her rival.
The really crazy part of it was that she hated Christine.
Hated her and feared her. She had developed a vague dislike of walking in front of the new grille, or closely behind the boot; she had vague thoughts of the emergency brake letting go or the gearstick popping out of park and into neutral for some reason. Thoughts she had never had about the family sedan.
But mostly it was not wanting to do anything in the car . . . or even go anywhere in the car, if she could help it. Arnie seemed somehow different in the car, a person she didn't really know. She loved the feel of his hands on her body - her breasts, her thighs (she had not yet allowed him to touch the centre of her, but she wanted his hands there; she thought if he touched her there