that the whole world is against her being happy.
She texts him back: Please, you’re already there? Please stay at the river? I’m on my way.
North of Smith Valley, five minutes, then turn west on County Line Road, the public access road for the river. This is how you get to the eighth wonder of the world.
She’s speeding, going eighty, ninety, and suddenly she’s there and his car is there and she’s so happy, the elation is like a gushing feeling of wellness. Doctors medicate her depression with things she can’t pronounce. Every time she goes in it’s a new foil pack of pills. If they only knew, if they could just prescribe a man like this to be where he says he’s going to be. That’s all she needs to live painlessly.
She is in a black shirt and jeans and a leather jacket. He’s in his work clothes.
He comes around to the passenger side of her car. She’s happy but also a little angry. She can’t help herself. All week she has been writing to him on Facebook. He opens the door and gets in.
I know you saw my messages, she says. You didn’t reply.
I’m real busy, Kid.
You can’t reply a single word back?
They sit in silence.
Do you love your wife?
Well, she’s all right.
After a long period of silence, he takes her hand in his and then he rubs her arm. She almost vomits.
A rooster crows and it reminds Lina of her grandparents’ farm. She shows him her phone’s wallpaper—a picture of her children and her grandparents. She wishes she could buy their farm from them. But they’re likely to leave it to her parents, who would definitely sell it.
She puts her head on his shoulder as he strokes her arm. She reaches up to play with his dimples. The thing she is most afraid of is that he has no emotion for her beyond the sex, but at moments like these she knows for sure that he feels for her. That he loves her.
They move to the back seat and look into each other’s eyes during the whole thing. She’s afraid of him judging her face, of him thinking she’s not pretty, but she looks back at him anyhow. Just like the last time at the hotel. Only this time she pays attention to every little thing. She means to burn the motions into her brain so she can use them to keep herself warm at night. The things he does that she likes the best are:
Flipping her around from top to bottom while still being inside her.
Holding her pinned so that she couldn’t move for any reason.
When he goes slow and rhythmic.
When he goes hard and fast and it’s so fast that it occasionally slips out and pokes the strip of skin between her vagina and her anus.
When she uses counterforce to push against his thrusting, so he doesn’t have to do all the work, and so he thinks she’s talented at sex.
How he is so big that she feels not like a mother of two but like a teenage virgin.
When they are on the floor of the Suburban and she is riding him with her hands on the floor and her butt in his hands. She fucks him from the floor upward and then downward, like a crab or an acrobat, her elbows pointed in the same direction as her knees, like a creature built just for this movement.
The way he grasps both her hands with one of his while he’s going down on her.
The way he eats her, she says, like a warm wedge of cherry pie.
When he pulls out and comes on her pubic hair.
When after he comes he kisses her breasts and sucks on her nipples while he fingers her so she can come for the first time, or for the second.
How he fingers her. The slithering loving way his fingers move inside her.
How he feels around and makes circles on her mound and slips a finger in teasingly, and back to feeling all around, and then the finger again.
Ed used to run his hand along her arm and say, Feel like doin’ it?
Initiating to him meant asking. Are you fucking kidding me, she would say. Just roll on top of me or grab me and start kissing me and just be a goddamn man.
That’s just not me, Ed used to say.
Well that’s what I want, Lina used to say. It’s not a lot to ask for. If you love someone, it’s not a