“Take off that filthy wet T-shirt,” she said. “How stupid to dress like that on a cold day. While there’s a virus floating around. You want to impress me? You think I don’t know what your body looks like? We all know what your body looks like. Hooray for having a nice body.”
He started to take his T-shirt off, but managed to rip it under the armpits in the process. “People can see us,” he said, nodding at the road curving before the theater space.
“And that bothers you?” she said. “The whole world’s a stage.”
“？‘Actors show us the true face of the world,’？” he said.
“What?”
He pointed to the sign above them.
“Off with the jeans,” she said.
“No.”
“No?” She avoided his little boy’s gaze, the trembling of his eyes. “Fine,” she said. She unbuttoned his jeans, one by one by one. With his underwear halfway down around his ankles, he looked trapped in the moment. But he was also erect, and the triangle of his pubis had grown in especially dark. If she ignored the look on his face, she could be with a man.
After she had taken off her fleece, he noticed the perfection of her body, skin still taut and young, along with a gloomy pink bra that seemed a size too large. The sweatpants came off like a sheath. The underwear was different from the bra, filigreed, and now he wanted her warmth more than anything. What could he take and what had to be given away? “I go down on you?” he asked. “Or?”
She rolled to her side, looking away from him. He spooned her, hands on her bra, awkwardly massaging her breasts. This was the best part, she thought. Skin to skin. She did not look into his eyes or try to understand the smell of his hair, the awful conditioner he used on his Samsonian locks. There was a delicious loneliness to the hands on her bra not daring to go beneath the straps but also the warm, panting bulk of a man behind her, his breath professionally sweet against her earlobe. She tucked aside her panties—Panties, he thought to himself, registering the miracle of them and the miracle of their absence—then guided him inside and he smiled when he heard the familiar sound of entry.
She hadn’t realized how hard the wooden planks of the pollen-covered floor would feel against her hip （for sure, there would be a bruise, a memento to be examined in the shower, if there was any water left tonight）， and now her eyes settled on an old Nerf football, long abandoned by the likes of ?mercan Güldal and Jo?o Sousa, the teeth marks of a local possum still visible against its tender skin. And the graffiti everywhere, these kids proclaiming themselves for the next generation of campers, a generation that would never come. This was all part of the moment that she was inhabiting, alongside the billions of moments that constituted the daily madness of the planet. She pushed harder against him, felt her buttocks against his soft hairless flanks, wanting to give him something extra of herself, maybe even to prove that love was still possible. Her breath was fog in the pregnant air.
Her thrusts made him lose his rhythm. Now he was suspended inside her, nothing less. Everyone uses me, he thought. Like a natural resource. Elspeth, Masha, this woman. And I let them. I enjoy it. Why can’t I be the rabbit on the road? The sheep apart from his brethren, sitting on his haunches, alone? Why do I have to work so hard to be vulnerable? Who made me the hawk forever stuck in the updraft?
When a pickup truck’s wet tires crunched against the dirt road, when its high beams ran slowly, very slowly, across the single shape they had made of their bodies in a burst of yellow extraterrestrial light, he hid his face but came straightaway.
“I don’t want you to hang around that old woman anymore,” Dee said, when they were dressing.
“I won’t,” he said. He hoped she wouldn’t see his grin in the growing darkness. She wanted him all to herself now! Strange, under any other circumstance, he would have lost interest in her right at this moment. And then an old instinct took over, and he had to ask like an idiot: “Are you on birth control?”
“With extreme prejudice,” she said.
On the walk back, both lost in thought, they passed half a dozen examples of roadkill scattered across the wet tarmac. The Actor recoiled at each animal, but Dee understood a dead possum as well as anything. Still, it was strange that each creature was bleeding above the eye, as if shot by a marksman with a .22. What kind of people lived on this road? At least the snapping turtle was safe within her split-pea pond.
She looked at the darkened figure of the Actor, the optical white of his tee ripped at the armpits, his hands spread before him as he remembered grasping her buttocks on the cold empty stage.