“Wowee,” Dee finally said. “Young love.”
Ed was finding it hard to breathe. I may be old, he was thinking, but I can do this, too.
They were so lust-struck and dazed as they ran to Dee’s car that they both failed to realize they were not wearing masks. An older woman shielded her child from their advance and castigated them with her eyes of pale blue. Once in her car, they attempted to kiss, and she tried to sneak one of his hands up her bra, but he said, “No, honey, please, just drive us home. Go as fast as you like. I can cover your speeding tickets.”
She pulled out of town, and the cornfields and apple orchards took on a festive golden-hour glow, but each second felt painful and burning. She unbuttoned the top of her jeans. “Just squeeze your hand in there,” she said.
He reached over the gear stick and tried to touch her as instructed. “Maybe shift your seat back a little,” he said.
They swerved past an empty school bus. “Fuck you!” Dee yelled to the driver. “I’m trying to get laid here!” His tongue was inside her ear. “No, I don’t like that, sorry. Kiss my neck!”
She was at eighty on the speedometer, and a voice that sounded like a chime that had just been taught to speak English announced: “Driver alert, please pull over and take a break!”
“Not tonight, Satan,” Dee said, stepping on the gas some more. She noticed Ed had slung back to his seat and, amid his heavy breathing, had put his hand on his crotch. “Oh my God, are you going to masturbate in front of me?”
“No!” he shouted. “It just hurts a little. I’m going to loosen things up a bit.”
“Oh, please do,” she said. “I’d love to see you jerk off.”
“You’re driving,” he said weakly. “We’re in a car.”
She threw off her seat belt and raised herself up. The car’s chiming voice was crazy with despair. With both hands off the wheel and one foot on the accelerator, she stripped her shorts and panties down to her ankles. “Give me your fucking hand,” she said.
“What?” he said as he reached for the wheel and tried to keep the car steady. Dying right now would not be a problem for him. She brought his fingers inside her. “Oh,” he said. “Dee.”
“We can do it in that cornfield.” She moaned, as the car hurtled madly from one side of the road to the other.
“They can see us,” he whispered, two fingers suspended inside her. They passed a sign that read OUR PRAYERS HAVE COME TRUE. WELCOME BACK, PASTOR ED. “Everyone can see us.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Fuck everyone.”
“Oh, God.” He was massaging her now, circularly, while examining the willowy blond triangle above her sex with more scrutiny than he had deployed in his entire life. If only he had been as diligent at university, he might have graduated with honors （or just graduated）。
* * *
—
The car was bounding up the gravel driveway as Ed was trying to extricate his hand from within her warmth. （How desperately he now wanted to place each perfumed finger into his mouth.） She stepped on the brakes, and the car skidded, sideways, into an inopportune position blocking all the garage bays at once. They plopped out of the car as she pulled up her underthings and shorts with one hand and began to run toward the closest of the bungalows, which would be his. They heard Nat’s voice ringing from the covered porch: “Dee! Ed! We still have some food left! My mommy made borscht.”
“That’s okay,” Masha sang to the almost-lovers as they ran past the porch. “I’m sure they’ve eaten already.”
Ed could hear Vinod and Karen and Senderovsky laughing, but he did not give a damn.
The Kīlauea volcano above Ed’s bed was still donating a steady stream of lava to the Pacific. As soon as the door was shut they were upon each other, their handsome faces clanging （“Ouch”） as they tried to get better purchase. “Sorry, but not sorry,” Dee said as she ripped to shreds Ed’s deadstock cotton banker-stripe shirt. “You should never wear that again,” she hissed. “We should make beautiful rags out of it. Out of all your shit.”
Ed’s vision was flirting with darkness, the oxygenated blood in his body was flowing in one direction—he had to remind himself to breathe. She put all of him in her mouth, she licked him below, he explored both orifices with his tongue and fingers—they worked so hard at times they forgot the nature of their assignments and merely breathed hard into the other’s genitals or listened to the textures of the other’s moans. He wanted to ejaculate, but held back. “Can we do anything?” he asked. “Like maybe weird things?”