“Shit,” he said. “Green light.”
I laid back into my seat, my guts aching.
Our view was the curves and crags of a low green mountain and the road in front of us. I realized he was heading up to Gold Camp. I felt like his girl. Like we could still have been in high school. Gravel popped underneath his tires until we got to a pull-off section hidden by a portion of rock. I bit my lip, and he changed the CD out to the one I had slipped him in the returned book. NIN. I unbuttoned his pants, pretending I was the only girl to ever do it. My face this close, the smell of his sweat mixed with the air of everything else, the sour of his body and the cotton of his jeans.
I gave him head and thought about Frankie. I wondered what she was doing, what jail was like. This competition, like I was the one who was the mother of his child. Daddy.
His hands graced my upper back and that dissolving feel hit my shoulders and spread through the rest of my body. I emptied against his skin and let his presence permeate, making up for the months I hadn’t seen him. Fucking or making love or neither, I didn’t care anymore. The music in the car so loud it reverberated with harsh twangs. I thought about the way I grabbed Jenny, leaving marks in her skin. Matt sucked his lips and I bit them. I pulled on them with my teeth. I let go of his lip and kissed him again and pushed my tongue into my mouth, I tongued his teeth. He bit me back. I wanted to fuck him the way he had fucked me in front of Frankie. Hatefuck.
I traced my hands over his head. When he came to and looked at me, between our bodies where the heat was happening, something snapped. We stopped.
“Did you come?” I asked.
He nodded and pulled the condom off, looking for the tear. The car smelled heavysweet with the stench of wet latex. We both saw it at the same time, and he looked at me, throwing the condom and the wrapper out of the car window. He looked down and sighed.
Something fractured inside me. This crescendo was so disappointing. I didn’t know how it happened. The car was the same. The road was the same. Matt was still the same person. But there was something that finally felt cold in me, a shutdown. When I looked at him, I saw that he had a woman, a kid, responsibilities. Things that I didn’t care about or comprehend yet. He had places he was going to, a future. These were things I did not have.
We left Gold Camp. I traced my fingers along the leather edges of the seats in the Malibu, followed them up to the glove box. Matt looked over at me as I opened the glove box, papers, ice scraper, an old book injured with water. The heart I gave him was in there, underneath all the trash. It seemed appropriate to hide it underneath something so like myself.
Colorado Springs ascended before us as we hit Cheyenne Mountain Boulevard. Smoke curled up from the paper factory. I was reminded of the first time we rode up here, with Frankie, blasting Manson through the night with the dome light on. As we drove on, I looked in the backseat to see what I might look like if I were Frankie, staring back.
But I wasn’t Frankie. I was Lilith.
He drove me back to his apartment building behind the highway barrier, and I stayed the night. His mother brought Jett back over. He mentioned needing to work in the morning. We went to bed early. I slept next to him, both of us alone. I texted Jenny throughout the night and had nightmares that Frankie would come home and find me there in the bed, that she’d drag me out by my feet. The phone kept vibrating with each text from Jenny, and I could tell it was keeping Matt awake, annoying him each time it happened. I finally fell asleep around 2 a.m.
We woke the next morning to his alarm. I felt groggy. The baby stirred, but we stayed in bed for a few long minutes and I tried to savor each part of the moment that I could—the smell and feel of his hair against my lips, the stubble that had grown in on his face overnight. I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back.
“You should get the morning after pill,” he said. He wasn’t sad when he said it. It was very matter-of-fact. “Frankie told me she wants to leave soon, but I can’t fuck everything up right now.”
I put my hand on his lips, felt the warmth. He turned his face away and I moved my hand to his. He did not respond.
“Frankie’s leaving?” I asked.
“She threatened to move back to New Mexico,” he said. “With her dad.”
I stayed silent. I wanted to remember this exactly how it happened. In the light of the sun rising into the room, my free hand picked at the overlap between two small pieces of fabric in the blanket, a tiny thump against the mattress each time it gave way. I stared at my other hand on his face, which almost seemed detached from me. I could not feel his skin. I followed the squares of light with my eyes and then glanced at the alarm clock flashing green and blue. Frankie would be coming home.
“I’ll go the pharmacy,” I said. I lingered for
