Easier

Easier

I.

The boy picked her up from her parents' place. He waited in the car for her to come, listening to music and drumming his fingers on the wheel. The Malibu looked dirty from the outside, coated in summer pollen and the grit from city rain, but on the inside it was spotless. His fingers smelled bitter from coins he had put in the vacuum machine at the service station only a few minutes before. If he thought the girl had loved him, he might have smoked. But the girl did not love him and so he put a stick of gum in his mouth and checked his chin where the razor had slipped. It wasn't the same. Another minute flicked past on the clock, and he cleared his throat, raised the volume of the stereo and drummed his fingers.

The girl left her parents' house precisely five minutes after they were supposed to meet, which was right on time. She came out the side gate and walked past the garden that was all weeds now, wearing a dress that made her skin look like cream. The fabric was blue, a little too dark for the shade of her eyes. Over the dress she wore a men's blazer that did not belong to the boy.

Giving him a weak wave from the lawn, she walked up to the car and around to the passenger door. She tried the handle, and when the door didn't open, the boy undid the locks so she could come inside.

“Hi,” said the girl, as she floated into the passenger's seat.

“It's good to see you. You look great.”

They drove out of town on a dusty ranch road that ran north. Limestone hillsides and patches of trees cleared away for quarries that stayed lit up like amusement parks all night. They were looking for an empty parking lot. The boy wanted it to be someplace he didn't know, where his memories wouldn't win out over experience.

“Do you care where we go?” he asked.

Staring into the window glass, looking at the scenery or maybe her reflection, she said that whatever was fine with her. Her face was mottled by the little moonlight that made its way to the interior of the car. Two weeks earlier, they had met up for the first time in over a year at some asian restaurant where they ate in a large outdoor seating area, overrun with birdbaths and ivy. The first ten minutes they had barely spoken, gawking at each other in contemplation of their changed looks, in wonder of what a year could do.

For the boy, it had been rough. He had come back into town after dropping out of school, after spending months at a state college, sleeping all the time and driving to fuck away weekends with an out of town girlfriend named Elizabeth, who he knew loved him, but also had been breaking his heart for as long as he could remember. He skin had grown stained and weathered, like the stretches of Texas terrain he had traversed on her behalf. The girl though, sitting beside him in the car, had erupted into something miraculous and dangerous since their last meeting. He was acutely aware of it as they drove: how she had been beautiful a year ago, but now she was older and wore it with abandon, almost with anger, as if it was her revenge on everything to look so good. She put her feet up on the dashboard, and played with the fraying ends of a run in her tights.

“Hey,” he said, “Are you alright?”

“Let's not talk about that, okay?”

He looked away from the road at her because he could not stop looking away from the road at her. She ran her finger along the tab for the automatic locks and after a while she said, “Can you believe we used to be so young?”

He said, “Are we old already?”

II.

The roads climbed, running thin and twisting like a black serpent choking the life out of the hillsides and the boy put a hand on the girl's thigh. She chewed on her lower lip while she contemplated the gesture. He probably didn't even know what he meant by it, he was so used to love. The moment hung in the air for a while, until the boy noticed that the girl was looking at him strangely.

“I'm sorry,” he said, stretching out his fingers across the fabric of her dress. “Is this not okay?”

“I don't know,” she said, and ran her hand over his knuckles. His skin was freezing.

Up ahead of them, a set of street lights appeared, washing out the night. Their metal stalks were planted in the parking lot of an abandoned bible school: an outpost for some suburb that had become a ghost town when the housing bubble burst. It was a possible stopping point. The boy didn't believe in sin, so the irony didn't matter to him. He didn't know what the girl believed in.

“Want to check it out?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

They pulled into the lot and parked. In front of them, at the end of the lot, the land dropped off and went running for ten miles down to the city they had left. Those lights glimmered like the embers of a dying fire and the boy rolled down the windows and inhaled the cool air. He killed the engine but left the power on because he didn't want the radio to shut off. His ribs distended and fell back into place as he breathed, and he thought of knots untying.

The girl watched this, and she said, “Can you turn the headlights off?”

He looked at her, and smiled. She smiled too, but quickly let her gaze drop down to her ankles. He flicked off the headlights. A moment wore down and then they were kissing. Her mouth was softer than anything, some violet static that washed over him. She ran her fingers down the skin of his neck, and he closed his eyes and she was the only thing he felt in that dark. Then he thought of his own fingers tracing across Elizabeth's neck, four days ago. Of the bruise that he knew was caused by someone else's lips and the open drawers across her dorm room that she always stared into after they fucked. The girl had called him, his phone vibrating deep within the sheets, and when Elizabeth had asked who it was, he had told her that the girl was just an old friend he had run into. Eventually Elizabeth had rolled over to look at him and when she dropped her head onto his chest, he closed her eyes and felt the weight of it and knew had been lied to because the world was anything but limitless.

In the car, his fingers pushed across the fabric of her dress and his mouth was hungry and dry. They were in the back seat now, the windows still rolled down and the stereo still playing. The whole thing was careless because it had to be, because they knew that thought would rip the night in half. She let him take off her dress, lifting her arms over her head. When he had it off, she took the lifeless fabric from his hands and threw it on the floor. He smiled a sheepish smile and she lay back against the cool leather of the car seats. Seeing her like that, he wanted her in his bed on a morning when the sun was out, wanted to feel her skin as it would contrast with cloth and comfort. He watched her for too long, and she stared in his eyes as he watched. Then she sat up and she put her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her and moved her mouth in his

He pushed his fingers underneath her bra and he was reading her like a map when his phone went off in the backseat. All at once context clapped down around them: he saw it come together in her eyes. He watched her face change expression as she remembered what brought them here, the stupid drunken voicemail she had left him, how sad he looked when he picked her up. He brushed her hair away, tried to brush those thoughts away from her. He kissed her on her cheek, and while his lips were tracing down her stomach, she said, “wait,” and at first it just came out as hot breath, so she said it again.

“Wait.”

He looked up at her. The concern on his face was obvious and fatal. He said, “What's the matter?” even though the answer was spelled out in the air. She hesitated and she said, “I really don't want to fuck anything up for you.”

He laughed a sick laugh, like a death rattle or wood splintering, and he said, “You could not possibly fuck anything up that hasn't been broken forever.”

She wanted to be insistent. She said, “Really.”

And he got up right next to her face and he said, “I promise. This is what I want. I wouldn't be here otherwise.”

She shook her head at the boy like he was misunderstanding the world completely, but when he pressed his lips against hers again to prove his point she kissed him back, and when he ran his fingers over the lace of her underwear she lifted her hips so he could take them off. They let the phone ring and ring.

III.

Afterward, they stayed for a while in the cool of the car. There was a feather on her hip, composed of barely straight lines. He ran his finger along the raised ink, and said, “What's this?”

She said, “ I did it myself.”

He asked why, and she said, “Sometimes you just get too drunk and too sad.”

The boy turned the stereo off and took the keys out of the ignition so that the battery wouldn't die and they could stay longer, and asked, “Is that why you're here now?”

Soon, the girl wanted to put her dress back on. The boy got out of the car and walked around to the front and sat on the hood. He put his hand on the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, and hesitated for a while before he lit one. The girl joined him while he finished it. He drove her home. In her driveway, she started to get out and he said, “Hey, wait,” and they shared another long kiss before he let her slip away from him. She tasted like he imagined the winds might taste if they were changing.

VII.

The boy drove back toward his house as rain was starting to fall, thinking about the girl. There were puddles of water already gathered at the shoulders of the road from yesterday's storms and they reflected streetlamps like they were trying to imitate constellations. He wanted everything beautiful to stop, because it was making his head ache. He wanted a drink. He pulled off the road two exits early, and parked in front of a gas station.

The boy got out of the car and smoked another cigarette, staring at the sky, and then at the gasoline pumps. When he was finished, he threw the butt of his cigarette into a puddle, searched his pockets for change and vacuumed the car. The car got clean, and then he didn't know what to do. He walked the lot until, eventually, his cellphone was in his hand and he stared for a long time at the girl's number in his directory, mouthing her name to himself again and again. Then, slowly, he scrolled down another 6 names and dialed.

Elizabeth answered on the fourth ring and he could tell by her voice that she was alone.

He said, “Can I come over?”