There is a lot of dirt on her knees. Dirt and pine needles, tiny stones, strange lines and pockmarks ironed into her flesh. She leans over to wipe the tops of her shins. Her pelvis shifts inside her skin, feels too big for her body. She looks up, watching him climb the driveway, bare from the waist up, ghostly white in the restless dark. Her dress hangs over one arm like an empty shadow and her shoes cradled to his ribs, dirt-clotted heels hooked on his forearm. He moves out from beneath crosshatched tree branches and in his other hand is her gun, weighing down the natural swing of his arm.

Emily glances up at the dark highway reflected in the rearview mirror. How far could I get on a dark highway while barefoot naked? She imagines herself on the blacktop, running in the breakdown lane and wincing at the bite of pebbles, the steady wind awash in the scent of sap and salt. A car comes, headlights blinding her like a deer. She throws a hand up to block the assault of the light. The car slows. The car doesn’t slow. Its driver thinks she is an apparition or a streaking drunk. Maybe the horn blows. The driver is a woman and a prickling of concern shifts her foot onto the brake. All along here are barren dunes threatening to cross the road. Long empty places full of shuttered houses. There are miles and miles of serpentine blackness, night breathing in the sound of crickets and the restless sea. Cold and bare, her pale skin flashing.

The driver’s side door unlocks, sending her train of thought off the rails. The wind blows inside the car, bounces off the glass, pushes her hair into her face. She moves it aside. George tosses her shoes onto the floormat. He reaches out and puts the dress on her lap, then digs around in his front pocket. She starts to unwind the skirt and he tosses the clip on top of its slippery pile. He climbs in and the car settles. He hands over the gun butt-first, leaning back in the seat and watching as she tucks it into her purse.

“I left the bullet.” He starts the engine. “Let em wonder.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

He rests his hands on the wheel. The red glow of the dash tints his skin, deepening the hollows in his cheeks. He looks at her. “Do you want me to?”

Nervous warmth awakens in her belly and stretches, turning over, bumping up against things she doesn’t want to think about. Her cheeks light with fitful heat. She shifts in her seat, looking toward the house. The windows are low, set in silvered listing walls, wrapped in flaking casements. Full of starlit darkness, individual square panes look back at her like eyes.

“Why would you ask me that?”

George starts the car. He twists, bracing his arm behind the headrest, and looks over his shoulder. He nudges the wheel, easing the car up the driveway. “Why wouldn’t I?”

She wants a kiss like it would erase everything, repurpose the passing seconds and smooth down the hackles in her mind. The flavor of this craving crawls out of her tongue. She watches his hand, fingers on the molded leather of the steering wheel, veins under the skin like rivers and knuckles like smoothed stones. He is another country, full of strange customs she doesn’t understand. She looks at the tendons in his turned neck and it comes like a wind, blowing in off her dark waters, a sigh knifing through her flesh and curling up to sleep in her throat. She swallows. Half-thought words floating up, fashioned out of silk:

I am the opposite of Sleeping Beauty: I’m so awake.

Emily shakes it off, focusing on the pine needles on her dress. In places they spear the delicate fabric, rending the fine weave. She eases them out, a paramedic tweezing glass out of young skin. She drops the needles onto the floor. She plucks pitch-sticky twigs off the hem. She shakes it out the fabric as best she can, feeling it drift down cool and delicate across her thighs. She flips the dress up over her head, wriggling her arms into the bodice. She leans forward and bends, reaching behind her waist for the zipper.

“I guess I don’t know.”

The car backs into the deserted lane. He steps on the brake, leans sideways, and reaches down between her spine and the seat. He takes the little metal tab out of her blind fingertips and tugs it up between her shoulder blades. Her back twists away from the intrusive pleasure of his skin.

“Thank you.”

For a brief second, his hand warms the silk. “You’re welcome.”

Am I? Emily watches the rolling movement of the center line. Am I welcome?

She pushes a button. The window slides down. In rushes the air, washing over her face, smelling of fog and grass and rugged flowers. It ruffles her skirt up past her stained knees. It breaks up their body heat, pulling the pieces out into the night.

“Is that a no?”

New memories hum inside his voice. She feels them, warm and living things longing to crawl up the inside of her skin. She crosses her legs. “Yes, it’s a no.”

Pomegranate seeds. The thought flies out of nowhere. Food of the dead.

“I’m not going to kill you.”

She looks at him. “Why?”

The lights of town flare up over the backs of houses and fall in through the windshield, deepening the dimple in his cheek. He’s smiling. “You’re more fun alive.”

Emily turns her back on the window. “And what happens when I stop being fun?”

He chuckles. “It’ll never happen.”

She feels warm, then cold, then warm. She fidgets and lazy heat rises up through her skin, kindled in the soles of her feet. She turns her face into the wind. The wharf houses pass by, salt-weathered shingles gleaming in the damp lamplight. Peaked roofs loom sharp and black against a pastel sky. Though they wear purple petunias in hanging baskets and bright-colored window boxes full of new marigolds, in every corner, every window, every eave they are dreaming of winter. She imagines them boarded up against a low roiling pewter sky, fringed with dripping ice.

Crowded streetlights and the shapes of people walking inside the fallen pyramids of light, storefronts like cut-rate televisions offering freeze-frames of a culture that never existed.

The car slows. He pulls up next to a black streetlamp styled to look like an old-fashioned gaslight. Emily sees three of them, lined up inside their trick of diminishing perspective, a fourth and fifth melting into vague shapes of light inside the fog. Music bangs around inside the mist, turned tinny with distance. A cluster of young drunk people ranges over the wet brick sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and laughing too loud. Hanging in the darkened plate glass window behind them are batik-printed shift dresses and bangles and leather purses imported from India. She smells exhaust.

The engine idles up through the seats. “You want me to leave you here?”

“No.”

He looks at her. “You want me to take you all the way?”

She gives him her profile. “I don’t have any secrets.”

He pulls back out into the road. The air smells like wet trees. Gold-lit windows float in shades of darkness.

“All the way to the door?”

The last of the lampposts pulls into the distance. Emily leans over, wiping the remainder of her red lipstick across his bare shoulder. He glances at the top of her head. She touches the inside of his thigh. Pink streaks smear onto her cheek, desire cracking open inside her breath. He pulls the car onto the soft shoulder and hooks one hand around the back of her neck, hauling her face up to his. She whimpers. Parts of her fall away and land in his mouth, floating on the erratic bursts of his breath. He smothers her in his salty mouth and makes a fist of her hair.

In her mind she is turned over, her head sinking into his lap, looking at the ceiling of the car and the shape of his jaw. In her mind she can only feel the forward momentum of wheels, see the flash of passing headlights like heat lightning on a steamed windshield. Her life is a raft. She is floating, floating.

In her flesh the kiss is breaking, pulling apart into strings of panting saliva.

She puts his fingers on a nipple, standing up hard beneath the silk. The way he touches it makes her think of bullets.