She giggled. “They don’t know where Stanson Road ends up.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her, some of his good humour returning. “That’s what you think,” he said.
He drove back down toward town slowly, and Christine managed the twisting, steeply descending road with easy surefootedness. The sprinkle of earth-stars that was Libertyville and Monroeville grew larger and drew closer together and then ceased to have any pattern at all. Leigh watched this a little sadly, feeling that the best part of potentially wonderful evening had somehow slipped away. She felt irritated, chafed, out of sorts with herself—unfulfilled, she supposed. There was a dull ache in her breasts. She didn’t know if she had meant to let him go what was euphemistically known as “all the way” or not, but after things had reached a certain point, nothing had gone as she had hoped… all because she had to open her big fat mouth.
Her body was in a mess, and her thoughts were the same way. Again and again on the mostly silent drive back down she opened her mouth to try to clarify how she felt… and then closed it again, afraid of being misunderstood, because she didn’t understand how she felt herself.
She didn’t feel jealous of Christine… and yet she did. About that Arnie hadn’t told the truth. She had a good idea of how much time he spent tinkering on the car, but was that so wrong? He was good with his hands, he liked to work on it, and it ran like a watch… except for that funny little glitch with the milometer numbers running backward.
Cars are girls, she had said. She hadn’t been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn’t always true; she didn’t think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford.
But—
Forget it, get rid of all the hocus-pocus and phony stuff. The truth was much more brutal and even crazier, wasn’t it? She couldn’t make love to him, couldn’t touch him in that intimate way, much less think about bringing him to a climax that way (or the other, the real way—she had turned that over and over in her mind as she lay in her narrow bed, feeling a new and nearly amazing excitement steal over her), in the car.
Not in the car.
Because the really crazy part was that she felt Christine was watching them. That she was jealous, disapproving, maybe hating. Because there were times (like tonight, as Arnie skated the Plymouth so smoothly and delicately across the building scales of sleet) when she felt that the two of them—Arnie and Christine—were welded together in a disturbing parody of the act of love. Because Leigh did not feel that she rode in Christine; when she got in to go somewhere with Arnie she felt swallowed in Christine. And the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism—it was like making love inside the body of her rival.
The really crazy part of it was that she hated Christine.
Hated her and feared her. She had developed a vague dislike of walking in front of the new grille, or closely behind the boot; she had vague thoughts of the emergency brake letting go or the gearstick popping out of park and into neutral for some reason. Thoughts she had never had about the family sedan.
But mostly it was not wanting to do anything in the car… or even go anywhere in the car, if she could help it. Arnie seemed somehow different in the car, a person she didn’t really know. She loved the feel of his hands on her body—her breasts, her thighs (she had not yet allowed him to touch the centre of her, but she wanted his hands there; she thought if he touched her there she would probably just melt). His touch always brought a coppery taste of excitement to her mouth, a feeling that every sense was alive and deliciously attuned. But in the car that feeling seemed blunted… maybe because in the car Arnie seemed less honestly passionate and somehow more lecherous.
She opened her mouth again as they turned onto her street, wanting to explain some of this, and again nothing would come. Why should it? There was really nothing to explain—it was all vapours. Nothing but vague burnouts.
Well… there was one thing. But she couldn’t tell him that; it would hurt him too badly. She didn’t want to hurt him because she thought she was beginning to love him.
But it was there.
The smell—a rotten, thick smell under the aromas of new seat covers and the cleaning fluid he had used on the floormats. It was there, faint but terribly unpleasant. Almost stomach-turning.
As if, at some time, something had crawled into the car and died there.
He kissed her good night on her doorstep, the sleet shining silver in the cone of yellow light thrown by the carriage lamp at the foot of the porch steps. It shone in her dark blond hair like jewels. He would have liked to have really kissed her, but the fact that her parents might be watching from the living room—probably were, in fact—forced him to kiss her almost formally, as you might kiss a dear cousin.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was silly.”
“No,” Arnie said, obviously meaning yes.
“It’s just that”—and her mind supplied her with something that was a curious hybrid of the truth and a lie—“that it doesn’t seem right in the car. Any car. I want us to be together, but not parked in the dark at the end of a dead-end road. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said. Up at the Embankment, in the car, he had felt a little angry with her… well, to be honest, he had been pretty goddam pissed off. But now, standing here on her stoop, he thought he could understand—and marvel that he could want to deny her anything or cross her will in any way. “I know exactly what you mean.”
She hugged him, her arms locked around his neck. Her coat was still open, and he could feel the soft, maddening weight of her breasts.
“I love you,” she said for the first time, and then slipped inside to leave him standing there on the porch momentarily, agreeably stunned, and much warmer than he should have been in the ticking, pattering sleet of late autumn.
The idea that the Cabots might find it peculiar if he stood on their front stoop much longer in the sleet at last percolated down into his bemused brain. Arnie went back down the walk through the tick and patter, snapping his fingers and grinning. He was riding the rollercoaster now, the one that’s the best ride, the one they really only let you take once.
Near the place where the concrete path joined the sidewalk, he stopped, the smile fading off his face. Christine stood at the kerb, drops of melted sleet pearling her glass, smearing the red dash lights from the inside. He had left Christine running, and she had stalled. This was the second time.
“Wet wires,” he muttered under his breath. “That’s all.” It couldn’t be plugs; he had put in a whole new set just the day before yesterday, at Will’s. Eight new Champions and—
Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?
The smile returned, but this time it was uneasy. Well, he spent more time around cars in general—of course. That came of working for Will. But it was ridiculous to think that…
You lied to her. That’s the truth, isn’t it?
No, he answered himself uneasily. No, I don’t think you could say I really lied to her…
No? Then just what do you call it?
For the first and only time since he had taken her to the football game at Hidden Hills, he had told her a big fat lie. Because the truth was, he spent more time with Christine, and he hated having her parked in the thirty-day section of the airport parking lot, out in the wind and the rain, soon to be snow—
He had lied to her.
He spent more time with Christine.
And that was—
Was—
“Wrong,” he croaked, and the word was almost lost in the slick, mysterious sound of the falling sleet.