"All right." She got in.
It grew darker, and then she began to hear it. A thin, flowing hiss. Not a crackle, but a sound like escaping gas. The tall tower had begun to vent something, to ooze something, something very odd, something like wind, something like fur, something like flame. White, striated, gaseous spikiness, a flickering, rippling presence, at the corners of the old tower's braced galvanized-iron uprights and crossbars. All on one side, vowing up and down one metal corner of the tower, like glowing ball moss. It hissed and it ffickered and it moved a little, fitfully, like the spitting breath of ghosts. She watched it steadily through the binocular cameras, rock steadily, and she called out, very unsteadily, "Jerry! What is it?"
"It's Saint Elmo's fire."
Jane suddenly felt the hair rise all over her head. She didn't stop recording, but the electric fire had fallen on her now, it had seeped down and come inside the car with her. The corona lifted her hair like a pincushion. Deep natural electricity was discharging off the top of her head. Her whole scalp, from nape to forehead, felt like an eyelid felt when an eyelid was gently peeled back.
"I've seen this at Pike's Peak," Jerry said. "I've never seen it at this low an elevation."
"'Will it hurt us?"
"No. It should pass us when this wave passes."
"All tight. I'm not afraid."
"Keep recording."
"Don't worry, I've got it."
And in less than a minute the wave passed. And the fire was gone away from them, the strange deep fire was gone completely. Just as if there had never been anything.
IT WAS VERY hard to sleep together when you weren't allowed to sleep together. Jane had always had trouble sleeping, always ready to prowl around red-eyed and pull an all-nighter. Jerry had no such problems. Jerry was good at catnaps; he could turn off his virching helmet, lie down on the carpet with his head inside the casket of blackness, sleep twenty minutes, and then get right up and resume his calculations.
But tonight, although Jerry was silent and still, Jerry wasn't sleeping. Jane had her head in the hollow of his left shoulder, a place that fit her as if it had been designed for her, the place where she had passed the most sweetly restLtd nights of her life. They would come away from a chase and have a furious encounter, and then she would fling one naked possessive leg over him and put her head on his shoulder, and she'd close her eyes and hear his heart beating, and she would tumble headlong into a dark sated slumber so deep and healing that it would have set Lady Macbeth to rights.
But not tonight. Her nerves felt as tight and high-pitched as a mariachi violin, and she found no comfort in Jerry. Somehow he didn't smell right. And she didn't smell right either: she smelled of topical vaginal ointment, possibly the least erotic scent known to humankind. But unless at least one of them got some real rest, something awful was going to happen.
"Jerry?" she said. In the still of camp-the ticking of insects, the distant whoosh of the wind generator-even a tender whisper sounded loud as a gunshot.
"Mmmph."
"Jerry, I'm getting better now, I really am. Maybe we should try something."
"I don't think that's a good idea."
"Okay, maybe you're right, but that's no reason why you should have to lie there stiff as a board. Let me try something, darling, let me see if I can make you feel better." Before he could say anything, she slipped her hand down and gripped his cock.
His penis felt so odd and hot in her fingers that for one shocked instant she thought something had gone terribly wrong with him. Then she realized that he didn't have a condom on. She'd touched it before, and even stroked it and kissed it, but never without the condom.
Well, no harm done. Not just with fingers.
"All tight?" she said.
"All right."
He didn't seem to lack enthusiasm. And if she stopped and got out in the pitch darkness and made him put a condom on, it would be a mega drag. Forget it: so far, so good. She stroked him patiently and persistently, until she got a bad cramp in her forearm. Then she burrowed down into the sleeping bag and tried kissing for a while, and although he didn't come, he at least began to make the right noises.
Then she came out of the bag for some much-needed air and tried rubbing some more.
It was taking a very long time. At first she felt intensely embarrassed; and then she got used to it, and began to feel better, thinking that even if this was a very ungainly and unsatisfactory substitute for sex, at least she was doing something practical. At least she was taking charge of their troubles. Then she thought that he was never going to come, that she wasn't skilled or sweet enough to make him do it, and that brought the threat of a cavernous sense of failure.
But he was stroking her neck and shoulder in an encouraging way, and finally he started breathing seriously hard. Then he groaned in the dark, and she held it carefully, and she felt it pulsing.
The wetness on her fingers felt viscous and drippy. It felt rather like motor oil. She had seen semen before, and she even knew that odd and particular smell that it had, but never in her life had it actually touched her skin. It was an intimate bodily fluid. Intimate bodily fluids were very dangerous.
"I'm twenty-six years old," she said, "and this is the first time I've ever touched this stuff."
He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. "My sweet darling," he said quietly, "it wont hurt you.
"I know that. You don't have any viruses. You're not sick! You're the healthiest person I how!"
"You have no way to really know that, though."
"Have you ever had sex with anybody, without using a condom?"
"No, never, of course not."
"Me either. So then how could you possibly have any STh?"
"Blood transfusion, maybe? IV drugs? Anyway, I might be lying about the condom use."
"Oh, for heaven's sake! You're not a liar, I've never known you to lie. You never lie to me!" Her voice trembled. "I can't believe that I've known you all this time, that you're the man I love more than anyone else in the world, and yet I never really knew about this simple thing that you do, this simple thing that comes out of your body." She burst into tears.
"Don't cry, sweetheart."
"Jerry, why is our life this way?" she said. "What did we ever do to deserve this? We don't hurt each other! We love each other! Why can't we be like men and women used to be? Why is everything always so difficult for us?"
"It's for protection.
"I don't need any protection from you! I don't want any protection from you! I'm not afraid about this! Christ. Jerry, this is the part of being with you that I'm never afraid about! This is the part that's really wonderful with us, it's the part that we're really good at." She held on to him and sobbed.
He held her close and tight for a long time as she shook and wept. Finally he began to deliberately kiss the tears away from her inflamed and aching face. When their mouths met, she felt a rush of passion so intcnse that her soul seemed to flow from her lips. She slid on top of him in a patch of cooling stickiness and jammed his cock into her aching, needful body.
And it really hurt. She wasn't at all well, she was sick, she had yeast. It stung and burned, but nowhere near enough to make her want to stop. She put her arms out straight to support herself and started rocking on him in the darkness.
"Juanita, yo te quiero."
It was such a perfect, intoxicating thing for him to say at that moment that she lost all sense of herself. She went way past the hurt and into frenzy. Maybe forty seconds of it, something like forty aeons in the hottest Tantric circle of Nirvana. Her yell of exultation was still ringing in her ears when he grabbed her hips hard enough to bruise and rammed into her from underneath and he came, he pulsed, deep inside of her.