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Questionable Taste (later)

She stays right where she is for awhile after, and once again there's that quiet wish for the impossible forever. The speculative what ifs of two strangers meeting had their circumstances been different. Eventually there is an affectionate whisper of aw s**t gotta piss and a laughing scramble out of the car and into the bushes.

When she takes the wheel, sunglasses on and lipstick refreshed, she goes from relaxed giggling to sudden, focus intensity as she pulls back onto the highway. She shifts and speeds and listens to the car, pushing it to some unspoken limit and then, finally relaxing, she eases up and flashes a grin to the passenger seat.

She's not that great with modern cars, with too much electronics on the dash and rides so smooth and quiet that she can barely feel the power of the vehicle underneath. But with steely old junkers she found herself at home, found special challenges in coaxing them about. She liked this one a lot, even if it was on its last big hurrah.

"First off, I didn't wreck General McRusty at all, got that? It was Davey Buer's car that got wrecked, and it was his fault. He was always doing that race n'flirt thing, y'know the sort? All the goddamn time with me. Ever since he was sixteen and his parents had the bright idea of getting him a new car. He always won of course, and maybe it was cute the first few times but the next three of four dozen got irritating as ******** flexed her hand on the wheel and pursed her lips just thinking about it. "Anyway, one day we're at the usual stop light and he's revving his little engine when he see the truck pull up, and calls out some stupid boy s**t like, Hey, Merica! Show me your tits and I'll give you a real ride! And then honks his horns all <********>

A toothy grin follows, "'Course that would be the day Pa was in town and needing my truck for a bit, so he was just dropping me off at school. Once Davey got a look at who he was talking to..." She glances at Taym, "He's a big fellow you know? Bout six-five and built like a ******** fridge. Most gentle person you'll ever meet, but looks like he pulls people's heads off like grapes for a living." Her laugh at this is fond, because in this place at this moment, she has forgotten to be angry or hurt or sad.

"That boy got so startled he just hit the gas, light was nearly turned too so maybe nothing woulda come from it, 'cept there was this ******** chicken in the road in front of him and so Davey got another terrible startle when it flapped up on his windshield. Drove right into our lane just as we got goin' and the front of that shiny little car crumpled like paper. We had to call an ambulance for him, but as soon as that was out of the way we got that chicken to the vet. It lived," she reassures him.

"After that, Davey Buer couldn't go hardly anywhere without some a*****e asking him why the chicken crossed the road." Her grin indicates clearly that she was one such a*****e.

Questionable Taste

He spends her story leaning his head against the door, the window down, his eyes closed except when he's watching his exhaled smoke get snatched away. Like a ********' dog, just like he'd said he would.

He grins around his cigarette at <********>, snorts; he barks a laugh for the punchline.

"With every story I get more of an impression that you were a local terror. Probably just made it worse. I'd have <********> at you too." And leaned out to offer her a cigarette, probably; racing didn't prove a damn thing. He takes a drag with a noise suspiciously like a stifled giggle, and then adds, with a sideways glance and a voice fully sincere, all affection and gratitude: "Local terror with a gift for narrative."

Questionable Taste

There's a long empty stretch of highway in front of them but her hand moves past the shift and takes his instead. In an old barn with the sky thundering down just outside, in a little white room with confessions in the air and recorded applause in the background, in a shitty car rattling down middle of nowhere fast: it meant thank you.

It always meant thank you.

And many more

BIRTHDAY PLANS!!

• Cake (FUNFETTI WITH NERD FROSTING)
  
• Outfit (maybe something fluffy?)New shoes. Hair up.
  
• Gift (ME)
  
• Reservations (good to go!)Emotionally and mentally prepare for devastating defeat at skee ball
  

(He doesn't even deny reading it. Of course he did. Just as she'd known he would.)

Polyamory

One particularly rough night, two joints and a couple of shots and some mysterious pill into his attempts at self-medicating, he spends several minutes making a list, out loud, of every word he can think of right off that combine Greek and Latin roots. It's a long list.

He tells her about a game he plays in his head, when he can't sleep or when he's in the shower or scrubbing down some floor somewhere: he thinks of a person he knows, a passing acquaintance for preference, and he starts at A and lists every descriptor he possibly can before moving on to B. On a bad night, he tells her, he can get halfway through the alphabet with people he met once at a party two or three years ago.

Malneirophrenia," he says. "Sociopath, I think--makes sense. Neonate, of course. Claustrophobia."

Sometimes it looks like he's working until a glance over the shoulder reveals that he is yet again laboring through compiling lists of what he calls promising candidates for the composition of elusive palindromes, a pursuit he twice bitches that he's ill-suited to but doesn't stop playing with.

"Television. Neuroscience--beautiful. Retronym. That's an interesting word--it's a word you don't need until a new version of something's been made. Like acoustic guitar, or brick and mortar store--after electric guitars and the internet." A pause. "Hyperactive. Hetero and homosexual both, which is hilarious." Of course it was. "Meritocracy."

He can never, ever, find the words to say what he's thinking.

And many more

BIRTHDAY PLANS!!

• Cake (FUNFETTI WITH NERD FROSTING) (pretzel with ez cheese frosting) Something chocolate and only chocolate
  
• Outfit (maybe something fluffy?)New shoes. Hair up. (new slippers! cornrows!) The other new shoes. Not quite going to court up, not quite prom up.
  
• Gift (ME)
  
• Reservations (good to go!)Emotionally and mentally prepare for devastating defeat at skee ball (make my angel honey a consolation prize so he doesn't feel bad on his birthday)make room for giant inflatable jukebox angel honey will be buying with his million tickets
  

Also

It's easy to say what she gives him: she gives him the good kind of terror. The stray-dog metaphors are never far from hand: she gives him the privilege of being afraid of a warm room after months in the rain. He wants--he is a romantic, despite his cynicism, despite the fact that he'd deny it--to say that it's all a chaotic dependent sort of privilege tangled up singularly in America Jones, but it isn't. She unlocks doors and some of them he closes back up behind her but others he doesn't. She's just the first one, maybe the only one, to be patient enough to do it.

He still feels like someone else, despite the bad days. It's just not always a curse any more. Not always.

It's harder for him to imagine what he gives her, because his sense of self-worth is improving but there's too much lost ground to make up now or possibly ever. When he's feeling brave (sometimes) he speculates.

He gives her incompletely of himself: enough of a man to be cruel, enough too much boy to be worth it. Enough of a man to needle her into defiance, enough too much boy to draw her close, pliant, careful, sweet. Enough of a man to hurt and be hurt, enough too much boy to apologize and to make up, over and over.

It's the best theory he has. It takes the sting out of some of her fond mockery, and puts a dull ache into the moments when she's at her most girlish, when for a flickering instant she remembers that she's so young, or the even more infrequent moments when he remembers that he is, too.

Twinkle Toes

"Most of the time," he corrects, and he hands her a box, a suggestion. It can at least be said that he has good taste. "You're nice," he adds. "Most of the time."