“Stone…” I say. “I’m trying to drive…”
“I’m your eyes on the road.” He reaches across me and puts the car on cruise control. “Remember what I said? I got you.” He pushes his fingers into me. “You ever have a cock in here?”
I squirm in the seat, shocked by the strange sensation of having him there. “No.”
“What about a toy?”
A squeak escapes me. Visions of Barbies and Tonka trunks flash through my mind. That’s not the kind of toy he means. “No!”
“Not even a vegetable?” he asks, his voice low with a casual curiosity. “Maybe a nice, thick zucchini. You could have put it back in the fridge before anyone noticed, no one knowing what you’d done with it.”
“I’ve never,” I say, breathless with my denial.
“You must have fucked yourself. Put one finger inside. Two. Three. How many can you fit?”
“No, I—” Embarrassment turns my cheeks hot.
“You just touch your clit?”
God, how can he just say those words? None of the boys I’ve known talked like that to me. All the boys I’ve ever talked to go to Saint Matthew’s, the boys’ school we have dances and events with. Those boys ask to kiss me. They lean in from three feet away for a peck on the lips. They probably blush as much as I do during health class.
“Do you?” he asks again.
“Only that one time.” On the phone with him.
“Then what?” he demands softly.
“The pillow,” I choke out.
His fingers still, and he makes a sound, almost a groan. I’m starting to realize I can affect him as much as he’s affecting me. When he speaks, his voice has gone pure gravel. “That’s what you do, sweetheart? You put a pillow between your legs?”
I swear my face is going up in flames. It’s a good thing we’re on cruise control, because my legs are useless. My entire body is focused on what’s happening where his hand touches me. “And I just move my hips. Press my legs together.”
“Yeah,” he breathes. “Rub yourself until you come.”
My hips are already moving, like I’m in bed under the covers. Like it’s dark in my bedroom, the entire house asleep. Like I’m not in broad daylight behind the wheel of a moving vehicle with a man’s hand between my legs. “I can’t. Not here. Not like this.”
“Yes, here. Exactly like this.” His thumb brushes the sensitive place on me, as if to prove his point. And I can’t deny what’s happening. I’m sparking on the inside, light turned into sensation, the rest of my life a dark sky as the backdrop for this moment.
“Wait,” I say, almost afraid of what will happen next.
Afraid of what’s outside the box.
“No waiting,” he growls. “Look at the sign. Exit four twenty. You have one mile to come. By the time we reach four twenty-one, you’re going to be spilling your cum all over my fingers.”
I shiver at his words, making a soft sound of surrender. The cruise control is set to sixty. My brain moves sluggishly, all the blood rushing elsewhere. One minute to come. One minute. Sixty seconds. “It’s too soon.”
“How long have you thought about me?” he murmurs, pressing his fingers deeper, rubbing his thumb faster. “How long have you been afraid of me, dreamed of me? Imagined me coming to you like this?”
“Forever,” I say, almost a sob.
“That’s right. You’ve been waiting for this. Now I’m here. I’m in charge. I have you.”
My body moves on its own, pulled along by his knowing touch, his dark words. The scent of sex in the air.
The highway is mostly empty. Reflective stripes on the pavement flash by like blinking lights. From far away I can see the big green sign overhead proclaiming the next exit. Almost there.
“And I’ve been waiting,” he murmurs. “Waiting to feel how soft you are, how wet. How much you want me. Do you know how incredible your cunt feels? Like fucking heaven. Like nothing that came before matters. Like I’ve never seen hell.”
Before I can even process that, my climax rushes over me like an eclipse. It’s an explosion of pleasure, blinding and yet dark. It blocks out everything but the sensation of his fingers on my clit. It’s as if I can feel every ridge on his finger pad, as if I’m attuned to him in some permanent, inexorable way.
He rubs me softer and softer, pushing the climax on longer than anything I’ve ever felt. Every muscle in my body feels wrung out. I hear a whimpering sound and realize it’s me. I’m collapsed on the seat, the insides of my thighs damp from my orgasm, his touch soothing now.
“There you are,” he says with one last whisper of his fingers through my slit. “You’re beautiful, sweetheart. You’re perfect like this.”
Something nags the back of my mind, something important he said to me in the final moments, but I can barely think. I can barely hold my head up as we speed along. His hand is still on the wheel, cruise control still keeping us steady. Even so it’s a miracle we haven’t crashed.
Slowly my hands fall onto the steering wheel. I turn on the blinker for the exit. Tap the brake to disconnect cruise control. I don’t feel completely steady, but it’s safer this way. I should be the one driving. “That was dangerous,” I say, my voice shaky.
Stone leans back in his seat, his expression suddenly tense and brooding. “Yeah. It was.”
And I know he doesn’t mean the fact that we were driving.
I don’t really mean that either.
He’s dangerous to me because he opens the lid of the box, because he lets me see what’s outside. He’s the sun, a burning ball so bright it can blind me, and I don’t even care. I want more. I’ll do anything to feel more, even if it means I burn.
I take the exit and stop at the top of the ramp. From up here on the overpass, you can see the highway stretching out into the distance, going for miles. I grip the wheel hard, reeling still—from the climax, from the freedom, from Stone’s wild beauty. I always thought of the world as a kind of lush garden I was being kept secluded from, but it’s more like a jungle—dangerous, wild, and fiercely beautiful.
He makes me feel wild, like I could go anywhere. I turn to him, pulse racing. “Where should we go now?”
He regards me strangely. He doesn’t seem happy. Doesn’t he see that I would go anywhere with him? That I’d give him anything?
“Left,” he says.
I flip on the blinker. “What’s left?”
He’s silent.
I take the turn. “Now what?”
“Left again. Back on the highway.”
“What? You want to go back?”
“Of course I want to go back. And so do you.”
He’s wrong. For one magical moment back there, I wanted to never go back. It felt good to imagine it. Good the way Stone feels good. I stop the car, right on the overpass, and turn on the blinker, but I keep my foot on the brake. “Us,” I say.
“What?” he says. “Go on. Turn.”
“Us. Far away from here,” I say. “In a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And there are pretty things strung on the walls. Colorful rocks that we find in a river. And we eat the fish we catch. And we lie under the stars at night on this giant rock that’s cool underneath us.”