Rearview

The clock above the register said 2:04 when Nicky heard the engine coming up US-6, that ragged cough-and-sputter sound of a car that had been driven too long on old fuel, and she looked out the window out of habit more than interest. Two in the morning in Tonopah was when the coyotes got bored, not when customers showed up, and the station was quiet enough that she could hear the ice machine cycling behind her. Then the headlights swept across the pumps and she saw the sedan, ten years old now with a dented rear bumper she'd have known in the dark at a hundred yards, and her stomach did something complicated and unwelcome.

Ida stepped out of the car wearing a wrinkled blouse and that same sly smile from three years ago, thirty-three years old now and somehow looking better than the day she'd driven off, if better was a word Nicky was willing to apply here.

"Hey, Nicky," she said, leaning against the door like she'd been here yesterday instead of three years ago. "Battery's dead. You got cables?"

"You have got to be kidding me," Nicky said, and set down her coffee anyway.

It took about ten minutes, Ida holding the flashlight in her teeth while Nicky worked the clamps, and Ida talked the whole time the way she always had, filling silence like it was a job. She was a sales rep now, covering half of Nevada, on her way to Reno in the morning, and the only motel in town had one room left, which she mentioned twice, casually, while watching Nicky connect the negative cable.

"One room," she repeated, straightening up. "Small town, huh. I could sleep in the car, but it's gonna be forty degrees by three."

"You're shameless," Nicky said, and stood there with the cables in her hand feeling thirty-four years old and stupid and, God help her, interested. It had been a dry three years. Dry like the desert around them, the kind of dry where you forget what rain even feels like.

"Shameless is a strong word," Ida said. "I prefer persistent."

They took Ida's car to the Dust Devil Motel, because Nicky's car had a gearshift that stuck in second and no air conditioning, and the room smelled like cigarette smoke and burnt coffee, which apparently was the house specialty. Ida set her bag on the bed and unzipped a toiletry kit that clinked, and out came bottles, four or five of them, all clearly the same general category of product.

"Okay," Nicky said, sitting on the edge of the mattress. "That's a lot of lube."

"I've been thinking about this for months," Ida said, not embarrassed, because Ida had never once in her life been embarrassed. "Months, Nicky. I have a spreadsheet mentality about it. And you're the only person I ever wanted to do it with."

"That's either the sweetest or the weirdest thing anyone's said to me at a motel."

"Weirdest," Ida said, and started unbuttoning her blouse. "It's gonna be both, probably."

Nicky had a choice right there, standing in a room that smelled like an ashtray in Tonopah at 2:40 in the morning, and she made it, because she was lonely and because Ida was already down to her bra and looking at her like the last three years were a rounding error.

"Say it plain," Nicky said. "I need to hear you say it."

"I'm asking you to touch me," Ida said. "All of me. Tonight, if you want it too."

"I want it too."

Ida lay back on the bed and Nicky knelt between her legs, and Ida reached down and took her wrist, guiding her fingers, patient about it, coaching her in a low voice. "Slow. More of that, yeah, just there, just circle it. Now push a little, easy, easy, let me open up for you." Nicky followed the instructions like a woman following a recipe for the first time, careful and a little clumsy, working the lube in until the resistance gave way all at once and they both gasped at the same moment, which made Ida laugh even as she arched off the bed.

"There it is," Ida breathed. "God, I knew you'd figure it out fast. You were always good with your hands, all those years at the pumps."

"Is that a sex talk or a job review?"

"Shut up and keep going," Ida said, and Nicky kept going, adding a second finger when Ida asked for it, watching her face change, watching three years of distance dissolve into something older and more reliable. When Ida finally came she grabbed the headboard with one hand and Nicky's hair with the other and said her name like it was the answer to a question.

Afterward they lay there in the burnt-coffee dark, and Ida said, "Next exit. There's a Sagebrush Inn outside Hawthorne. Meet me there tomorrow night."

"You're actually scheduling this."

"I have a spreadsheet mentality," Ida said, and was asleep in four minutes.

---

The second evening, Nicky drove the hundred miles to Hawthorne with her hands at ten and two and her heart doing a quiet ridiculous drum solo, and Ida was waiting in the Sagebrush Inn parking lot in a sundress, which was an absurd garment for the high desert in October but Nicky wasn't complaining. In the room, Ida reached into her bag and produced a slim silicone plug, purple, modest in size, and held it up like a product demo.

"Try this out during the day," she said, handing it over. "Train the team, as it were."

She'd already tried it herself, it turned out, because the next morning Ida left her sedan at the inn and rode along while Nicky drove the back road to Mina for a part, plug in the whole way, and Nicky discovered a whole new genre of entertainment: Ida in the passenger seat, shifting her weight every few miles, pressing her thighs together, making small suppressed sounds at the good stretches of road.

"You okay over there?" Nicky asked, somewhere outside Mina.

"I'm fantastic," Ida said through her