Rest Stop Rules

*This one's about what happens when two people who know every inch of each other decide to act like strangers. It's raw on purpose, no soft edges, no lessons. Thanks for riding shotgun.*

Edith drove with one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, fingers riding the hot wind like it was a dog she was petting. The interstate stretched ahead of them, flat and beige and hypnotic, and Rodney sat in the passenger seat doing a crossword he'd bought two hours ago at a gas station outside Winnemucca. She was thirty-four years old, she had been married twelve years, and somewhere around mile marker 210 she realized she could not remember the last time anything had surprised her.

"I'm bored," she said.

"Of driving?"

"Of everything, Rod." She kept her eyes on the road because it was easier that way. "Of my job, of Tuesdays, of this car, of the way you say 'well now' before you tell me bad news. I'm bored of the whole shape of my life."

Rodney put down the crossword. He was thirty-six, a warehouse supervisor, a man who alphabetized his tools and still opened doors for her, and she loved him, she did, but loving him had started to feel like watching a show she'd seen a hundred times. She knew every episode.

"That's a lot to lay on a guy outside Winnemucca," he said.

"I know."

"You want the crossword? I'm not far in. You could do the seven letters, the one about fences."

"I don't want your crossword, honey." She drummed her fingers on the wheel. "I want to feel like something could happen. Anything. I scrub toilets at the motel six days a week and the seventh day I scrub the tub at home because nobody's around to stop me. And you come home, we eat, we watch whatever you picked, we go to bed. You touch me and it's nice. It's so nice. And I lie there thinking about bleach."

Rodney was quiet for a while. The wind hummed. A semi passed them going somewhere more interesting, probably.

"Bleach," he said finally.

"Bleach," she confirmed.

"I'm not going to lie, that's not how a man wants to hear his sex life described."

"I'm not describing your sex life, I'm describing mine. Yours might be great. Nobody tells me anything."

He laughed at that, which annoyed her a little, because she had been going for devastating. But that was Rodney all over, taking the sting out of things before she could even enjoy it. They had met at a barbecue when he was twenty-one and she was nineteen, she could never keep that straight, but Rodney always said nineteen, and he'd spent the whole evening refilling her cup and laughing at her jokes like they were all new. Twelve years later he still laughed at her jokes. Even the old ones. Especially the old ones.

They stopped at a gas station a hundred and fifty miles short of Elko, mostly because Edith wanted a fountain drink and the big plastic slushie she'd been thinking about for an hour. The mini-mart smelled like diesel and air freshener shaped like a pine tree, the universal scent of nowhere. She wandered the aisles while Rodney paid, picking up jerky she wouldn't eat and a lottery ticket she wouldn't check, and that was when she saw the receipt lying by the register, long and blank on its back side, and something clicked in her head like a light she'd forgotten she owned.

She borrowed the pen chained to the counter, wrote fast, and folded the paper twice.

"What's that?" Rodney asked when she held it out.

"Rules."

"For what?"

"For the trip. For us. Read them."

He unfolded the paper with the caution of a man expecting a bill. Then he read it, and his eyebrows went up, and he read it again. "Okay. Rule one, no talking. Rule two, no taking off your own clothes. Rule three, no finishing." He looked up. "No finishing what?"

"Anything. Whatever's happening, it doesn't happen till I say."

"Edith, these are the rules of a hostage situation."

"That's the game. We break them. One at a time."

He was laughing now, that warm rumbling laugh she'd heard a thousand times, and he leaned against the sedan and shook his head. "Who breaks rules? That's the whole point of rules, sweetheart, you don't break them."

"Then what's the point of the game?"

"I don't know, what is the point of the game?" He tucked the receipt into his shirt pocket, patting it like it might escape. "Because if this is a joke, it's a good one, and I want to enjoy it properly."

"Are you laughing at me?"

"A little."

Edith looked at him for a second, and then she took the keys out of her pocket, walked around to the driver's side, and pulled out of the lot without a word. Rodney, to his credit, recognized the silence for what it was and climbed in beside her.

A mile down the road she saw the shoulder, wide and gravelly, and she steered onto it, set the brake, and killed the engine. The truck traffic roared past, close enough to rock the car. She turned in her seat to face him.

"Read rule one," she said.

"No talking." He glanced at the paper, then at her. "This is serious? You're serious."

"Rule one, Rod."

"But we're talking right now, so technically you're already breaking your own rules, which, okay, I see, that's the game." And she reached over and put two fingers against his mouth, gently, and he shut up, which was the fastest he'd shut up in twelve years of marriage, including the time she'd threatened the thermostat.

The engine ticked as it cooled. A truck went by and the car shuddered. Edith slid across the bench seat, the old vinyl sticking to her thighs, and looked at her husband up close, at the gray coming in at his temples and the line of his jaw, a jaw she could have drawn from memory, except that up close it looked different somehow, newer, like she'd been looking at a copy all these years.

She reached down and took his hand, the one not holding the rules, and brought it to the hem of her skirt.

"Rule two," she said.

His breath went out of him. "You're serious."

"I said no talking."

"I didn't agree to any of this."

"You didn't agree not to, either. And if you want me to stop, you can say stop. Can you do that? Say stop, and I stop, anything else and rule two is in effect."

He swallowed. "Stop," he said, testing it, and she stopped, hands still, waiting, and then he said, "No. Don't stop. Don't you dare." So she took his hand and put it back where it had been, under the hem, on the warm skin of her thigh, and watched his face while his fingers learned their way upward.

It was a strange and electric thing, being undressed by a man she'd been undressed by a thousand times, except that this time she wasn't allowed to help. Her hands sat in her lap like guest hands. Rodney worked the buttons of her shirt slowly, with the concentration of a man defusing something, and when the shirt fell open he looked at her bra, the plain gray one she'd put on that morning without a thought, and said, "You're wearing the boring one."

"It's what was clean."

"I'm just saying, if I'd known the rules were coming I'd have done laundry differently." He unhooked the bra with one hand, which he'd always been able to do, one of the small talents she'd married him for, and the cool gas station air hit her skin and her nipples came up hard and visible and she did not cover herself, because rule two said she could not, and somehow that made it easier, not harder, to sit there and be seen.

"Rule three," he murmured, mouth near her collarbone now.

"Means you don't get to come," she said. "Neither of us."

"That seems cruel."

"It's supposed to be cruel. It's supposed to make you crazy."

"It's working," he said, and his hand moved between her legs, over the cotton, pressing just enough, and Edith heard herself make a noise, a low, surprised noise, the kind of noise she hadn't made in a car since before she was married, and the trucks kept thundering past on the other side of the glass, none of them the wiser, while her husband of twelve years found her through her underwear and pressed again, slower this time, watching her face like the crossword had finally gotten interesting.

"Edith," he said against her neck.

"Shh. Rule one."

"I just want to say one thing."

"Then say it fast."

He kissed the side of her throat, once, unhurried, and said, "I'm not bored," and then his fingers slipped under the cotton, and she forgot all three rules for a second and reached for him, and he caught her wrist and held it, gently, against the seat, and said, "Rule two, sweetheart," and something in her chest turned over and restarted.

* * *

They sat in the parked car for a long time after, windows fogged, engine off, the receipt with its three rules lying on the dash where he'd stuck it. Edith straightened her shirt. Rodney tucked himself away and did up his jeans and looked, she thought, about six years old and about forty at the same time.

"So," he said. "Which rule do we break next?"

Edith started the car and pulled back onto the interstate, and smiled at the road ahead.

The interstate took them on toward Elko, which was fine, because neither of them had a real destination, only a receipt and three rules and about four hundred miles of Nevada to burn. Edith drove. Rodney sat in the passenger seat with his shirt half untucked and his crossword folded shut on his knee, and for a while nobody said anything, which was legal, rule one being in effect and all, and the silence had a different flavor than it usually did. Usually their silences were tired, the kind you fell into after dinner with the television going. This one felt like holding a match.

Thirty miles went by, then forty. The sun was going down behind the mountains and the road ahead had that late summer glare on it, and Edith found she was grinning at the windshield like an idiot, and she let herself, because nobody could see her and rule one only covered talking.

It was Rodney who broke first, of course. She should have known. Twelve years, and the man still couldn't leave a quiet room alone. "So when does the talking come back," he said, "or is that a prize we win later," and Edith reached over and patted his knee, twice, the way you'd pat a dog that had done something almost clever, and kept driving.

They passed a sign for a rest stop, ten miles, and Edith took it, mostly because the slushie she'd bought back at the gas station had caught up with her. She pulled in past the truck idling at the far end of the lot and the picnic tables with their coat of gray sun-rotted paint, and cut the engine, and sat there a second with her hands in her lap.

"So here's what I think," she said. "I think rule one is broken. It's been broken since the shoulder of the interstate, and a broken rule is worth nothing, so I'm saying we amend it." Rodney turned in his seat to look at her, and up close, in the orange light coming through the windshield, he looked like a man being handed a present he hadn't asked for and wasn't sure he deserved.

"Amend it how."

"Talking is allowed now, but only in whispers. Loud talking is still against the rules." She picked up the receipt from the dash and found the pen in the door pocket, and under rule three she wrote, in the cramped handwriting of a woman writing on a dashboard, rule four, whispering only. "There. Signed into law."

"You realize we're in a rest stop parking lot," he said. "With truckers."

"I realize exactly where we are. That's the fun of it. Rule two is still in effect, by the way. Nobody takes off their own clothes." She got out of the car before he could argue, which he wasn't going to, and walked toward the building, and she could feel him behind her, hurrying a little to catch up, and it occurred to her that she had walked ahead of this man into a thousand places and had never once listened to his footsteps behind her, and that his footsteps were somehow the best thing she'd heard all week.

The rest stop bathroom was the usual situation, fluorescent hum, wet floor sign nobody obeyed, a smell of industrial lemon fighting a losing war. The handicap stall at the end was the big one, and Edith pushed Rodney into it ahead of her and pulled the door shut and turned the little slide lock, and then they were standing in about eight square feet of tile with their rule sheet stuck in his shirt pocket, and it felt, in a way she didn't want to examine too closely, like being nineteen again, if nineteen had come with a minivan mortgage and a Costco membership.

"Rule two," he whispered, and it was a whisper, technically, and she nodded, and he reached for the hem of her shirt.

Here was the thing about taking your clothes off in a bathroom stall with a man you'd been married to for twelve years, which was that they had a whole choreography by now, a routine, she'd do her bra while he did his belt, efficient, eyes half closed, over in a minute. Rule two blew all of that up. He pulled her shirt off over her head and folded it, actually folded it, over the grab bar, which was such a Rodney move that she had to press her face against his shoulder to keep from laughing out loud, because laughing was not whispering.

"You're laughing," he whispered.

"I'm not."

"Your shoulders are laughing." He turned her around by the hips and unhooked the bra, the gray one, the boring one, and slid the