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forward against her seatbelt that made every muscle in his body tense up at her violation of the bubble that was supposed to separate her part of the car from his own.
    He couldn’t believe she was really so carefree—not when she’d been attached to a palm tree just this morning. She was doing this to torture him, and it was working. It hurt in his joints, in his bones, to endure her. As though she’d aged him, and now he was a four-hundred-year-old creature, dry and dusty. He was an ancient pharaoh mummy, all his organs stored in jars, and she was … fuck, some kind of Girl Scout who wandered into his tomb in search of a merit badge. Naively, gleefully desecrating his thousand-year sleep.
    If he were a pharaoh, he would curse her. Not with death—just something to stop her from being so disorderly and annoying and vital all the time. Whenever her stomach rumbled, he wanted to reach over and give her shoulder a push and say, “Stop it.”
    Stop it, stop it, stop it.
    But she couldn’t, of course. It wasn’t her fault that she was hungry. It was his fault for starving her. His fault he was so hungry, so disrupted around her.
    The thought struck him—mallet against gong—and reverberated inside his head.
    She made him hungry.
    Unacceptable.
    But he couldn’t get rid of her, and he couldn’t shut her off. He had to find a way to control her.
    “Don’t you want something to eat?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Just say the word, and I’ll stop. Anytime.”
    She got another piece of gum out of her purse. It smelled—synthetic cherries and oranges—and the noise of it. The noise made him think of spit and teeth and tongues and lips. Kissing. Sex.
    It did not make him think of sex. He wouldn’t allow it to.
    A new song came on, and she reached for the radio dial. He tapped her hand away. “Leave it.”
    “I hate this song.”
    “I hate driving without knowing where I’m going.”
    “Get used to it.”
    “Back at you.”
    She crossed her arms, and they both endured a particularly unbearable version of “The Loco-Motion,” followed by a country ballad that made her fidgety.
    “Do you need a restroom?”
    “Stop asking me if I have to pee,” she snapped.
    “Stop squirming like a three-year-old, and I will.”
    “I’m squirming because this song is so awful.”
    “You were the one who wanted to listen to the radio. You had your turn to choose the music. Now it’s mine.”
    “For how long?”
    “Until we get wherever it is we’re going.”
    She snorted.
    “What?” he asked.
    “If this is a trick to get information from me, you should know that it’s not going to work.”
    “If you’re irritating me on purpose because you hope I’ll lose my temper and blurt out something you can use against me, you should know that’s not going to work, either.”
    “You think I’m being irritating?”
    “I think you might be the single most irritating person I’ve ever met.”
    She crossed her arms and looked down. When she glanced back at him, she was smiling again, proud and defiant, and he could almost convince himself he hadn’t seen it.
    That instant gleam of moisture in her eyes, the widening of her nostrils.
    He’d hurt her feelings.
    She was so easy to hurt. Such a strange combination of tough and vulnerable. He didn’t know how to act around her. She made him feel like a giant, squeezing the goose to death in the hope it would lay a golden egg.
    “Just quit messing with the stereo,” he said, trying to be reasonable. “Enjoy … whatever this is.”
    “I think it’s Garth Brooks. I’m pretty sure I made out with a guy in a closet to this song once.”
    “Why were you in a closet?”
    Damn it, why did he keep asking questions in response to her inane conversation? She drew them from him against his will. He didn’t care why she’d made out with a guy in a closet. He didn’t want to hear about it.
    “It was a party game.”
    “Sounds like fun.” The statement didn’t come out as