I twist in my seat to look at Brian, but he’s staring straight ahead, hands still gripping the steering wheel even though the jeep has already coasted to an exceedingly gradual stop. The type of stop a jeep might make if it actually were, for example, out of gas. But this makes no sense. Brian is neurotic about his jeep. It’s his baby. There is no way he’d set out on a trip, no matter how brief in duration it was expected to be, without ensuring that the gas tank was filled.

So I keep waiting for the punch line. Like maybe he’s going to cough elaborately so that he can slide an arm around my shoulders, like a scene in one of those cheezy old drive-in movies that he makes me watch. Sometimes the films I have to endure in exchange for a little Moulin Rouge action are just pure torture.

But it‘s not Saturday Night at the Movies. It’s the middle of a ridiculously hot Sunday afternoon, and we’re already twenty minutes late for Deb’s pasta primavera special, and not even Brian would risk being fashionably late for one of Debbie’s “family nights” if he had any way to prevent it. Yet here we are, sitting motionless on a two-lane roadway. Empty fields stretch to either side of the blacktop, broken only by a few remote stands of sickly looking tufts of greenery that may once have been trees.

If this is a joke, it better be a good one. Sometimes Brian does have a twisted sense of humour. So I try again.

“What exactly do you mean?”

“It’s a simple concept, Justin. One would assume that someone with your SAT scores could figure it out.”

Well, fuck me.

“But you were supposed to get gas before we left!”

“Yeah, and this ‘country store’ that sells ‘the best fucking apple-rhubarb pies you ever tasted’ was supposed to be off Dickenson Road!”

I can’t help sneaking a look into the back seat where the two pies sit, looking as innocent as pies can look. Which is pretty innocent. They really are the best apple-rhubarb pies. Mom used to pick them up for me and Molly occasionally as a treat, but only occasionally because they’re hideously expensive and really, by the time you factor in gas and time, it probably worked out to something like twenty bucks per pie. It’s been fucking ages since I had a slice of that pie. So last night, I managed to convince Brian that we had to bring some apple-rhubarb pie to Deb’s for dessert. I’m very persuasive when I’m naked. I guess I’m lucky that Brian does a lot of his thinking with his dick.

“Just a couple of miles off Dickenson, you said.” Brian is still ranting. “Was the store off Dickenson, Justin?”

“It was close,” I mutter.

“Close? Fucking close? It was miles away. Light years away. Close, my ass.”

“Well… fuck off!”

I jump out of the jeep, slamming the car door behind me. Once out of the air conditioning, the heat hits me in the face like a wet woolen blanket. Fucking humidity. Heat phantoms shimmer and dance in the air above the asphalt, and I can already feel a thin trickle of sweat dribbling its way between my shoulder blades.

How the hell is it suddenly my fault that we ran out of gas? It wasn’t me that forgot to fill up the tank, now was it? And shit… Dickenson. Dundonald. They’re similar, right? Anybody could have made the same mistake.

“Excellent comeback.” Brian’s door thuds shut, then he’s stalking toward me. “Stunning delivery.”

He can be such an asshole. If I wasn’t in love with him, he’d probably drive me insane.

“We wouldn’t have run out of gas if you hadn’t gotten lost on the way back,” I tell him. Okay, I shout. But I’m logical. That’s got to be a big plus in my favour.

“And we wouldn’t have gotten lost if the store was off Dickenson, like you said,” Brian says evenly.

“It doesn’t matter where it was! You got us there. How fucking difficult could it be to get back? You just do exactly what you did going there, but in reverse!”

“Except that we drove in circles for forty-five minutes getting there because your directions were for shit,” Brian snips back. “Now if you had a map…”

Yeah, he’d definitely drive me insane.

“A map! Do I look like I‘m carrying a map?” I slap at my body, clad in a tight blue t-shirt and faded jeans. Brian and I were hoping to hit Babylon once it was safe to escape from Deb’s. And I admit, I chose this particular t-shirt because it totally brings out the colour in my eyes. This shirt gets Brian hot. He gets this look on his face when he thinks I’m not watching him, and he licks his lips, and his whole vibe becomes territorial. And that gets me hot. And when we’re dancing, he can’t keep his hands to himself. Not that I’m complaining. Except with the way he’s acting right now, I’d rather spend the evening dancing with Ted.

I run a finger under the collar of the drive-Brian-crazy shirt -- the shirt that will soon be too sweat-soaked to be good for anything other than a jeep chamois. It feels like the temperature has risen ten degrees just in the time we’ve been standing here talking. Yelling. Whatever.

“God, it must be a thousand fucking degrees out here. Trust you to get us lost on the hottest fucking day of the year!” I ignore Brian’s incredulous look and snap, “Do you have any water?”

Brian leans against the jeep, crossing his arms at his chest. “Justin, I’m prepared for every emergency. There’s condoms and lube in the glove box.” He pauses a moment, head cocked, before adding, “And handcuffs.”

“So… no water.”

“What do you think?”

Okay, it has seriously got to be one-twenty in the shade, if there was any goddamn shade, and we hadn’t passed a car in a good fifteen minutes of traveling, and we have no water and no one knows where the fuck we are and… shit, this is just not good. I tell myself not to panic. Justin, my inner voice says, sounding eerily calm and somewhat like my first-grade school teacher, do not panic. I tell my inner voice to fuck off. I always hated my first-grade teacher.

“Fuck! That’s it. We’re going to die out here.” I start pacing back and forth, back and forth, my arms swinging wildly, my sneakers slapping on the pavement. “They’ll find our emaciated bodies in a few weeks, nothing but taut skin stretched over our bones, all the moisture leeched from our bodies!”

Brian snorts.

“No! We’ll be all withered and brown, like… like… like peaches when they go bad. And deep sunken lines will be etched into our skin, and our hands will be twisted into claws…”

Brian grabs me on one of my back-and-forths, his fingers light on my wrist. “That’s it. No more horror movies for you, young man.”

Damn straight. Christian and Satine never get attacked by cadaverous mind sucking zombies. I vow to limit myself to a steady diet of movie musicals and whatever shit Brian forces me to watch. Then I remember that I’m going to die in a few short days so it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Brian takes a step closer, his fingers running lightly up and down my arm. “Anyway, I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” he says. “By the time the search party finds us, the vultures will already have had their way with us. Nothing left but a pile of bones, bleached by the sun.”

I squint up at him, catch the twinkling eyes and fuck, he’s biting his cheek so hard he’s going to be bleeding soon. I push back against his chest, laughing in spite of myself. “Get lost!”

Brian smirks. “Already am.”

Shaking my head, I pull myself onto the hood of the jeep and stand up, searching the landscape. There’s a lot of… nothing. Not a house or a sign, just an endless row of telephone poles and lots of grass. I drop down with a sigh, sitting and crossing my legs. Now that Brian and I are finished having our drama queen moments -- okay, mostly me -- I suddenly realize just how quiet it is, too. There’s noises that everybody associates with the city -- the rumble of passing traffic, car horns, music drifting from a café -- and of course there’s none of that out here. But the usual background hum of life is missing too. No drone from air conditioners doing their best to blast back the sweltering heat. No wind rustling the leaves of the trees. No insect buzz. The only sound is the muted tick-tick-tick from the jeep’s cooling motor, and the scratch of Brian’s match against the matchbox as he lights his cigarette.

This is an unearthly silence. The silence of the tomb.

“B-Brian?”

Hazel eyes flick in my direction.

“There aren’t really vultures in Pennsylvania, are there?”

He closes the distance between us, wrapping one arm around my waist and resting the other at the back of my neck. “You are such a cheesehead.”

Oh-kaaay. “But I’m your cheesehead.”

Brian’s kiss gives me all the confirmation I need.

Twenty minutes later, my drive-Brian-crazy T-shirt has done its job admirably, and we lay amongst the tall grass, and the silence has been replaced by the whisper of his stubble on my skin and the guttural moans that I can’t suppress, and we share apple-rhubarb kisses under the blazing sun.

Cheesehead. Guilty as charged.