It wasn’t lovemaking, the time that Hank and Angela spent naked together. Love had little, if anything, to do with the force of Hank’s thrusts, the covetous way he handled her breasts, left them slippery with spit. Love held scant significance to the earnest rollercoaster she carried between her thighs, the way she always swallowed when his orgasm poured him into her mouth. As for things of their collaborative making, the word “love” was about as far removed from their feverish pressings as a word could be.

Tonight, as their twice-weekly ritual had established, they were hooking up at his camper, in his bed. They were screwing as they’d been doing for the past seven months; him filling her with his hate, her engraving disloyalty and ownership across his tumescence. Him throwing himself after her, into her like a suicidal cliffdiver, pushing his malice deep into her chest, a scabrous seed secreted beneath the freshly-turned earth of her nakedness. Her responding with teeth, a sentient cyclone of hair and sweaty epithets spinning away his cares and responsibilities. Her fingernails autographed his sticky back as their pelvises ground his marriage into dust.

His loving and dutiful wife, her responsible big sister, would soon return home from that place out by the airport where she’d been spending two nights a week for too damned long. She would return to their fucked-up little desert camper at the edge of the interstate offramp, smelling of perspiration and dirty cash and other men’s lust. She would kiss him hello and tell him how much money she’d made tonight as if all was right and well with world and marriage, but her eyes would not join in the denial that her tone wove into the air between them. Then she and her baby sis would begin World War III over which of them had eaten the last English muffin out of the pantry or left a dirty saucer in the kitchenette’s sink, or smoked more cigarettes out of the packs of one-twenties they shared…