Iowa at 2 A.M.

The train has been moving through nothing for two hours. I know this because I have been awake for all of it — lying on the narrow bunk, watching the Iowa dark slide past the gap in the curtain, counting the town lights that appear and dissolve before I can name them. The car sways. The rails click underneath in a rhythm that is almost regular, almost something I could sleep to, except that I cannot sleep.

The slip has ridden up. I am aware of this the way I am aware of the cold that presses through the berth wall — as a fact about my body that I have been cataloguing without deciding to. The jersey fabric, thin enough to be nearly nothing, sits across the top of my thighs. Below it: the specific coolness of the berth air against skin I was not planning to think about.

Then the sound comes through the partition.

Not loud. That is almost the point. A murmur, low enough that I have to hold still to separate it from the rail-click — and I hold still, my shoulders pressed into the thin mattress, and I listen. A voice, then a different quality of quiet, then a sound that is not quite a voice anymore. The couple in the next compartment. I have not seen them. I don't need to. I am already composing them from sound alone: the weight of a body shifting, the particular held breath before something is given or taken.

My left hand finds the edge of the mattress. My right hand is where I placed it before I started listening — flat against my sternum, feeling my own pulse. I am aware, suddenly, of the warmth under the slip. My own warmth, trapped by the fabric, waiting.

The silicone is cool in my hand. I retrieved it from my bag before I lay down, telling myself it was only in case. It has been beside me for two hours, pressed between my hip and the berth wall, and it has not warmed to my temperature. When I close my right hand around it, the contrast is sharp — cold length against the inside of my wrist, where the skin is thinnest.

Through the partition: another sound. Softer than the first. The kind of sound someone makes when they have stopped trying to be quiet and not yet realized it.

My stomach contracts before I have decided anything.

I shift on the mattress. The slip moves with me — hem rising another inch, the fabric no longer covering the place where my thighs press together. A town light sweeps the ceiling and goes, and for one second I can see my own hands in the dark: one holding the silicone, one moving to cover my mouth before I have made any sound that would require covering.

The train sways through Iowa. The partition is very thin.

I part my knees, just slightly — enough to feel the cool air move between them — and I wait for the next sound to tell me what to do.