"I thought I was going to die, but now I feel strong again."

She kisses him. Then it all disappears, time disappears, and thought, and worry, and only sensation is left, and it sort of feels great and sort of hurts, but mostly what she does is look at his face, which is concentrated and beautiful, the sad eyes, the scar on his lip, the tendons in his neck, the black hair flopping like a curtain in the wind, a bead of sweat along his cheekbone. He's pulling back, and then digging deeper and really going for it, he's lifted her legs with his hands and is just going for it.

And then at some point the balance goes the other way, and things aren't so good. Despite the natural lubrication, there's an irritated feeling, too. Some excess friction. "Slower," she croaks out.

"Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry." He leans in and kisses her.

"You don't have to apologize," she says.

He says, "Let me pull out," and he does. Then he says, "Oh, no."

"What?"

She sees his p.e.n.i.s pointing up to his navel, pulsating, oozing clear gooey liquid. But there's no latex on it.

She's confused. "I thought you put it on-"

"I did. You saw it."

He's patting the bed around her. She lowers her legs, scoots backward.

He says, "Is it in you?"

"What?" She reaches down, it almost hurts to touch herself, she's so inflamed, but her fingers slip in past the hair and lips. Then she feels the curled edge. She pulls it out, a dun colored wrinkled slimy thing. She winces.

"Oh, f.u.c.k," he says. "I think that can happen if, I don't know, I heard it can happen, if it doesn't fit right." He's stammering through accelerated breath. "Do you want, I don't know, a towel or anything?"

She looks at her fingers. She never took off the ring he gave her. She says, "Let me go wipe up the blood."

"Is there?" he says, examining under the head. The clear goo dribbles down the length of the shaft. Could she get pregnant from that?

In the bathroom she runs the water, wipes herself with a warm cloth. There's no blood. She hates that she's lying. She doesn't know what else to do.

She sits on the toilet, she thinks she should pee, that if there were any sperm that got in she could pee them out. This is absurd, she knows, but she imagines it's true anyway. The urine tingles as it pa.s.ses through.

When she gets back to the bed he's lying on his side. "What are we supposed to do?" she asks.

"You're upset," he says.

"Aren't you? The condom-"

"I doubt it would, I mean, I didn't actually shoot-"

"No, I'm sure it's OK." She sits down, but apart from him. He's still hard. Should she use her hand on him? No, not with Chris.

"Come here," he says, patting the bed.

She spoons into him, letting him enfold her. She's aware of the tangle of limbs, of hard parts and soft, the strangeness of trying to find the right position, the awkwardness of their breaths moving at different paces. He licks her shoulder, nibbles her ear. She feels his tongue near the scratch on her neck.

He says, "I don't want you to feel bad. This has been magical."

"Until I find out I'm pregnant."

"Shh, shhh, no. We didn't get that far."

"I'm due next week, so we'll know soon enough."

He rubs her hair, which calms her down. "Nothing bad will happen," he says. "There's something holy between us."

She takes a deep breath. He's right. It was beautiful and holy and the condom probably only came off at the end, so there's no chance-not much of a chance anyway. Nothing she can do about it now. Just be here with Chris. She thinks that she won't sleep, and then she's drifting away. Sinking.

She's awakened from a dream that disappears the moment her eyes take in the motel furniture, the drapes, their clothes scattered across the carpet. Two condom wrappers on the floor near the bed. She recognizes the whoosh of waves crashing beyond the walls before she registers a louder, closer sound: the ringing of the phone on the bedside table. It hurts her ears. She must be a little hungover. Her mouth is dry, too.

Chris lies nearer to the phone, but he remains inert, his face so calm and youthful that she can picture him at age fifteen, the boy she kissed in the woods behind the seminary, the smell of wet leaves all around them.

She reaches across him to the phone. "h.e.l.lo?"

It's the guy at the front desk, telling her in a gruff voice that checkout was thirty minutes ago. She looks at the clock. 12:30. They've slept all morning! Bright light seeps through the crack between the curtains.

Unsure what to do, she asks, "Can we have this for one more night?"

"You plan on staying one more night?"

"If the room is available." She's amazed at her own composure. Could they really stay longer? What day is it, anyway?

He grumbles to himself, as if reacting to an impossible request, but then he says, "Well, I think if I move some folks around." His voice is unconvincing. He's lying to her. He just doesn't want them there. "This is the kind of thing you're supposed to request before before checkout time," he mutters. checkout time," he mutters.

Chris is stirring beneath her. She covers the mouthpiece and says to him, "We slept late." He smiles at her, his eyes full of wonder, as if she's just told him something miraculous. Or maybe he's remembering last night, as she is-the tumult of their bodies together.

The manager comes back on the phone. "OK. One more night."

"Use the same card," Ruby says.

Chris raises his voice, "And tell the maid we don't need the room cleaned."

Ruby repeats, "We don't need-"

"I heard heard," the guy says and hangs up.

"I guess that's that," she says to Chris. They both grin and fall naturally back into their spooning positions. Fresh stubble on his jaw brushes her neck, which sends a shiver along her skin. She reaches behind and grabs him. For a few moments, everything is bright and cheerful. Another day together. The room paid for. This improvised honeymoon can continue. Maybe life itself will continue like this, days and nights blurring into each other indefinitely, Chris at her side, nothing but deep, contented sleep to separate one leg of time from the next.

Chris's breaths fall into a steady rhythm. Sleeping again. She's not sure she can. Her mind has become active. It was just a day ago, a little over twenty-four hours, that a different phone woke her up, a different voice on the other end: Calvin's. He was leaving his apartment, was going to get his car from the garage and then would pick her up. Make sure you're ready, so I don't have to find parking. Make sure you're ready, so I don't have to find parking.

Now, just like that, the dream she awoke from comes back to her. Calvin was in it, knocking on the door, saying, "Ruby, I know you're in there." She didn't answer, but he persisted. His voice boomed through the door: "Just come out so we can talk about the baby." The baby!

Involuntarily, she twitches, and Chris mumbles. "I slept again."

"I'm awake," she says.

"So, what're we gonna do to get our thirty-five dollars' worth?"

In an earlier part of the dream Calvin was saying, "I have to drive you back up the Garden State Parkway. It's Sunday. We have to go to church." Alice was part of it, too. Ruby was pleading with her, "Alice, you're a woman, you understand. I have to find Chris. I have to get to Chris." The hotel room became her bedroom in Greenlawn. On the nightstand was the lamp shaped like a ballerina with its hollow bottom.

She gasps, remembering suddenly. "It's Sunday! It's my brother's birthday."

"Do you want to call him?"

"Not Robin Robin." She pulls herself upright, struggling to reorient herself. What is she doing here? She's out of her mind. She's supposed to be driving back to Manhattan with Calvin. There was this idea about stopping at the cemetery-it was her idea in the first place. They were going to end up at Dorothy's in time for supper. It's Father's Day, too. She can't remember, did she tell Clark she'd stop by on her way home?

"I have to go back to Alice's."

"Seriously?" Chris says, "I don't understand."

"Calvin has my bag, with all my clothes and toiletries-"

"He'll bring it back to New York, and you can just meet up with him later."

"No. I mean, yes, I could, but-"

"We just paid for another night here."

She drops her head in her hands. "I think I really messed up..."

"Are you mad at me?" he asks, an urgency in his voice that bothers her. This isn't about him, why is he trying to take this on?

"I just have to deal with this."

She gets up and scavenges the room for her purse, finally locating it in the bathroom. Inside is a sc.r.a.p of paper that has Alice's number. When she returns and picks up the phone, Chris rolls away from her.

On the other end of the line, endless ringing. No answer.

She hangs up. Have they all left the party? Did the rental end today?

She dials again and waits through more ringing. At last, someone picks up. A female voice, loud and slurred, says, "h.e.l.lo?"

"Is this Alice?"

"Hi, Alice. Wanna come to a party?"

"No, this is Ruby. Is Alice there?"

The voice calls out, "Which one of you stuck-up b.i.t.c.hes is Alice?" and then the phone drops, and the m.u.f.fled sounds of the party filter through the line-voices, laughter, another bad pop song she recognizes but can't name. It seems impossible that the house is still full of people. She waits, frustrated, her fingers tight around the receiver, as Chris rises and walks naked across the room. He closes himself in the bathroom. Maybe he's right. Maybe it's a bad idea to go back there.

Eventually she hears a click, and then the automated voice saying, "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again." She puts down the receiver, redials, and gets a busy signal.

Chris emerges from the bathroom, water droplets running off his face and neck onto his bare torso. His lean body glows from behind, like a saint in a religious painting. As he approaches her, his eyes seem to plead: Not yet. Let's not break from this yet. She doesn't want to, but what about all those plans? Then he squats down next to her and looks her in the eyes. "I don't care what we do. I just want to be with you."

"I was going to visit my brother's grave today," she says.

"Where?"

"Near where my Dad lives. Paramus."

"Do you want me to take you?"

She thinks about it. She nods. Yes.

Their hands reach out to each other and meet with a tick of static electricity, which seems to seal the agreement. She feels panic slip away. Chris will take her to the cemetery. She'll get herself home eventually.

So they've bought themselves some more time. They embrace, and he nudges her back toward the bed, pulls her down into the sheets. For another hour, she forgets about everything outside this room. They try different positions this time. Even through her hangover, it feels clearer in the light of day, more intense. He pants her name as he comes. This time, the condom stays on.

They cruise in Chris's car down Ocean Avenue, along the promenade. The streets are Sunday-crowded with jaywalking pedestrians, slowing progress to a crawl. Chris swerves into the first open parking spot they see, which is closer to the boardwalk than to Alice's house. "You wanna?" he asks, c.o.c.king his head toward the ocean.

"No, we should, I mean, I I should-" should-"

"Ten minutes," he says, taking her hand. "One last blast."

She nods, not at all sure why she's agreeing, and then just like that, they're flowing toward the music, the rides, the smoke of an Italian sausage stand, the din of the ocean. He's right, what's ten more minutes? She clings to his hand, as if to let go would set her adrift in this sea of bodies, never to find him again. She imagines that any pa.s.serby who notices them would definitely think they were made for each other, with their matching hair and matching jeans and what must be twin expressions on their faces-a little bit satisfied and a little bit selfish, understanding themselves to be apart from the rest of the world. It must be obvious to anyone who looks closely that they've just pulled themselves from bed. That they are lovers.

Chris says, "It's the first day of your post-virgin life."

She nods vaguely. "Now we never have to talk about it again."

The squeeze he gives her hand is a great relief.

Chris pulls out his wallet to pay for their boardwalk tickets-in a pa.s.sing glance Ruby notices that twenties are bursting from the billfold. He said last night that he had a lot of cash, but this is really a lot. Should she have asked for some for the motel? He should have offered to split the charge. A dark thought-this money was related to wanting to kill himself. Maybe he was going to give away all his money on the last day of his life. Or something.

She puts it out of her mind as he takes her hand and leads her onto the Funtown Pier, toward the Ferris wheel, and they dodge little kids and harried parents and groups of teenagers making noise and blocking the way. They are cut off by a rushing group of girls chanting among themselves, "Walk fast, beat ten people, walk fast, beat ten people," and then whooping as they secure a place near the front of the line. They remind Ruby of a certain kind of cla.s.smate at Barnard-athletic, nerdy, peppy to the point of annoying. Young for their age. There's one boy among this group, in white OP shorts and a T-shirt that reads IT'S FUN TO WORK AT CHICK FIL'A IT'S FUN TO WORK AT CHICK FIL'A. His blond hair is feathered, his face lightly freckled. His voice, as he gossips breathlessly with the girls, is pitched high. He reminds her of Robin-of Robin a few years ago, in high school, when he was a little softer, a little-for lack of a better word-gayer.

Robin! She called him, last night, from a pay phone-she'd almost forgotten about that. Left some kind of half-drunken message. She should try him again, in case she said anything odd-though it's not likely he would worry about her, even if she did sound plastered. He's so wrapped up in his own life, he probably didn't give the message a second thought.

The line for the Ferris wheel moves fast. They slide into a two-person seat, behind a safety bar, which she lowers carefully, remembering Wendy's broken nail. Then they begin the lurch upward. The wheel stops and starts along the rotation as the seats fill up, until finally they're in motion, gathering enough speed to make her feel a little queasy. She put her body through so much yesterday. Chris is smiling, a brighter smile than she's ever seen take hold of his face. He's enjoying the rush of being raised up so high. He even lifts himself from the bench, as if he would take the whole ride standing, and she yanks him back with a playful slap, giggling as if she finds this funny. In fact, for a moment her imagination had turned sinister-she saw Chris jumping out, arcing through the air over the amus.e.m.e.nt park, clearing the planks of the boardwalk, plummeting toward the churning water down below. It's Jackson all over again-a fall that happened right before her eyes. So many years ago, but the fresh pain in her gut reminds her how quickly she can be taken back to those days. The worst time ever.

"OK, now we definitely have to get going," she tells Chris, as she finds her footing on the pier and feels some sense of balance returning.

"OK," he says. "If we walk fast, we'll beat ten people."

"You're a geek." As she smiles, she catches sight of a st.u.r.dy, dark-haired girl in a black skirt up ahead. As she turns her head, the flat features of her face, the catlike eyes, reveal themselves. "Hold on," she says to Chris. "It's Joanne."

She's strolling with a guy, her arm hooked through his in a strangely old-fashioned way. Ruby calls her name. Joanne turns and lets out a shriek of recognition. She pulls away from her man. The two of them, Ruby and Joanne, rush toward each other and fall into a hug like sisters at a family reunion.