She never touched his prick. It was too sacred, too potent. They pretended it wasn’t there, even when their bodies straightened at the angle permitted by the front seat and its heater-crowded foot space and he held her buttocks through her rumpled skirt and pressed himself rhythmically against her, all the time their mouths kissing, until he came, came in his underpants, where the dried jism made a brittle stain he later picked off with his fingernail, hoping his mother wouldn’t notice it when she did the wash. In the house they had now she did the wash in a dim cobwebby space under the cellar stairs, on a newer machine than the tub-shaped one that had seized his hand in the Willow basement; this machine had a lid that closed, and a spin-dry phase in its cycle instead of a wringer.

His sense of sexual etiquette was primitive, gleaned from the way men and women acted in the movies up to their huge close-up kiss at the end, and from enigmatic dialogue in a few books, like For Whom the Bell Tolls and Forever Amber and A Rage to Live and The Amboy Dukes, that he had looked into, and from a pornographic poem that Marty Naftzinger’s younger brother, Jerry, a runty curly-haired kid in Owen’s class, could recite, if you paid him a dime. But it was developed enough to ask, after one such climax against her compliant body, “What can we do for you?”

This embarrassed her. Elsie liked to pretend that what had just happened hadn’t happened at all. “How do you mean?”

This made him shy in turn. “I mean—just holding still for me isn’t enough, is it?”

She said, “We can’t do more, Owen. There might be consequences you don’t want.” She never touched his prick and never said “I love you,” knowing it would put him to the discomfort of saying the same thing back, when he wasn’t ready. Otherwise she could have explained, I love you, I like exciting you, it excites me, isn’t that enough for now?