Muddin’

Though they weren’t married anymore, Chelle and Bill still got together for sex from time to time. But only when they had both been drinking at the Elks, usually on nights when the special was tequila. Cheap tequila with a little lime and salt was Chelle’s favorite. After the first few shots, when Chelle said, “That’s it for me—I don’t want to crawl home,” Bill would send a shot over to her table, then another. He would bring the third one himself.

They still liked each other when they were sober, but they only remembered how much they’d been in love when they were drunk. Then, it was as if they were still in high school and a bottle of Matador and a starry sky were all they needed to believe they were meant to be together. The wedding they’d had after a positive pregnancy test, the stillbirth months later, the intervening years of loving and hating each other until the hate outweighed the love—all that disappeared when Bill bought her drinks and put his hand on her leg under the table. Then, they remembered the nights Chelle had stopped believing she killed their baby and the years they’d spent trying to make a new one. Eventually, Chelle had come to believe she was defective. That was when the love had turned into hate. It had been a relief to end the marriage when they were thirty; there was no point in trying to make something work that obviously didn’t. But every once in a while, when the sky was clear and the tequila went down smoothly, they were eighteen again, and what mattered most was getting each other’s clothes off as quickly as possible.

“Let’s go muddin’,” Chelle said one night after sex. They were at her house, formerly their house, in her bed, which had also been their marriage bed. Bill lay on his back, still breathing heavily, but that was more from years of smoking and working in the coal mines than from the sex, which had been quick and unimaginative. He sat up, lit two cigarettes, and passed one to her.

“I’m too drunk,” Bill said.

“You’re just the right amount of drunk.” Chelle swung her leg around and sat on Bill’s chest, straddling him. “It’ll be like it used to be.”

At the moment, she was almost drunk enough to believe it and that their fifteen minutes of sex had been like it was years before. Then they’d made love for hours, or at least touched and licked each other for hours, kept each other excited for whole nights.

“Your car?” Bill asked.

“Still at the Elks.”

“Okay,” he said. “But I’m driving.”

“We always were good together,” she said.

“We still are.”

Chelle didn’t bother with a bra—she threw a sweatshirt over jeans and called it enough. It was still early spring, and though the days were warm enough for a T-shirt, the nights still dipped into the forties. Tonight, the moon was new and the sky was clear, millions of stars twinkling above them. With no cloud cover, it was also cold enough to see your breath, and the weatherman had called for frost. As soon as Bill turned the key in the ignition, Chelle switched the heat to full blast.

Bill turned on the headlights and aimed them toward the trees. Chelle’s double-wide sat on an acre of land surrounded by forest. She didn’t own anything outside of that one cleared acre, but the Millers up the road let her use the woods when she wanted, except during deer season. Then, she wore orange even in her yard.

“Hold on tight,” Bill yelled as they sped into the trees.

The truck jumped forward, plunging into mud holes and climbing out the other side, mud flying into the air, onto the windshield and back onto the truck. Bill turned on the wipers, but they just spread the mess, making it even harder to see. But...