Free Love Love by Sung J. Woo

disc at a time as he watched, until he got so hot that he couldn’t wait any longer and ripped away her clothes so he could ravage her beautiful body.
    Except she wasn’t beautiful. She had love handles, which jiggled like Jell-O and felt like Play-Doh. The other day she caught a flint of silver in her pubic hair. She plucked it out with tweezers, but if there was one, there had to be others. And as she grew older, she’d become highly lactose intolerant, so if she didn’t take her Lactaid pill, the cheese in the spinach lasagna she had for dinner would produce farts so foul she could hardly stand it herself. Jesus, had she taken that pill? Her stomach rumbled, but then she remembered slipping the foil cover of the pill tablet in the pocket of her skirt, and when she patted it, she felt the tiny, reassuring bulge.
    â€œHalfway there,” Roger said.
    Already? She should’ve told him that she’d changed her mind, that she wanted to return to her home the second he got in the car, but now it was too late. Maybe it was what she wanted after all, because wasn’t this better than being alone, even if she hardly knew this man? He had a cat, that’s all she knew, but Judy had to remind herself this was how relationships worked, that every friend or lover at some point had been a stranger.
    Still, this was too fast. She wasn’t going to sleep with him.
    â€œI’m not going to sleep with you tonight,” she blurted out, and she couldn’t believe how loud her voice was.
    â€œOkay,” Roger said.
    â€œI hope you’re not disappointed,” Judy said.
    â€œI’m not,” he said, and her heart sank a little, but only momentarily. “And I am.”
    Judy had been so preoccupied with her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed what a nice car this was. It was an old BMW, but it didn’t look old. In fact, it looked as if it had come directly from a showroom, the black dashboard a polished obsidian, the chrome spokes on the steering wheel gleaming like mirrors. He must’ve had the car detailed for their date, and Judy realized that Roger must’ve had his own dreams for this evening, dreams that were no doubt shattered with his car breaking down and her bitchy attitude.
    â€œCool car,” she said.
    He told her about his BMW New Class 2002 Turbo. Only about seventeen hundred of them were made; this was one of the first ones off the assembly line, circa 1968. He bought it from a guy who specialized in restoring old Bimmers, so even though it looked authentic, almost nothing inside the car was original.
    â€œMust’ve been expensive,” she said, and she wondered how someone who worked in customer service, one of those headset-wearing lobotomites who answered the phones, could afford a car like this.
    He shrugged. “I’m still paying off the loan, but you only live once, right?”
    â€œWhy this one?” she asked.
    â€œIt was what my dad drove. I have good memories of it.”
    â€œYou like your dad,” she said.
    Roger nodded, chuckling. “Most people do, don’t they?”
    They crested a hilly part of Route 287, white and yellow lines of the highway disappearing over the black horizon.
    â€œMaybe not everyone,” he said.
    â€œMaybe not,” she said.
    Growing up, she hardly saw her father’s face, which was mostly hidden behind the newspaper. When he spoke, it was to tell her she’d done something wrong, and she’d given him plenty of opportunities: getting arrested for shoplifting, repeating tenth grade, breaking her ankle on prom night when she fell down a flight of stairs. Was it all to get his attention? Her various shrinks throughout the years thought so. He was a prototypical Asian father, content to keep his distance from his children. Why this didn’t disturb her brother, she never knew. Maybe Kevin was a more accepting person than she was, a stronger, better person. Or maybe he was