Free Pike's Folly by Mike Heppner

the backseat. The parking lot was lit up with yellow sodium lights. “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s just drive for awhile.”
    â€œWhat are we looking for?” she asked. Her hand had moved up her skirt as she touched herself through the fabric of her pantyhose. She did this out of a compulsion, hardly aware of it herself.
    â€œI don’t know,” he repeated, then started the car and pulled out of the lot. The roads were perfectly dark; the car’s high beams shone cones of hazy white light across the two-lane street. Dense walls of trees flickered by, dissolving away to expose a fenced-in field, a mill, an old pharmacy, a block of antique shops—all of them closed down for the night—and then just more trees and darkness, here and there a gravel trail that led straight into the forest.
    Marlene steeled herself and, in a thoughtless burst of energy, tore off her clothes. Like Stuart’s, her sense of time had accelerated; all of this was happening much too fast for her to experience it in the present tense. As if from a distance, she observed her naked body in the seat of the car, her bare feet raised and pressed against the windshield, hands moving across her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said.
    The road continued straight for another quarter mile or so. When another car appeared, she spread her feet apart and thrust out her chest, staring determinedly into the headlights that illuminated her body. She couldn’t see the driver’s face, but she was fairly certain that he or she, whoever it was, could see her. She
had
to believe it.
Look at me,
she thought, then said it out loud, her right hand rubbing between her legs. Once the car had passed, she tried to remember what it’d felt like. The only way she could explain it to herself, and this revelation came much later, was that she’d given the other person something so central to herself—the sight of her naked body—that the stranger now maintained a sexual control over her, control that was total and could never be revoked.
    By the time they’d reached the next little village, her need to put herself in an even more dangerous situation had increased to the point where she felt like a passenger inside her own body. She had no choice over what her body decided to do, so she had no accountability for any of its decisions. Swept along, she unrolled the window and tossed her skirt and blouse outside. Wind filled the car, wrapping around her torso like a pair of cold hands.
    The woods became more sparse as they drew closer to Great Barrington, where a Mobil station stood at the junction with Highway 7, a police car parked out front with its engine running.
    Marlene crouched under the level of the dashboard as Stuart drove past. Her own thoughts confused her. As expected, she felt excited, aroused, a little dizzy—but also trapped, unable to control herself, filled with regret. Climbing back up to her seat, she rolled herself in a ball and thought,
Please stop doing this, please.
I don’t want to do this anymore.
    â€œTake a left here.” She pointed at a sign marked To Mass Pike. Stuart veered the car onto an empty street and continued for another few miles before she told him to pull over. He hesitated; the breakdown lane was narrow and hard to see in the dark. As he eased to a stop, his tires kicked up a cloud of dust that hung suspended like fog in the headlights. He turned off the car, and they both sat quietly for a moment, almost too stunned to speak.
    â€œHow do you feel?” he asked.
    With her arms wedged between her legs, she’d managed to cover both her breasts and her pubic hair, but this only made her look even more naked. “Scared,” she admitted.
    Stuart checked the rearview mirror. It reflected nothing, only black. “Do you want to go home?”
    â€œOh, no,” she insisted but said