He laces his fingers in hers. He leans close to her, bends his head, and nibbles her neck playfully. “Yum,” he murmurs. “Delicious.”
Aida stiffens. As much as she wants to kiss him, she doesn’t know really what it all involves. The bus is dark and safe, but what if he wants to make out? What exactly does that entail? This, she supposes as his lips move from her neck, slowly, kissing her chin and then finding her mouth. This time, when he kisses her, it is soft and slow. I am a person kissing a boy on a bus, Aida thinks with awe.
Bill’s tongue slips inside her mouth and she tries to remember what she should do. Her friend Linda Martino made out with a boy at the Portuguese carnival last summer. She told Aida how their tongues poked at each other like two snakes. Relieved for this tidbit of guidance, Aida lets her own tongue meet his.
But he doesn’t kiss her again, and Aida wonders if perhaps she is a bad kisser. Maybe she should have held her tongue flat in her mouth. Maybe Linda Martino lied to her. Linda had also said that the boy felt her up over her shirt. That part, Linda said, was stupid. He just rubbed at her purple poorboy shirt and it was incredibly boring.
Bill puts his hand on Aida’s knee. She feels it there, heavy and warm, convinced that he had called Beth from Denver and told her good-bye once and for all.
FOR THE NEXT TWO NIGHTS, Aida sat waiting for more kissing, her body both rigid and melting, afraid and ready. But Bill did not kiss her again, and on the night before the morning they are going to arrive in San Francisco, she is certain she is the worst kisser in the world. Hadn’t Linda Martino said their tongues had poked like two snakes? And Aida had arched her tongue and met his, imitating the way she’d seen snakes on Wild Kingdom.
They are somewhere in California, driving down a deserted highway, when the bus driver slows.
“Uh,” he says into the microphone, “we got a problem.”
There is a clunk and a grinding, and the bus swerves into the breakdown lane.
“Uh-oh,” Bill says, “I hope we don’t have to eat each other to survive.”
Aida rolls her eyes. She thinks she might hate him.
The bus driver is on some kind of radio, describing the noises the bus made, his voice urgent. Then he says, “We ain’t going nowhere.”
Speaking into the microphone again, he says, “Uh, people, we’re stuck here for a while. You can get off the bus if you want. These here are lettuce fields. Just watch out for trucks and things coming down the highway.”
Passengers moan and complain. Some get off the bus right away, but they stand close to it, staring out over the lettuce fields. A man starts yelling at the bus driver, telling him he needs to be in San Francisco, he needs to!
“Do you want to stay on the bus?’ Bill asks Aida.
She wants him to kiss her again, that’s all she wants, so she says nothing.
“Let’s walk a little bit,” he says.
They leave the bus. It is so dark that Aida feels disoriented, off-balance. Bill takes her hand, whispers, “Careful.”
The dirt in the lettuce field is dry and cracks under their weight. Her eyes start to adjust and she can make out neat rows of lettuce on either side of the path they walk down. They don’t wander too far from the bus, which sits in the distance looking lopsided and broken.
“Feels good to be away from buses,” Bill says.
Aida believes that she could ride these buses without ever stopping, Bill sitting beside her, America whizzing past.
“Rice paddies,” Bill says. “Rice paddies are beautiful. Like works of art.”
He is quiet a moment. Aida wonders if Beth wouldn’t listen to him when he strayed like this, his voice dreamy and distant. Maybe Beth was afraid of what he had seen. But Aida isn’t.
“I don’t know anything about it,” she whispers. “Tell me.”
Bill tucks her hair behind her ears again and says her name the way you say it in the opera. Then he finally kisses her again, not slow this time but right away opening his mouth, his tongue finding hers. He is kissing her with an urgency that almost frightens her. His breathing is sharp, his hands clutch her back, pulling her close enough to him that she feels the buttons on his shirt digging into her and the hardness in his khakis against her.
Bill tugs her down to the dirt with him. It doesn’t smell like Mama Jo’s garden back home, but more like dust.
They kiss for a long time. This, Aida realizes, is making out. She believes there must be an order to things, and that Bill will start to rub her shirt the way the boy at the Portuguese carnival did to Linda Martino. She tries to decide at which point she should say no. Linda Martino said that you should never kiss a boy lying down; it leads to things, the way smoking pot can make you a heroin addict. But here she was, lying in a lettuce field kissing a boy. Did that mean they had skipped over the rubbing part?
Bill pauses. He looks right at her, like he is trying to figure something out.