I think she’s asleep, but then she rolls over, bones cracking as she realigns herself, dips her mouth close to my ear, and taps my sternum twice. “I bet you I could kill you out here and get away with it,” she says.
We are lying in the bed of her truck, under a flat sky punctured with stars. It’s cold, and moments ago when we were fucking, I kept my jeans on, but she still expertly worked her way between them as she has done before, her knuckles rubbed red from the friction of denim, but I don’t care, and neither does she. She asked me to be louder when I came, so I pitched my moan into a yelp and wondered if I sounded like a coyote.
I’m not sure if there are coyotes where we are. I know that we’re somewhere in Connecticut and I know that she grew up here and I know that we’re in a field four miles down the road from the restaurant where she took me and we shared two bottles of red wine that tasted sour to me but I kept drinking it anyway because it made me forget about how cold I was. I’ve never been to Connecticut. Everything smells wet and rotted. The field’s grass has been flattened and thatched by endless truck tires. She has talked of her hometown’s beauty. So crisp. So quaint. So lovely. But I can’t escape that rotted smell. And I’m so fucking cold all the way to the bone. I feel the skin of my hands start to crack.
This is her favorite game. I bet you I could jump over that fence. I bet you I could hit that sign with this peach pit. I bet you I could make you come five times in a row. I bet you I could make that bartender flirt with me. I bet you I could chug this, shotgun that, shoot cheap whiskey without a chaser. I bet you I could swim out to that post in less than two minutes. 
I bet you I could kill you out here and get away with it. This one is new.
I laugh, unbothered. She has always had a dark, twisted sense of humor. Jokes coil out of her like a lithe, live thing, make it easy for her to make new friends, made it easy for me to fall for her quickly, though I haven’t yet told her I’m in love, and she hasn’t budged either. That’s a different game entirely. Sometimes it feels like we’ve known each other for only a blip, barely scraped the surface of one another. Other times, like now in the truck, I can remember the time before her, but it feels distant, like looking at a speck out at sea from the beach and wondering if it’s moving. If it’s alive or just a really big rock.
“How would you do it?” I egg her on.
She hooks her arm back under my neck, where she’d pulled me into her while fucking me with her other hand moments before. She tightens it there, curves her hand around until it’s resting on my neck. She taps my sternum again.
“Wring your neck like a little chicken,” she says.
“It takes more strength than you would think to snap a neck,” I say. 
She laughs and removes her arm from behind me, curls it into an exaggerated flexed-muscle pose, which looks ridiculous because she’s still awkwardly sprawled on the truck bed and because she’s wearing a big sweater that hides any strength she might have. “You saying my arms are weak?”
I laugh and pull her back to me. My head presses against the hardness of the truck, and I want the cushion of her arm back. I hope she’ll put it there without me asking. I wait, but she leaves one thrown across my waist and one propping up her own head to look down at me. My eyes flit between her and the stars glittering behind her head. Her short hair is dark and mussed, looking just like the leafless trees surrounding the field.
“Fine. I’d just choke you out and then drive down to the river and drop you there,” she says. I guess we’re still playing.
“They’d find my body.”
Her head tilts. “Maybe so.”
“Plus there’s the issue of all these witnesses,” I say. Other trucks and cars line this field, headlights cut so that I didn’t see them at first, not until we got closer and I realized this is a place where plenty of people come to do the things we’re doing here. So much for a secluded romantic field. She had waved her hand as we pulled closer. “It’s called The Love Field,” she’d said. “Don’t worry. No one will bother us.”
“What witnesses?” she asks.
“All the people in The Love Field,” I say, dramatically deepening my voice a bit as I say the last three words to make a joke of it. She doesn’t laugh.
“What if all of those cars you saw before weren’t really here? What if I told you that everyone thinks they see those cars out here at first, but really they’re just a trick?” Her voice stays soft and slow. “What if they’re ghost cars with ghosts inside? What if it’s called The Love Field because this is where messed-up people bring lovers to die? What if this town is haunted and cursed? If we’re stuck in a scary story? Maybe I didn’t tell you the full story. Maybe I brought you to a ghost field full of ghost lovers.”
It sounds like another one of her weird dark jokes, but I haven’t heard a punchline yet, and the way she says the words, so gently like she’s casting a spell, isn’t how she tells jokes at all. I try to keep my eyes locked on her, but they flitter sideways, searching. I can’t see over the side of the truck bed’s walls. I know I’ll have to lift my head if I want to. I don’t believe her ghost story, but I have an overwhelming need to see those faint outlines of cars again, to see other couples sitting in beds of trucks, nowhere to go, too drunk to get on the highway anyway, wrapped in blankets, huddled for warmth and horniness.
“Look at you,” she says. “You want to look now, don’t you? You want to check?”
I slap her sweatered arm and roll my eyes, tucking my own arms under my head as I turn on my side. “Let me sleep, freak,” I say. I close my eyes to stop myself from straining to see beyond our little boxed-in truck coffin.

***

          The game evolves, and I am still learning the rules. The I bets of before have been replaced with this new iteration of the game, the one where she threatens to kill me and describes how she’ll do it. Her plots are underdeveloped and easily debunkable, and I like poking holes in her theories.
“The perfect murder weapon is a pillow,” she whispers in my ear. She has me pressed up against the bar, and people swarm around us, and there isn’t a pillow in sight.
“No, the perfect murder weapon is an icicle,” I tell her. “Or a frozen lamb leg.”
She kisses under my chin, a gentle choke. “You’re so weird,” she says. “I never know what the hell you’re talking about.”
She isn’t romantic, and it’s one of my favorite things about her. Before, there were others who gave me gifts, and they still poisoned me eventually. Fresh flowers always rotted. I prefer her fucked-up jokes, her rough commands when she fucks me, this confounding and exciting game of snake and mouse.
“If I murdered you in space, no one would hear you scream,” she tells me after a perfect meal of Thai takeout that we inhale in her bed, a window unit blasting ice-air on our sweat-flecked, naked bodies.
“Are we going to space together?” I ask. She shrugs as if actually contemplating it.
“I could take you all sorts of places.” 

      ***

Back in the truck, before we fucked, before the start of the game, I watched her trace the stars with her index finger. I named the constellations. Every time she moved her finger from one lighted dot to the next, I felt the same phantom touch against my skin. It must have just been the wind. I named the constellations, and she kept asking how I knew. How do you know, how do you know, how do you know. And I realized I wasn’t sure how I knew. I wasn’t sure if my grandfather had taught me the constellations or if I’d read about them or if someone else had told me the way I was telling her, as foreplay, as a seduction. How do you know, she asked again, and I said I didn’t know for sure, that maybe I was wrong about the names anyway, and then I kissed her, and then we had sex in the bed of her truck. Then the game began.

***

  I’m still learning the rules as we go. She wants to play the game only when things are going well. Usually, after fucking. She likes to slice through the postcoital bliss, the heavy-breathing comedown. She cuts it with the game, adds a hard edge to the quiet moments between us in bed. We still have not said we love each other, and I’m wondering how long that particular game can last. It’s a standoff, I know it. And even though she’s the stubborn one, I won’t give in either. I catch myself wanting to be more like her. Harder and quieter. I’m embarrassed when I tell her how many times I’ve switched jobs, how many times I switched my major in school, always trying on something new to see how it fits. I want to be someone who knows herself better.
She works for a family she knows from back home, serving as a personal assistant of sorts for a husband and wife who rely on her for everything. They have an apartment on the Upper West Side, and most weekends they abandon it for damp Connecticut, letting her stay there. When we sleep in the same bed, it’s usually in the second guest room of this play-pretend apartment. She doesn’t like me to sleep over at her apartment, though she certainly has no problem fucking me there. It’s too shitty for me, according to her. 
“You deserve a nice place. I could build you a house in the woods, you know,” she says, and I indulge this game too. Even though we live in a woodsless city that neither of us has any intention of moving from any time soon. Even though it would certainly just be easier to move into her shitty apartment than it would be for her to build an entire fantasy house. Even though I’m never sure how serious this relationship is. She’s talking about building me a house, and she’s never even bought me a gift.
My apartment is never on the table. “You have too many roommates,” she says. “I feel like someone’s always listening.” She hates to be watched. When a guy at the bar where we often make out looks like he’s eavesdropping on our buzzed conversation, she gets in his face. “I know you’re listening to us,” she says. He leaves quickly. More than once, she accuses someone of following us when she’s driving the truck, even though that’s just how people drive here. Too close. Way too close. I don’t know why she insists on keeping the truck in the city.
She is quick to tell me when she doesn’t like something, and she doesn’t like when I see my friends without her. Sometimes she lets us throw parties at the rich couple’s apartment. We drink their alcohol and eat their fancy cheese, and she says it doesn’t matter at all. They never check, and they love her. “I’m like their kid and their parent,” she says. “They let me do anything, and they can’t do anything without me.” She pours drinks for my friends with bottles from a bronze cart. This is nice of her, she reminds me often. 
It’s party time on the Upper West Side, and we greet my friends at the door dressed like the straight couple that barely lives here. I still have never met them. She looks so good in his brown suit, the jacket elbow-patched and tight on her broad shoulders. I wear a pale pink dress I’d never wear as myself, but I love a good costume. We get drunk on expensive gin that tastes like a liquefied Christmas tree, and I think I hate it, but she’s so excited to share it with me, keeps rattling off facts about the distillery and tasting notes, and maybe this many months into a relationship is too long to still be pretending to like something just because the other person does. Then again, the more of this gin I drink, the better it tastes.
My friends out of earshot, she pulls my ponytail until my head falls back, neck exposed. It’s rough and gentle at the same time, and I feel myself get instantly wet. “Professor Plum in the lounge with the rope,” she says, bisecting my throat with her finger.
“What rope?” I ask her, and she nods toward a curtain on the other side of the room, bound in the middle with a garish gold cord.
“Such a fancy murder weapon!” I bite her finger, and she leaves it hooked in my mouth.
“Nothing but the best for my girl,” she says. She tugs on the lower rack of my teeth, and I resist. I pull my head back to feel her tug more deeply. I want her to unhinge me.
After my friends leave and it’s just us again, the role-playing continues, but I don’t know exactly what roles we’re playing. I sit in front of the wife’s vanity when she tells me to, and she picks up a brush and takes it to my thick curls. The brush snags, but she pulls through. It sounds like small bones crunching.
I bet you I could crush this bird with my hands, I hear her say in my head. This isn’t a memory, but I see the bird as clearly as one, maybe even clearer, every ridge of its feathers in high definition.
She keeps brushing, and I don’t budge. I’m not like you, I want to say to her, and not because I’m looking at the reflection of her hair, short thin wisps that a comb could teeth through with ease, no resistance at all. I don’t know how to be like her, how to make everyone and everything else bend.
When my friends skip a potential party night to go to the movies instead, she gives me permission that she immediately retracts once it’s too late. She says she felt pressured to say yes. She says I’m making her feel bad for missing me. “Don’t you want to spend time with me?” she asks. “Did you think of me while you were out with everyone? Think of me all alone in that apartment?”
We have the same fight over and over. Endless rounds of the same wrestling match. One round ends with her screaming into a pillow. One round ends with her asking me to leave the apartment. One round ends with accusing me of plotting to leave her, and even though I have no desire to, even though I’m still just waiting, waiting, waiting for her to tell me she needs me, feel like maybe I could bloom into something magnificent if she would just let me in a little more, I don’t deny her wild accusations, and she gets more upset.
Instead, I beg her to play the game. “Tell me how you’d kill me,” I say to her.
She looks at me with disgust. She’s still in charge of the rules, and this apparently is not how the game is played.
“You’re really fucked-up, you know that?”
I do know it. Because never once have I been afraid of her empty death threats. The only thing that scares me is how much I crave them.

 ***

Back in the truck, she is finally asleep. A deep drunk-sleep with her mouth agape. I strain my neck to peer over the side of the truck. The other cars, the other people, are there. Of course they are. I feel stupid for falling briefly for her ghost story. I remember how gullible I was as a kid when my older sisters told me ghost stories, too. I was always the easy one to trick, and they delighted in it. I don’t think that this strange and enchanting person sleeping next to me would ever truly hurt me, but I still needed proof we were not alone out here. I hate how much I doubt myself.
We are surrounded by at least a dozen other cars, all of them their own little impenetrable worlds. The one closest to us rocks gently, the tremblings of another couple love-locked. I imagine the games they play.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and a writer for Autostraddle. Her debut short story, published in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, was nominated for the 2021 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her short stories have also been published or are forthcoming in Catapult, The Offing, The Journal, and Fugue. She attended the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop for short fiction, and she is an upcoming fellow for the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.