The car raced south on Interstate 15 inbound for Los Angeles. She was about to attain Cajon Pass, considered by Angelenos the beginning of the stretch run. Here the San Andreas Fault had kindly cut a notch in the San Bernardino Mountains, allowing feasible access to the metropolis and basin of eighteen million people below.

April continued her assessment.

Fact two, they had been hot as hell before she left town. There were things she did the night before her departure that made her distrust the evidence of memory. No, that couldn’t have been me, I don’t do that kind of thing. Never.

Next: she was at a certain spot in her monthly cycle. This was a two or three-day interval out of every twenty-eight when there was no such thing as getting turned on, she stayed continually lit up, in a state of girly heat. This little secret she had masked so far in this affair. It’s just for me, she justified in her mind. Well, she was roaring along right in the middle of it this very moment.

She glanced at the speedometer. If it were not for the well-known fact that the California Highway Patrol inevitably camped out on the L.A. side of the pass, she would have dared ninety. Or more. Come on, come on, take me home, dusty road.

Last fact: the damned phone sex. Nearly every freakin’ night this week from the hotel room in Vegas back to his apartment in Westwood. She had been the crazier of the two of them in this game, once making him wait until his dirty talk caused her to reach a climax twice before she unleashed the exact, graphic instructions that made him erupt like a berserk King Kong.

She opened the window of the car an inch. Maybe if the noise and wind rattled around inside enough it would shake her up, interrupt her obsessive daydreams. The air – hot. All it did was bake her brain fully.

Her mind’s eye flooded with vivid memories, unstoppable. She visualized the scene the first time he took her rough from behind. She had asked to be taken strong that way, but then kept edging away from it. He just threw her on the bed, fed up with her teasing, spread her wide and moved in like a stallion. The forcefulness and power as the first thrust ripped into her, recalled now, conveyed an instant hormone injection and a white-out in the brain – she slowed the car until the rush subsided.

A montage of other firsts flooded in. First time he made her do it in public, on the porch of her mother’s house. First time she tied him up. That was a good one, because she tortured him with her mouth on his entire body for half an hour until he begged, and no joke about it.

First time his hands went under her shirt. First time she surprised him with nothing on under her dress. First time she watched his hand do all the work.

First time she felt the tip of his cock slip into her mouth. Oh, damn, she put that image in a loop, revivifying it over and over, imagining the heft and texture of it on the underside of her lips. She let an imaginary play run of three ultimate impalements, the heft slipping in, pausing, then easing all the way down. His fucking cock deep in her fucking throat.

And then all these images, and six or seven others, more salacious, some of them, bombarded her, flashing in rotation, fast and intense, the sense memories of each growing more exaggerated until just the briefest millisecond mental image of his erect cock seemed like grand opera featuring Cupid’s mightiest shaft. With each mental picture, her brain triggered its proportionate share of love-dopamine, like a lab rat self-administering an ever-increasing dose of pleasure juice. April went roaring over the top of Cajon Pass, a love-mobile if ever there was one.

She dropped her hand into her lap. This gesture set off new erotic movies. First time she let him watch her masturbate. First time she put her hand on his and showed him how she liked it done. First time he made her do it in the car as he drove down the highway. These new ones entered the stream of her fevered imagination, escalating the stakes.

She checked her mirrors. She engaged cruise control, setting it to just over the speed limit. After all, a girl can only take so much. She shifted her dress up around her waist. A hand went under the elastic of her fancy undergarment, triggering flashback images of his getting in. She loved this man slipping his hand in her pants. She had let him do it so many times.

She moved her legs apart slightly, as much as was safe, determined not to stop the damn car, pointed as it was in a beeline to the hive.

With a practiced motion, April’s hand slipped onto her sex. It went right for home, the perfect little button aching to be set free. She moaned her happy sorrowful moan right from the first touch.

Within seconds, while the car might be descending for landing in L.A., April was accelerating for takeoff.

The images raced on, chasing one another, like a stampeded slide show of her libido. She caressed and tugged and pressed and urged herself on with “oh yes oh yes oh yes oh fucking yes.”

And as easy as that, fevered as she was, April achieved.

She arched back against the seat. The hand did not stop. She turned it a certain way to let thumb rub clit. The other fingers put themselves in a row just below, on the lips. Right at the height of her trajectory, two fingers slipped inside an inch. They pulled the lips of her sex apart. Revealed, exposed, glorious, the writhing insides shuddered again and again, splashing delicious juice onto her fingers and thigh.

The way down was gratifyingly long. She put her fingers deeper inside, just to be where the action was. Everything was marvelously sensitive, so she touched, caressed, caused more pleasure to come into existence.

The slide show in her mind’s eye ceased. But it was stuck on one image, as if the projector had broken at the most important frame: the first time he had kissed her, at that party, after they had laughed and talked and flirted for hours. That kiss was gentle, sweet, risky, true.

April kept one hand in her warm sex for many miles. She roared off the down-slope of the mountains, the taste of that kiss on her lips, homing on the beacon of her waiting love, like Venus hearing the twang of Cupid’s mightiest shaft.