Bullet Vibrator on the California Zephyr, Night

The train had its own rhythm through the mountains — not the steady click of flatland miles but something more uneven, a syncopation she'd felt in her sternum since they crossed into Colorado. It came up through the thin mattress and into her hips and did not stop. She had been lying still for forty minutes, listening to it, listening to him breathe below.

His shoulder was visible from where she lay, the curve of it rising and falling in the dark. Steady. Unhurried. He had fallen asleep somewhere outside Grand Junction and had not moved since, and she had spent the last hour in a kind of negotiation with herself that she'd been losing incrementally.

The toiletry bag was at the foot of the berth. She'd put it there on purpose, she understood now. Not consciously. But she'd put it there.

She moved slowly, the way you move when the goal is silence rather than speed. The sleeping car had its own ambient sound — the wheel noise, the occasional creak of the car body, the low pressure of air — and she used all of it. Her hand found the zipper by feel. The small weight of the bullet was in her palm before she'd fully decided.

She lay back. The mattress was narrow and the ceiling was close and outside the window there was nothing but the dark shapes of mountains passing and sometimes a scatter of distant light. She pressed her shoulders into the pillow and felt the train move through her.

The shorts were thin. She'd worn them because they were comfortable, she'd told herself. The fabric sat across both thighs where she'd kept her legs together, light enough that she was aware of it as a specific sensation — the slight drag of cotton against skin, the warmth she'd already generated underneath it.

She held the bullet in her right hand. Her left hand found the luggage rail above her head and gripped it, not hard, just enough to have something. An anchor. The rail was cold — she hadn't expected that, the metal pulling heat from her palm — and the contrast made her more awake than she already was.

Below, his shoulder rose. Fell.

She exhaled through her nose, longer than she'd meant to, the sound absorbed immediately by the wheel noise. Her thumb found the button on the bullet without pressing it. Just the awareness of it. The small cylinder was warming in her hand now, taking her temperature, and she was aware of her own pulse in the place she hadn't touched yet.

The train leaned into a curve, unhurried, and she felt the lean in her hips and in the press of the mattress along her side. The mountains outside were doing something to the air pressure. Or she was doing something to herself.

She had not pressed the button yet.

Her knees were still together. The cotton of the shorts lay across them, light as a suggestion.

Below, he breathed. The train moved through the dark. And she lay in the almost of it, thumb on the button, the cold rail in her left hand, waiting for herself to decide.