I'd never had phone sex before. Not that I was opposed to it—it was just one of those things that never came up. I guess it had always seemed sort of strange and silly to me. Real sex was so much more appealing. And in times when that was hard to come by, well, that's what the stack of Victoria's Secret catalogs crammed behind the books on my bookshelf was for, along with a 1988 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition with Elle Macpherson on the cover and battered VHS copies of 9 ½ Weeks and Basic Instinct (my good stash had been lost in a move).

"If you were here," Nicole said. "I'd lick your lips. I'd lick you everywhere." She moaned a little. "I'm fucking myself right now. Tell me what you're doing."

"Umm, touching my privates?" I started touching my privates.

"I'm sucking your dick right now. Oh yeah, I'm sucking you good. I want you to fuck my mouth like you're fucking my pussy."

Nicole's dirty talk was both ridiculous and oddly arousing. But I couldn't shake the thought that this was all being recorded, that in the parking lot, staked out in the back of an ice cream truck that had been pimped into a mobile surveillance unit, friends of mine were listening in, wide-eyed and gleeful, headphones clamped to their ears. It was hard to be serious. "Nicole," I said. "I'm grabbing onto your titties! I'm kissing you with reckless abandon! I'm pumping in and out of you, like, well…well, like an oil derrick! Or a piston? I'm the sword, baby, and you're the scabbard!"

Finally, I grew less bashful and got into it for real, and in a few minutes there was a happy ending. We said good night. The basketball game on the TV had ended long before, and I had no idea who'd won.

At seven thirty the next morning, the phone rang again, jarring me awake; my brother, too. He lifted his head from the pillow. "Who the fuck is calling?" he said.

It was Nicole. "Girl," I said, "I'm sleeping. Don't you know what time it is?" I was about to hang up, but then, remembering our little moment a few hours before, I softened. "Look, here's my cell number. Call me later, okay?"

···

A few months earlier, in May 2004, I'd published a book called Found and hit the road with Peter for an eight-month, 136-city tour. At each event, I read from my book and Peter played guitar and sang. We burned from one city to the next in a 1999 Dodge van we'd bought on eBay. Mostly, we crashed on sofas and floors at friends' houses or stayed with folks we'd met that night at our show, though sometimes we'd take turns driving through till dawn while the other slept in the backseat, which folded down into a bed. It was actually so comfortable, a lot of nights I chose to sleep out in the van rather than on a stranger's sagging couch. Once a month or so, dusted from the road, we'd splurge on some sad-sack hotel, like that Motel 6 on the outskirts of Austin. That night Nicole found me, Peter and I had been on the road for six months; we were about a hundred cities into the tour.

Three nights later, in Oklahoma City, I was getting ready for bed out in the van when my cell phone rang. PRIVATE CALLER, it said. It was Nicole. She was still whispering. "What's up with the whispering?" I asked. She said her roommates were sleeping in the next room. We chatted for a few minutes, then got into the phone sex again. She told me she was tonguing my balls. This time I went Shakespeare: "Oh baby, wherefore art thy labia?" Afterward, she was about to hang up, but I said, "Nicole, that's so impersonal. If the fantasy is that we're having sex, I don't want to just zip up my pants the second we're done and leave. Can't we just talk for a bit? You know, cuddle?"