Kate never liked The Doors. Perhaps she had liked them when she was a kid, but by the time she had bloomed into young womanhood, thirty-some-odd years ago, her revulsion had been well established. There had never been a time that she could remember when she hadn’t reached to change the station the moment she recognized one of their songs coming out of the speakers on her dashboard while she was driving. Kate had long since discarded most of the affectations of her youth, and would now eat sushi, listen to opera, wear denim and sneakers, change poopy diapers, squish spiders, and say disapproving things when a boy driving a chrome-festooned, grumbling, muscle-car drove by, but she had never outgrown her dislike of The Doors.
Kate had discovered that she disliked The Doors at approximately the same point in her life that she discovered the wonders of french kissing. Although these two aspects of her personal taste were acquired at almost the same time, and under circumstances that were intimately connected, they did not occupy the same rank in the hierarchy of her passions. She could tolerate listening to The Doors, and often did–when a Doors song came on the radio of her friends cars, or appeared in a soundtrack of a movie she liked, or sometimes as background music at the mall. She could take them or leave them, but preferred the latter, when the choice was hers, and particularly when she was alone with her thoughts. If asked to name ten things, or twenty things, or possibly even one hundred things that she didn’t like, Kate probably would not have mentioned the music of the The Doors, but she disliked it enough so that when it came on the radio, she reacted.
But kissing was a passion for Kate. There was no leeway here. Kate craved kissing. Asked to name her ten things that she liked, Kate probably would have to fight against the impulse to name ten different types of kisses.
Kate had been fifteen when she discovered boys–or, more precisely, that boys would kiss her. Like any girl or boy of her generation, she had endured learning the clinical definition of the process of procreation at the well-intentioned but ice-cold hands of the public educational system. She knew what to expect, and what to do about it before, during and afterward, but the curriculum had omitted several very important points regarding what Kate was or was not actually going to enjoy. Her friends had compared rumors, speculations, and the occasional nugget of hard-won empirical data, and tried to fill in the gaps of their knowledge with information inferred from the innuendo of movies and television shows their parents let them watch, romance novels spirited away from their mother’s nightstands, and the lyrics of popular music that made their parents blush. They told each other that they were ready to go all the way, but their common sense spoke to them in quiet moments and reminded them of the opposite. Like all of her friends, Kate was a virgin when she entered her sophomore year of high school, but she was untroubled. As far as she was concerned, the risks appeared to far outweigh the rewards. Sex could wait.
Greg Loomis could not have agreed less.
At the ripe age of seventeen, Greg had been waiting to have sex with someone for as long as his hormone-addled brain could clearly remember. Although he was dimly aware of a time when the teenage girls he saw every day at high school and every night in his dreams had not held any particular fascination, these memories seemed to belong to a different person, a person without appetites, desires, or lusts.
Kate no longer remembered most of the details leading up to the day that she and Greg became an item, since they were completely overshadowed in importance by the life-changing revelations of the afternoon. She remembered that she had been excited about a plan to hike up to the summit of Mount Wilson with a mixed group of her friends, but for various forgotten reasons all of her friends except Greg had decided to hang out in town instead of making the climb. The weather was too beautiful to waste, so she and Greg had decided make the hike anyway.
Greg had no particular designs on Kate as they hiked through the woods. To the best of his knowledge, sex was conducted in bedrooms, in the dark, between clean, soft sheets. It certainly did not happen in the bright sunlight, especially in the vicinity of mud, chiggers, ticks, mosquitoes, and poison ivy. His thoughts were probably as chaste as they’d ever been at any time he’d been alone with a girl since his voice had started to change.
And yet, when they paused at one of the scenic outlooks, their skin flushed with exertion and minds overwhelmed with the beauty arrayed below them, they embraced, and then kissed. Kate could not remember who made the first move. It happened quickly and awkwardly, but the details were unimportant. She was not coerced and did not feel uncomfortable. She was carried away by the feeling.
The wonderful sensation of kissing amazed Kate with its power and complexity. It never felt the same way twice, but it always felt good. Kate wished it could go on forever, but after thirty minutes, her mouth was dry. They hadn’t brought anything to drink. They walked back to town. Kate couldn’t remember what they had talked about during the walk back. Her mind was elsewhere.
The romance lasted another seven days. It was based entirely on Kate’s bottomless hunger for kisses and Greg’s hope that their make-out sessions would lead to something more. They didn’t talk, and there probably wasn’t much to say. When Greg made his ultimatum–second base or it was all over–Kate ended it. There were no tears or drama.
Kate always felt thankful to Greg, in a small way, for showing her what she did and would always want most out of life, and starting her on her life-long journey for a man who could give her a perfect, hour-long kiss as well as making her happy when they weren’t kissing.
But all knowledge comes at a price. Greg had been an enormous fan of The Doors. It was his preferred make-out music, and at one point Kate was convinced that he really believed that reciting Jim Morrison’s lyrics would convince her to unsnap her Levis for him. Kate would always feel a small bit of disappointment that she’d given her first passionate kiss–lovely though it had been–to a boy who thought that the lyrics of “Light My Fire” were deep, meaningful, and seductive.
And thus, as Kate was traveling west on Route 70 through Kansas, and she heard the ascending drone that marks the beginning of “L.A. Woman”, she reflexively reached to change the station. Since none of the presets worked properly, more than 200 miles from her home outside Denver, it took her a moment to figure out how to change the channels in her husband’s car. This took enough of her attention away from her driving that she didn’t notice the state troopers waiting behind the ramp south of Goodland as she passed them at eighty-five miles per hour.
This close to the border, the troopers were uninterested in a car with Colorado plates, who was probably a local, going only ten miles per hour over the limit. They waited for better prey.
Ten miles behind Kate, Danny checked on his passengers in the rear view mirror. They seemed to be sleeping. He turned and smiled at his passenger in the front seat, but received only a sour look in response from Mr. Lin. Danny knew he was still unhappy that they were behind schedule. He did not feel reckless; the road was clear and dry, and Danny had the left lane to himself. Danny checked his cell phone to make sure that it was charged, on, and that his headset was working properly. Everything was fine. There were no speed-traps ahead; Kate would have called him.
Danny pressed the accelerator down slightly farther, and watched the needle on the speedometer creep toward ninety-five.
