I looked around, grabbed the money that Trevor and Joe had left, stuffed all but one twenty in my pocket and threw the spare on the bed. I knew one of the people I’d gone to high school with, probably Kathy Matthews, would be the maid for this place and finding a twenty on a bed as a tip was about as close to winning the lottery as she could get around here.
I didn’t know if Trevor and Joe really meant it but if they did, I was on my way. And if we weren’t meant to be together, I had Josie as a fallback.
If she didn’t work out – I had myself as a fallback. Always.
The click of the door locking behind me drove home the reality that it was over. Not that the window was closed into Trevor’s and Joe’s life, but that this particular episode of our co-existence was over and that whatever I decided in the next few weeks would just be about picking up the pieces and moving on – whatever moving on meant.
Not having their arms around me, not having them here to stare at whenever I wanted, at my whim, not having Trevor and Joe to talk to, or to freak out about, or to listen to felt weirder than having them here, their presence so much a part of the real Darla that when they were gone it felt like my “real” life was the fake one.
Dragging my feet, I walked out to the parking lot, digging for the keys in my pocket, deep in my own thoughts. When I reached my little shitbox I looked up to find a completely nak*d Trevor spread across the hood of my car with a straw hat covering his groin.
“I didn’t know Toyota made hood ornaments quite like that,” I sputtered.
“It’s a custom job, Ma’am.”
“Ass.”
“If you say so,” he said, peeling his body off the hood of my car and turning around, mooning me. Is it mooning if you’re already nak*d? Two truckers sucking on cigarettes gaped and guffawed.
“Put your clothes on!” I hissed.
“Not before I kiss you.” And then he did, my new hood ornament shoving into much of my thigh. His lips said so much, the kiss a redeeming, carefree symbol of hope.
He bent down and retrieved his pants from the puddle of clothing next to the driver’s side, more truckers gathering to gawk. Great. Mike would hear about this in an hour or less.
“Where’s Joe?” I asked, looking around. “And your note sucked.”
He mugged. “Sorry. I thought we were leaving. I didn’t know how else – ”
“You could have woken me up.”
“I didn’t want to. You were so beautiful, so peaceful, so…” he stepped forward and began to stroke my upper arm, “so sated.” He said the words like little pinpricks directly into my clit.
“Get your clothes on now,” I said through gritted teeth, my whisper rising to a loud roar, “before the cops come and get you.”
“Who’s gonna come? Davey?” he cracked, but he complied, slipping that gorgeous skin into his own faded jeans, throwing on his clothes that Joe had brought.
I heard one of the truckers mutter, “Nut job,” and I thought blowjob, which made me want to drag Trevor back into the hotel room for another quick episode of my real life.
“Anyhow, what happened?”
He stepped closer and I swear to God my heart started beating with his, my lungs breathed when he breathed, my body moved when his moved. I was a goner. What I thought would not end well was going to begin quite nicely.
“Joe took off. Got a text from his mom saying she reported that he had stolen the BMW. Plus,” Trevor added, “I think we freaked him out.”
This time it was my turn to do that body relaxing thing that I’d seen them both do so much, all of my muscles from the neck down loosening. I willed myself to do it and damn if it didn’t help, resetting me somehow, giving me clarity. “Did it freak you out Trevor?”
In the space between my words and his answer there was a kind of peace. My core knew that whatever he said, it would be all right.
His hands curled around my upper arms and he stared into my eyes earnestly. “We wouldn’t have left you the money and the note if we didn’t mean what we said.”
We got in my car. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I absentmindedly got back on the highway, forgetting what the rest of my day held. Did I work today? Did I have a shift? I’d have to go home and check, probably need to call in and ask, and then face the embarrassment of having my boss needle me about it. And then there was Trevor. He held my hand like we were drowning, and he hummed his new song as the wind whipped through the open windows.
I didn’t care about work. Really, there was nothing that I could possibly care about less right now. Boston? Moving with Josie? It seemed like a pipe dream and as I tootled down I-76 a freakishly familiar sight greeted my tired eyes.
Lightning could not strike twice in the same place. That was a fact, right? Because there, on the side of the road, stood a very nak*d Joe Ross wearing nothing but…you guessed it – a guitar. My daddy’s guitar.
What the fuck?
I pulled over about fifteen feet from him, turned my car off and climbed out. The opening chords of I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer floated through the air like the white moth yesterday in the clearing where Trevor and I had made love. Joe’s entire body was on display for anybody who drove by and I looked back, hoping to God no cops were on patrol in this stretch right now. The BMW was about twenty yards away, lonely and patient, looking not one bit stolen at all.
“What are you doing?” I called out.
He strummed a couple cords and then said, “What comes naturally.”
“How much peyote did you eat?”
“I’m not high on peyote, Darla.”
I crossed the distance between us and now a foot or less separated me from him, his fingers stopping on the frets, his hands still, his legs flexing and his face serious and willing. Trevor scrambled out of the car, practically peeing his pants from hysterical laughter, bent over double with his hands on his knees.
“I’m high on you.”
“What happened – the note?”
“Yeah, the note. I know. My mom reported the BMW stolen. I needed to rush home.”
The twenties were still fresh in my pocket, his note tucked away too. My heart pounded, slammed against my ribs as I watched him stretched out in the morning sun, his body like a relief map of brilliance against the faded, chipped blue of my car hood.
The grin on his face stretched from ear to ear and he said, “Howdy there, ma’am. Any chance you can give me a ride to Sudborough, Massachusetts?”
“Not if you’re gonna mess up my vinyl seats with that bare ass,” I said, grinning back, nudging his knee with my hand.
A car shot by, a giant SUV that looked like a Honda Pilot. The driver did a double take and then honked hard and extended his right arm across the passenger seat with a big thumbs-up.
Joe gave him a thumbs-up back and waved, his ass flexing for the driver to see, the guitar tipping at a dangerous angle.
“You comfortable?” I asked.
He shifted the guitar behind his back, exposing a specimen of manhood that I’d become all too intimate with last night, and then reached for me, pulling me against him. I could feel him harden, pushing into my hip and my body formed to his, so grateful for some kind of a last chance. The second nak*d man who had hauled me to him in fifteen minutes. That’s got to be some kind of record.
In broad daylight, that is.
“I am now. I don’t know what I’m doing, Darla,” he said, leaning down and kissing my lips with a soft, gentle gesture. “But I don’t want to go home.”
“You want to stay here, in Peters?”
“I want you to come back with us.”
“And do what? Live in Trevor’s mom’s basement.”
Honk! Honk! The blast of a semi’s horn cut through the air, scaring the shit out of all three of us, Joe jumping, the guitar banging against his groin and making him bend over in pain. We all turned toward the source of the sound to see Uncle Mike sitting in the driver’s seat of his haul truck, grinning and giving me a thumbs-up.
Aw, fuck. As Joe stood up and came into Mike’s view I could see the smile on his face slowly change to a frown, his lips mouthing the words What the fuck? as he drove on past, not hitting the brakes.
I had a very uncomfortable conversation waiting for me when he got home in five days.
How fast could I move?
I kept Josie’s offer to myself; I wasn’t going to act hastily, though. When you act too fast on things you can get burned.
“Well…uh,” his face faltered and he slapped a small bug that had landed on his hip bone. “How about his garden shed?”
Trevor sounded like a barking hyena at that comment, and I started giggling, too. Knowing I’d already said yes to Josie meant I could string these guys along a bit.
We locked eyes and grinned like mad fools at each other, my hand sliding up his shoulder to his neck and burying itself in his hair.
“You guys want me to move there?”
They exchanged a knowing look and nodded.
My sarcastic deflecting self rose up. “I don’t live with anybody who is nak*d all the time, especially on the side of the road. Can you imagine the germs you get from somebody’s ass being on strange car seats?”
“I’ll clean him up,” Trevor said.
“And he’ll clean your nak*d ass germs off my hood?”
Joe’s eyebrows flew up. “What is she talking about?”
Trevor was gasping and red-faced, trying to stop laughing. “We’ll explain later.”
“I – what are you doing here?” I asked him. “I thought you had to get back. Didn’t your mom call the cops?”
“She did. I realized I needed to stop texting with her so instead I called the Sudborough Police and told them that no, I’m not missing, that the car is registered in my name even though they pay the lease, I have insurance, and that I’m a twenty-two year old man who can do whatever the f**k he wants with his time. Whatever alert they had out is canceled. If my mom does this again she is going to be charged with a nuisance for reporting a crime that isn’t.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“No, the police chief did.” Joe looked simultaneously proud and sickly green. It was a good start.
Both men leaned in and held me. I thought about my life, about how so many things could change with one turn of the wheel, with one missed observation and how I had lived my life following what Mama needed, what money dictated but most of all, how my own mind had caged my body, forcing it to live in a world that wasn’t what I wanted.
Josie’s offer was on the table – a job, a place to live. It sounded like I had two places to live now. I wasn’t sure I was ready for that – jumping into a domestic life with two guys I’d just met two days ago. Did I take the leap and tell them what Josie had just offered? Did I trust them enough to say that I’d been offered the biggest chance of my life to follow my own path? If I opened my mouth and said the words I couldn’t take it back, I couldn’t unwind it, I’d have to acknowledge the reality of it and live with the consequences if I didn’t do what my heart told me.