Mine was already off and it was my turn to kneel in the cramped space between seats, reaching for her. I yanked her ass toward me so she slouched backward, sliding lower, sideways in the seat so her head thunked hard against the glass.
“Ow,” she laughed, rubbing her head.
And then I had her thighs hooked over my shoulders, soft as silk against my ears and cheeks, strong and thick and solid, and her sex was lush and wet and salty and tangy on my tongue. No more teasing, now—I devoured her, hungry, ravenous, eager. Tongue needling her clit, then flattening to lap at her, two fingers and then three slicking in, squelching out through her arousal. She flew over the edge almost instantly, screaming loud, one hand knotting in her hair as she arched up off the seat, thighs levering onto my shoulders, squeezing my head until I thought it might pop like a watermelon in a hydraulic press. Flexing, thrashing, driving, grinding, her other hand clutching at my head, fingers tangling in my hair, holding me hard against her slick wet slit, moving with my rhythm as I licked and lapped and swirled my tongue on her.
“Fuck oh fuck oh fuck, Errol, fuck, Errol fuck, Errol, oh god oh fuck oh god, Errol…” Her breath caught, her voice broke, and then I felt her coming, felt her channel squeeze impossibly hard around my fingers, and her voice lifted in a scream, which broke into a hoarse whimper as I tongued her through her climax, past it, not slowing, fingers driving, tongue lashing, demanding another. “Again? Oh shit, oh fuck, Errol, god yes…please, god, please don’t stop—again, Errol make me come again—”
I got hard all over again at the way she talked through her orgasm, the dirty, wild things she said.
“Eat me, Errol,” she growled, as the second orgasm built up in her. “Eat me so fucking good, Errol…yeah, just like that—ohmyfuckingGOD!” That last syllable was a shrill scream as the orgasm broke over her, and she was just wordlessly screaming, clutching my hair with both hands, riding my face like a cowboy breaking a bronc.
Whoooop-WHOOOP! The warning burble of a siren behind us.
“Shit!” Poppy shouted, yanking away. “Sit up, sit up.”
Thinking fast, she shoved her hand into her purse, came up with her phone, and tossed it into the footwell, far forward near her feet, under the pedals, righting her skirt at the same time.
“Wipe your face,” she hissed.
“Why,” I said, grinning. “Have I got something on my beard?”
She choked back laughter, reaching out to wipe at my mouth with her palm. “Let me do the talking.”
A uniformed officer bent over at the driver’s side window. Poppy rolled it down. “Good morning, Officer.”
He was young, stern-looking, clean-shaven. “Good morning, ma’am. Sir. There a problem here?” He was wearing mirrored aviators, but it was obvious he was searching the interior. “Funny spot to stop, this early. Seems I saw some…unusual movement in here as I passed.”
“No, no problems,” Poppy said. “I just dropped my phone, and pulled over to try to grab it.”
“That why neither of you are seat belted?”
“Yeah,” Poppy said. “I actually dropped it over here between the seats, so he went to grab it, then it slid under my feet, so I figured I’d better pull over to get it.” She leaned forward, angled to extend her reach, made a face of concentration as she hunted by feel, and straightened with her phone in hand. “There. See?”
I wondered if he’d say something about the beads of sweat still dotting her forehead and upper lip, or the way she was still short of breath—she was disguising it well, though.
He obviously wasn’t entirely sure he believed her. But, without anything else to go on, he just frowned. “Well. This road here is a dead end onto private property, so I’d keep a move on.” He tipped his hat. “Ya’ll have a nice day. Drive safe.”
“Thank you, Officer. You too.”
A moment later, tires crunched behind us, a motor revved, and the patrol car pulled around and drove away—thankfully in the opposite direction we were headed.
“Some quick thinking there,” I said. “Good on ya.”
She grinned. “I think maybe we’d better put the sexual hijinks on pause till we’re somewhere…private.”
“Yeah, maybe we had better,” I agreed. “Much as I’d rather put you on your back and give you a couple more screamers.”
She laughed, low and hoarse. “I think we’ve both been to heaven this morning.”
“Well, I got heaven two ways, because you taste as good coming on my mouth as you make me feel with yours.”
She closed her eyes, slowed her breath. Opened them, smiled at me, bright, eager, calm. “So. Nearest hotel?”
“Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn…” I quipped, quoting a tune I’d heard on the radio a while back.
She snickered. “Oh man, old school.” She plugged her phone into the auxiliary jack, hunting through her music app. “I’ve got a playlist for that!”
And so we hit the highway again, for real this time, jamming to old school American hip-hop, funk, and soul. Hours passed as easily as the miles, and our conversation flowed as freely as the day before.
You’d think what with the—as she’d so humorously and aptly put it—sexual hijinks of the morning, that the sexual tension would have eased between us.
Yeah nah. Not even. Worse, matter of fact.
Every time our hands brushed, sparks flew. Her eyes roamed my face, my body, mouth, hands, the fly of my shorts. And mine did as well.
Neither of us dared to outright touch each other, out of an unspoken mutual agreement—any touch, however innocent, would set us off, and after the close encounter with the police this morning, neither of us fancied a ticket or a further temptation of fate. No, best wait till we got somewhere like civilization, and a motel, where we could lock a door behind us and do things proper-like.
As in, get her lush body totally naked, so I could explore the many fine curves, feel her skin and taste her again and fucking finally get myself inside that sweet tight slit of hers.
Never in my life have I wanted anything so bad. Feeling her under my fingers, tasting her, having been so close but so far only made my need to be inside her worse than anything.
And judging by the way her eyes kept flicking to my shorts, to the outline of my cock behind them, she was feeling the same.
So, when I say the hours and miles passed easily, that’s a bit of a lie. They crept. It seemed we were prowling through the wops for hours on end before we started to see evidence of humanity instead of just forest and cows and hay and corn and wheat. I’d no idea where we were except heading north, and I didn’t rightly care. Neither did she—she just kept blasting us fifty-five miles per hour north, ever north, through one-light town after one-light town, where there was little but a single gas station and maybe a small dairy, a used car lot, or a home and farm store.
Nothing like a decent place to stop until well past noon. We paused to refuel at a junction, got shitty coffee, and I fixed us snacks for the next leg of our trip.
An hour or so later we passed signs for Moline and Davenport, and I’d no clue which state they were in, or which we were in—little two-lane roads like this don’t get big signs advertising the state line. I learned, if they’re there, they’re old and worn and if you blink you miss them. It was only early afternoon then, so we blew through them despite our growling stomachs. What was pushing us on, I wasn’t sure. The playlists we listened to were endless and varied, first from her phone, then mine.
We switched when we stopped to fuel up a second time, and I let Poppy pick a playlist from my phone. She perused for a minute, scrolling through the ones we’d already listened to, until she got near the bottom of the list.
“What’s this one?” she asked.
I glanced without really seeing—the sun was low and bright, and I refocused on the road. “What one?”
“It doesn’t have a title.” Shit, no, not that one; she tapped before I could say anything, though. “The songs are all…what is this? Gaelic
?”
I shifted. “Uh, yeah. Irish Gaelic. It’s just…some old stuff. Reels and jigs, and the like.”
Just old stuff. Good one, mate.
She shrugged. “I’m down for some Irish reels,” she said as she tapped the phone.
Fuck.
Instantly, my toe tapped. Drowsy Maggie, Dad’s favorite tune to fiddle. Close my eyes and I could see Dad beside me, leading the way on old Moll, the fiddle passed down from his great-grandfather. Fucking deluge of memories, all hitting like a load of bricks, all within half a measure.
She didn’t miss a trick, though, Poppy didn’t.
“You okay?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
She frowned. “Okay, well, bullshit. But that’s your business.” She paused the song, found a playlist of my favorite hard rock songs, a mix of American, New Zealand, and Australian bands.
She eyed me a few times, but even half of that recording of Drowsy Maggie was more than I could manage and remain on an even keel.
“That was, uh. My dad’s band.” I slammed old cold coffee, just for something to do.
“Oh.” She loaded that with a wealth of meaning. “The sad bits.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought your dad was French?”
I laughed. “Yeah. It’s…well, not all that complicated, actually. He was born in France, moved to Newfoundland as a young man. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all played the fiddle, more for fun and entertainment than anything, and my granddad taught Dad. Then, when Dad moved to Canada, he picked up the Cape Breton style of fiddling, ended up in a band that moved him to Dublin, joined a different band, this one proper Irish music, and that one blew up in Europe and the UK, parts of Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Never really got picked up here, though, for whatever reason. He met my mum after a gig in Christchurch, and…the rest is history.”
She hummed. “There’s a lot covered in that phrase, ‘the rest is history,’ I think.”
“Yeah, sure.” I tried for easy breezy. “We’ve all got that shit, though, yeah? No sense digging into it all. Just a bloody bunch of sad stuff that doesn’t make for good storytelling.”
“Meaning, off-limits.”
“I dunno about off-limits, exactly, just…don’t see the point in talking about it.”
She just nodded and didn’t push it. Conversation lapsed for a while after that.
“I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories, Errol. I’m sorry.”
I rolled my shoulder, left hand out the window, diving and rising in the air current. “Couldn’t have known.”
We stopped for food in Davenport, but it was still too early to stop for the day, and something about that weird issue with the music had chilled the fervor of our chemical combustibility. We drove, and drove. Signs for Dubuque, which I felt was maybe in Iowa.
Late evening. Sunset over cornfields.
“Hey, Errol?”
“Yeah?”
She pointed at a dirt track through a cornfield as we passed it, the sunset perfectly aligned with the road, a spreading umbrella of oak and cottonwood interrupting the corn. “I want to go shoot that.”
“All right,” I said. “Sounds good to me.”
I brought us to a halt and reversed down the shoulder, pulled onto the dirt road.
When I halted and shut off the engine, we both ducked in back to sort through our photography gear; I just needed my Nikon, she needed a handful of rolls of film, which she shoved into the pocket of her skirt; I hadn’t realized her skirt even had pockets.
We spent a quiet several minutes each wandering the road, snapping shots. I went into the corn rows a ways, knelt to capture a solar flare through the nodding heads while Poppy focused more on the dirt road and the sunset with the stand of trees as a frame and focal point.
After a while, I joined her on the road. “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”
“Okay?” She eyed me, and I had a feeling she was expecting some kind of a sexual game, but things were still a bit odd, strained—memories tend to linger, for me, and leave a stain of bitter pain, and I think my reaction set something off in her.
I wasn’t sure what, and I didn’t like it, and I wished she’d have just picked another playlist so we could have carried on in mere sexual tension rather than bizarre emotional tautness and confusion.
I handed her my Nikon. “Switch?”
She grinned. “Hell, yeah. I’ve always wanted an opportunity to play with one of these. I had a Canon Rebel when I first moved to New York, but it got stolen on the subway and I never got around to saving up to replace it, and I’m too stubborn to ask Mom.”
“Rebels are a decent starter kit,” I said. “And really, a professional can get a good shot no matter the camera. The photographer makes the camera, not the other way around.”
She glanced at the shot counter on her Minolta. “Hold on, I’ve got three shots left on this roll, and then you can have a fresh roll to work on.”
She looked around for something to shoot, saw me, smirked. Lifted the camera and snapped one of me before I could react. Backed up a step, two, tilted the camera sideways and bent to get all of me in the frame. I stood for it, letting my Nikon dangle loosely at my side, sunglasses up on my head. She closed in again, got a close-up of my face to finish the roll. Pulled the used roll out.
I reached for it. “Been a while since I’ve run a roll into a manual. Let me. It’ll be fun.” I took the camera from her and a new roll of black and white, fed the end of the celluloid in, settled the canister in place, closed the back. “My first camera was a cheapo Mom got me thirdhand when I was…oh god, eight? Nine? I used that till I was fourteen, and that’s when Dad got me my first good one. A vintage Leica. I still have that one, actually, carry it around in my gear, but I think the shutter is stuck and haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed.”
“What was your first digital camera?” she asked, playing with the Nikon to familiarize herself with it.
“That one,” I answered. “My portfolio was all black and white from actual film, but when Jerry got me this job, I used my entire savings to buy that D6 and a handful of lenses. I didn’t get my first pro-quality telephoto zoom lens till after my first paycheck, though, because those cost a mint.”
I watched her for a few minutes, fascinated by the way she chose her subjects. A lot of her work was fairly close up, which gave me an idea. I shouldered her Minolta and jogged back to the van, came back with my macro lens.
“Here. Ever shoot macro?”
She smiled, nodded, but it was bittersweet. “I had a bunch of lenses for my Canon. Zoom, a macro lens as well as macro filters, a portrait prime. I fell asleep on the train with the camera bag under my feet, and when I woke up, it was gone.”
“People suck,” I answered.
A shrug. “Yeah, but there’s as many good people in the world as there are shitty ones. You just gotta focus on looking for the good.”
She switched my prime for the macro and immediately knelt in the dirt to get a series of shots of a big fluffy caterpillar inching along the side of the road. I returned to the corn rows after watching her for another minute or two, worked the solar flare angle again in black and white, and then tried some avant-garde, almost abstract views of the stalks and rows as geometric patterns of vertical lines and shadows.
We spent more than an hour before we’d gotten everything we wanted. The sun had fully set by that time, and the chilly awkwardness between Poppy and me seemed to have gone.
“You want to get to Dubuque and find somewhere to crash for the night?” I asked.
She nodded, and her eyes betrayed renewed lust. “Yeah,” she murmured. “Sounds good.”
It was another hour into Dubuque itself, and it took us twenty minutes to find a decent motel. We parked outside the office and went in together. The clerk behind the low counter was reading an Agatha Christie paperback, smoking a cigarette despite the “no smoking” placard above his head, feet propped on the desk, half-moo
n readers low on his nose. He was older, bald with a long gray beard, thin but with a round belly.
“Single king is seventy-five,” he said, without looking up from his book. “Pay now. Check out at noon or stop in to extend a night.”
I glanced at Poppy. “Uh.”
She smirked, snorted. “Don’t get weird on me now, Errol. One room.”
I shrugged. “Didn’t want to presume.”
She snorted again. “Well, I can’t say I don’t appreciate the sentiment, because I do, but I think at this point one room and one bed is a foregone conclusion.”
The clerk wasn’t amused by our banter. “Seventy-nine-fifty.”
I handed him my card, and he took it, swiped it, handed me the receipt to sign, took it, shoved it into a slot in the cash register drawer, handed me the customer copy…all one-handed, without even looking up from his book. He reached over his head, glanced up, pulled down an actual key on a ring attached to a large white plastic card with a red number 12 on it, tossed it onto the counter. Went back to his book. “Room twelve. Halfway down on the left.”
“Thanks,” I said, stuffing my card back into my wallet.
He just grunted, and ignored us.
Bemused, I led the way back out the van. Twelve was nearer the end than the middle, so I moved the van in front of the room. Poppy had the key, so she unlocked it and went in, immediately turned on the ancient air-con unit while I grabbed my suitcase and toiletries. Poppy grabbed her bag and went back into the room.
It was small, with fake wood beadboard paneling, popcorn ceiling, a ten-year-old TV with a cable box beside it, a single king bed covered in a scratchy-looking white comforter with four thin pillows. A decent bathroom with a bathtub and a showerhead I’d have to bend backward to fit under, a pedestal sink, and a rust-pitted mirror.
I saw Poppy glancing at the shower as she sat down on the bed and began unlacing her boots. “Go ahead and take the first shower,” I said.
“That would be amazing,” she said, sounding breathlessly grateful. “I smell awful. Haven’t had a shower in a few days.”