by CD Reiss
“You call dispatch, okay?”
“All right.”
I got out, and the car took off. I was alone in the middle of nowhere. Then I realized she could have left that little note at any time for any reason and I’d chased it like a puppy playing fetch.
The grass was knee-high, and leaves crunched underfoot. The trees were half-covered in red and brown leaves hanging on for dear life.
I walked perpendicular to the road and came to cracked pavement. Following it, a building appeared soon after. Red brick with green shingles, boarded windows, and poured concrete slab, it looked as if it had never been a major station. The archways had decorative stones over them, as if someone, at some time, had given a shit. I passed through the arch, into the station, through to the other side. The slab dropped off into grey gravel that led to rusted tracks.
I went into the station again. The floor was concrete. The walls were painted white under layers of graffiti. A locked door led behind the boarded-up ticket window. I scoured every surface for a message but found nothing.
Outside, I stepped onto the tracks. Facing north, they disappeared around a sharp turn. The fall leaves clicked in the wind, and the grass rustled with the movements of small animals. Rats. Squirrels, maybe. Groundhogs, if they had them out here. The clouds moved across the cyan sky so steadily I could have set my watch to them. Nothing else moved. Nothing else made a sound. I was locked in position, listening for changes as they snapped neatly into the continuity of time.
“It’s amazing what you can do despite the obstacles.” Harper’s voice cut through a daydream I didn’t know I was in the middle of. She came toward me from the north, walking on a track with her arms out for balance.
“You really work too hard to make a point.”
She wore mirrored sunglasses I hadn’t seen before. She dropped off the rail onto the ties. She wore a blue shirt under her open plaid car coat. It was unbuttoned, and her bra was red. The velvet swell of her tits curved into a sweet divot between them. Not too wide, not a straight, dark line. Just right for running my tongue over.
“I figured, since we’re stuck together,” she said, “we’d make the best of it.”
“No. That’s not what you figured.” I overacted in the reflection of her sunglasses. I had to look bigger, but holding my arms out and talking louder didn’t change the optics. “You’re showing me more despair. I get it, okay? This sucks.”
What did I see in her glasses?
A tiny man looking down her shirt.
I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.
“Do you remember Lucy Park?” she asked.
“Sure, I do.”
Lucy Park had been a sweet little Korean girl I’d done a first-year P-set with. She hadn’t had much experience with men before we started it. By the time the quarter was over, she could take my entire cock down to the balls.
“She was a TA in my Calc 2 class. Married. Going for her PhD.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“She said you taught her how to fuck.”
What the—?
The clouds moved at the same speed across the sky.
Calm down.
“We were both adults.”
Had Harper dug something up? Was I going to wish she’d done no more than hack my system? Was she trying to ruin my life even more?
“She said you taught her what men like.”
“I like grown women. I like them wet, and I like it when they want it. So if you’re going to make up a story that I assaulted her, you got the wrong guy.”
The line of her mouth curved a little, stretching the bottom crease. Her face was no more than a half smile and two miniature Taylors in the reflection of her glasses.
Crossing her arms, she unbuttoned the blue shirt. Her red bra was simple, unpadded, with a hook in the front. The thin fabric did nothing to hide her hard nipples.
“I was worried this would be uncomfortable.” She unhooked the bra. “But that was stupid of me.”
“Whoa, whoa.”
My hand was doubled and huge in her lenses. The bra fell away. Her tits were round, velvet, crested with soft pink.
“I have something you want.”
“Seriously?” Confused, irritated, disoriented, yet unable to keep from looking at her tits. The way they were proportioned against the curve of her waist. The shadow the sun cast on her belly. I stepped back, either to get away from her or get a good look at her. I wasn’t sure which.
“You want QI4 back. And I need something from you.”
I’d never been plied with sex before. Sex was casual and fun. She was using it to disorient me, and I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
I advanced on her, taking her breast with my right hand, closing in on the nipple as I took her mouth with my tongue. I was merciless on her tit and her lips, biting and pinching my annoyance. I pushed my cock against her.
When I pulled away, two of me looked back.
I ripped the sunglasses off her and threw them on the ground. Her blue-ringed irises stared back at me. If I looked close enough, I was in the pupils.
Fuck her.
I abused her nipple, twisting until her mouth opened a little.
Pain or pleasure? Both?
“I don’t like being manipulated,” I hissed through teeth that wanted to bite her again. “You didn’t hack me just to fuck me.” Leveraging her hips, I pushed my erection against her.
She shifted so her clit felt me. “Teach me.” Her breath was hot and damp. “Teach me how to do it.”
I let her nipple go and grabbed the whole breast. I wanted to come on it. Paint it with my semen. Run my fingers through it and shove them down her throat. “Why?”
“Each thing you teach me, I’ll release—” She gasped as I moved against her. “I’ll release part of QI4.”
“Tell me why.”
“No.”
I bit her lower lip. That lying little crease. She squeaked in pain, and I made her suffer before letting go.
“You have men here.”
“I don’t want to be fucked like a princess.”
I took her chin in a hand still warm from her breast. “Why? You’ll waste what I teach you on them anyway.”
She pushed me so hard I nearly fell back. Good. She should be mad. She should be as pissed off and horny as I was.
“Now you listen to me.” She bent slightly at the waist, as if she was ready to attack. Her tits went from objects of desire to objects of power. “You’re going to do what I’m asking you to do. You’re going to take as long as you need to. Teach me how to kiss for your boot loader. You’ll get your master boot sector back when I can use my hands. Your object code when I can suck a cock. And the source code is released when I know how to fuck.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I am. I’m out of my fucking mind. I’m nuts from seeing my friends die. From my sister crying all night. From these fucking drugs everyone drives a hundred miles to get. The filth in the water and the air’s fucked my brain so bad I can’t even think straight.”
No. Her shouting, her tension, her growling conviction, told me… no.
Yes, but no. I was sure she was telling the truth about the things she saw, and I was sure she was unhappy and upset about the deterioration around her. But she wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t even sure she was truly as desperate as she wanted me to think she was. Maybe she was three steps from actual crazy desperation and she could see it coming, which would make her smart, shrewd, and very sane. She was what my grandmother would have called “crazy like a whorehouse priest.”
I knew I’d deal with the priest; I’d just never thought I’d be the whore.
I held up my hands, stepping onto the track as if standing a few inches taller would make a difference.
The rail vibrated underfoot.
“What you’re asking? It’s crazy. But you’re not,” I said. “So I need to know why. I need to know what kind of plan I’m playing into.”
“Did you ever nee
d to know a woman’s reasons for fucking you? What’s the difference now? You do what you’d do if we met in some bar in SanJo. I do what I’d do if I was feeling charitable.”
“That’s a real achievement in compartmentalization.”
The rail tremors underfoot sharpened, increasing with the faraway rattle of an engine.
“Trains still running on this line?” I asked.
“Yeah. Freight.”
The tremors increased, and the steady silence was broken by a rumble. She didn’t move her shirt down; it stayed bunched above her tits, tangled in her bra.
“They just pass Barrington?”
“At a hundred miles an hour.”
I stepped off the rail. I wasn’t in the mood to get run down. Standing close to her, she was a few inches taller, but still not taller than me.
“You can hear it,” I said softly. “Same as I can.”
“I know when to get off.”
“Fine.” I turned my back on her.
One step. Two. Was she getting off the rail? Was she really crazy? The rumble got louder, punctuated by clicks and clacks.
Basic stopping distance equals velocity squared over two times the coefficient of friction times the acceleration = unknown variables=tonnage, grade, maintenance, which means even best case, the train needs half a mile to—
Fuck this. When I turned to run toward her, she was still on the track. I grabbed her arm and yanked her away as the train came around the turn. I pulled her to the station as the freight train flew by. Without her sunglasses, I could see the determination in her eyes.
I’d lost a game of chicken. The simplest zero-sum game in the lexicon. Too simple for either of us.
“You just proved exactly nothing,” I said.
“I grew up here. I told you I knew when to move.” She buttoned her shirt without hooking her bra. “But you still felt the need to save me. See? You’re not a total asshole. But that’s me. So let’s pretend this is about you and me. Just us. Not about Barrington or the people in it.”
“I’m not touching you again.”
“Yeah. All right. Sure.” She stepped back, swaggering. “You need a lift back?”
Of course I did, and she knew it. But fuck her. I wasn’t getting into a car with her.
“No.”
“Suit yourself.” She left the station and disappeared into the trees, ass swaying like a lure.
A few seconds later, her Chevy pulled out from the cover of the trees and onto the two-lane blacktop. Then she was gone.
XXI
Turned out I didn’t have two quarters. I had ten credit cards, a twenty, and an emergency fifty-dollar bill jammed into the corner of my wallet. It was just as well. I had no idea where Harper had gone, and I needed a minute to think before I ran off half-cocked.
Walking on the shoulder in the direction Harper had driven, I tried to get my head around her offer.
I’d been pursued before. I wasn’t so much of a predator that I only fucked what I chased. But this girl was insane. She’d gutted my life so I’d teach her how to fuck? It would have been easier to fly out to San Jose and shake her little tits at me. Sell those earrings for a nice hotel room.
My mind slid into the possibilities inside a hotel room, and now that I had full visual on the tit situation, I could get really detailed about it.
In every fantasy, Deepak texted to say there was no problem. We were ready to roll with GreyHatC0n. Without his messages, I couldn’t touch her. Not even in a fantasy hotel room.
The route was a single lane in each direction, weaving through a lightly wooded forest. Not much traffic in the first hour. Three cars going in my direction and one coming the opposite way. I didn’t put my thumb out for the first hour of walking, and only one truck slowed down to ask where I was going. The guy looked like a traveling salesman in a cheap suit with a passenger seat loaded with fast food bags. I waved him on.
I missed my phone.
How was Deepak going to contact me to tell me how fucked up it was that I couldn’t sacrifice a little sex with a beautiful girl to save the company? How was I going to imagine the incredulity on his face when I told him how hot she was? That under normal circumstances, I would have taken her twelve ways from Tuesday? And she didn’t want a commitment. Just a crash course in how to please a guy, with the first lucky guy being me.
Despite the fact that Harper had the keys to a lock I needed opened, she freaked me out. I didn’t trust she’d do what she promised.
And it didn’t matter.
Man, her body.
And the way she let me kiss her. Like she was receiving the kiss. That was what it was. She was learning it as I did it.
The buzz and rumble of a car coming from behind me woke my mind up to the pain in my feet and the time of day. The sun was getting low in the sky, and I was just going to have to stick out my thumb.
The SUV passed with the driver staring at my thumb and me. Then two more. I must have gotten to a more used part of the road. All the cars had local plates. All the drivers were women. If I was a woman, I wouldn’t have stopped for me either.
The forest broke, and I was walking along open plain.
The rumble of a motorcycle cut the air as it passed. A motorcycle with a sidecar. I stuck my thumb out even though the back of a motorcycle or a deathtrap sidecar weren’t what I had in mind. The bike stopped. The driver wore a leather vest that should have scared me, but I was tired and hungry. The back graphic said Lord Of Rust in old English lettering and had roses twined around the chemical formula for oxidized iron.
Odd. Odd in every way.
The ninety-five pound uhff-ing dog was in the sidecar with its tongue lolling. Johnny swung his leg over the seat, and we met in the space between us. His corporate polo was gone in favor of a T-shirt that said, “Horologists Take Their Time.”
“Nice afternoon for a walk,” he said. “Unless you don’t wanna get robbed by a bunch of broke motherfuckers with tattoos.”
“You gonna rob me?”
“Shit. I ain’t no motherfucker.” He smiled to let me know he wasn’t offended. “Where you headed?”
“The Barrington place. I’m headed in the completely wrong direction, aren’t I?”
He shrugged. “Depends how much walking you’re fixing to do. Nobody picking up hitchers these days. Even nice white boys.”
“Why’s that?”
“Double murder a few months back. They found the guy, but everyone’s skittish.”
“Was he a nice white boy?”
“Yep. Nice haircut and an Oxycontin habit. Started like a regular robbery then went all wrong. Cops couldn’t figure out if the hitcher was a bigger moron than the driver, but there was plenty of stupid to go around that night. I don’t know what gets into people. They get a gun and have ideas. Gonna be a hero. Prove something. Shoot a guy who’s high on painkillers in the knee and think the pain’s gonna stop him from turning the gun back on you.”
“Great story. Really.”
“I have more.”
I looked up the road, then back down it, then at the dog in the sidecar.
“Come on.” He clapped me on the shoulder and stepped backward toward the bike. “I’ll take you back if you don’t mind sharing a sidecar with Redox.”
“Redox?”
“Yeah, the—”
“Oxidation reduction process. Dude.”
“Kids are gone, so a guy’s gotta have hobbies, right? Mine’s science.” He pointed at me then at the dog. “This here’s a nice city boy,” he told Redox. “That’s a fancy jacket, and it ain’t gonna hurt you. Be good.”
“Does he bite?” I asked.
“‘Course he bites. No point otherwise. Your other option is to ride bitch with your arms around me, but you’d have to kiss me first.”
I got into the sidecar. Redox was in the middle of the seat, and from the way he looked me straight in the eye, he had no intention of moving for a white boy in a nice jacket. I squeezed in where I could. Johnny
handed me a black military helmet and took off back toward town.
XXII
Johnny made a stop at the gas station, and I got to the register in time to pay for his cigarettes and some beef jerky. He spent a bunch of time talking to the guy behind the counter about off-gassing pipes and toxins. The guy laid his hands over his plaid-stretched gut and nodded. I got the feeling Johnny was like the town idiot, except he was really the town savant.
“You know Harper went to MIT, right?” he said.
“Yeah,” I replied. “She’s pretty smart.”
“We was all proud of her. Then she came back for that fuck of a father. He shoulda croaked faster. Done us all a favor.”
“Harper said everyone loved him.”
“Feed them enough barbecue, and they’ll love you.”
“I’ll remember that.”
He tossed me the black helmet. Redox hadn’t budged.
“Is the Barrington place far?” I asked.
“Let’s get something to eat first.”
“I’m buying.”
“Damn right, you are.”
He took me across three empty parking lots and a light industrial service road behind an abandoned brick structure. We landed in a dark bar right out of a movie. It smelled of stale beer and cigarettes and sounded like treble-heavy speakers and clicking resin pool balls. There was no sign out front.
Johnny pointed at a seat at the bar and introduced me to Kyle, Damon, Reggie, Curtis, and Butthead. A mug of beer and a shot of something amber appeared at my elbow.
“You were up at the Barrington place last night.” Damon pulled on his long goatee.
“This is the California guy Harper found.” Reggie handed me my shot and held up his own. I was apparently expected to drink it.
“Found?” I said.
“Knew each other in college, ain’t that right?” Johnny added.
“Those girls pick up strays where they find ‘em,” Kyle said. “They’re all right.”
Damon grumbled something behind his beer.
“Crazy broads,” Reggie added, smiling as if they were his own special crazy broads.