by Raen Smith
I conjure an image of Piper in a plaid skirt and knee-high socks. It makes my knees weak.
“Middle school?”
“No one should ever talk about middle school.”
“You’re probably right.”
“How about you? What was it like to be Cash Rowland?”
“I can’t say I went to expensive schools and wore skirts.” I shrug my shoulders.
“Thank God. What’s Big Dave like?” She’s leaning in closer, just inches away.
“He’s uh—something else,” I start. “No, he’s actually pretty great, all things considered. Completely normal childhood with Transformers and Spiderman and a spiritually-enlightened dad who let me do whatever made me happy. After my mom died, I guess he went pretty crazy trying to find the right spiritual path. He had some crazy therapist-slash-spiritual healer named Shaman Amy that helped him through it. It turned out okay for me, considering he’s probably the most laid back parent I’ve ever met. Watched a lot of movies, went to a Catholic high school, and lived a super normal, boring, well-adjusted life.”
“Sounds pretty great,” she whispers.
“So, now I know some more things about you. You wish your childhood was filled with Spiderman. Plus, you’re sexy as hell and incredibly irresistible.” I reach out and hold her face in my hand. Her jaw stops moving. I tilt her head up, and she runs her tongue against her upper lip. I don’t know if she’s trying to turn me on even more than I already am, and although I think it’s impossible, she somehow does.
“I probably have chocolate on my lips,” she whispers as she lifts her head toward mine.
“Let me help you with that,” I whisper and move toward her. Her eyelashes flutter before she closes her eyes and her breath catches. I close mine and lean further until my lips feel the warmth of hers. A jolt spreads through my body as my lips move against hers, tasting the peach of Piper that I missed for so long. She moves her lips softly against mine, slow at first with a longing that mimics my own. A small sound escapes from her lips, and I press a little faster, the urgency in my body flowing onto her lips.
Five years of waiting floods through my body.
My hand caresses her cheek as she suddenly slows her lips and finally pulls back a few inches. She’s breathing hard as she presses her forehead against mine. My hand is still on her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“For what?” I ask, running my finger lightly across her skin. “If it’s for stopping, then I know a way to remedy that.”
“I’m sorry for lying about where I was going. I never should have told you that I was going to California,” she says. Her eyelashes fall down like a curtain.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say. “All that matters is that we’re together now. We’re both here, on this blanket together, and we have another chance. I found you, and I don’t want to lose you again.”
Her eyes sear through me, but she doesn’t say anything. I just listen to her breathe, and I swear I can hear her think about all the reasons why we shouldn’t be together. The universe, she thinks over and over.
A cloud snuffs out the blades of sun that warmed us just seconds ago and a spring breeze brushes against us. Then she whispers three words that cut me like a knife, “We should go.”
***
The next three hours are filled with fast-food burgers and biochemistry. Piper pulled out her textbook from class and was running through questions.
Piper: What’s the second simplest amino acid?
Me: Alanine.
Piper: What’s the first?
Me: Glycine.
Piper: Enzymes are divided into how many categories?
Me: Six.
Piper: What are the categories?
Me: I don’t know.
“How can you possibly know this stuff?” she asks, biting the end of her pen.
To most people, that little action doesn’t mean anything. But for me, that pen between her teeth does me in. I know in this very moment that Piper is one deliberate girl, and more importantly, she isn’t letting on how she feels about me. For just a second I think I should pull out all the cards. I should lay everything out in front of us. Call a spade a spade. But I don’t. I want to savor this. After all, it’s only the first day.
“I don’t know. I just do. I read a lot. Well, I used to anyway. Now that I’m in the truck all the time, I’m kind of an audiobook freak.” I answer her question and try to ignore the pen.
“You read a lot? Most normal people read the newspaper or read a novel or read about random useless stuff on the internet like how many Blow Pops are in a bag or why the sky is blue. They’ll get the latest Dan Brown audiobook every five years.”
She’s right, most normal people do waste their time on being entertained with impractical information, and I wasn’t totally exempt from that, but I gravitate toward scientific facts. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a house with Big Dave where the spiritual world defied science at almost every turn. I had to ground myself in something other than the balance of my chakras or the orientation of Orion or the flow of Qi or whatever the hell he went on about in a particular week. And whether I knew it or not, I did want to find an explanation for the inexplicable: my Luella Intuition.
“You should take the test for me.” She closes her book, and shuts off the light on her phone. She stashes her things in her bag. The dash glimmers a pulse of yellow between us.
“I somehow doubt you’ll do badly considering you somehow managed a faultless score on the SAT.”
“Still not over the fact that I beat you, huh?” she asks. I can hear the smile in her voice. “In all seriousness, you should consider going back to school, Cash.”
“We’ll see.” I stare straight at the glowing white lines of the road. Medical school is the furthest thing from my mind right now. I can barely keep my eyes open, I’ve logged about as many hours as I can on the day. Stopping the truck means one thing, and I’m eager for the possibilities.
“Well, that’s my goal for this trip,” she says as if a light bulb popped over her head. “You can try to convince me that we should be together, and I’ll try to convince you to go to medical school.”
“I think I’ve already got it in the bag,” I reply.
“We’ll see.”
“Let’s pull off here. There’s a stop just a half-mile ahead. As much as I don’t want to subject you to the shady business of a truck stop at night, there’s no better place to be with a load in the back like mine.”
“What’s in the back?”
“Copper.”
“Copper?”
“Yeah, I’m hauling about three hundred grand of copper. It’ll be used for electric wires or pipes. It’s expensive stuff.”
The truck’s dash marks a bright 11:00 as I wind into the truck stop on the tip of Tennessee. Dozens of trucks already line the huge slab of asphalt, and within the next two hours the place will be filled like a pack of cigarettes, each truck in its place, just enough room to get in and out. I pull Cash Money up to an empty slot and turn off the engine. All that’s left is the girl and me.
“So that’s it? Day one is complete?” she asks.
“Not yet. I’ve got a TV in the back if you’re interested in finishing up that date of ours. Plus, we didn’t crack open the wine yet.” While I don’t typically drink during my nights on the road, Piper is cause for celebration. A drink could ease the nervous edge. Okay, more than a nervous edge.
“Man, modern technology is astounding. The only thing missing is a shower and toilet on this thing. Otherwise, it’s a bona fide house on wheels.”
“Welcome to Casa de Cash Money,” I reply, sweeping my hand in a grand gesture toward the platform that serves as my bed. I flip on the dome light and reach behind the seat to grab my stack of DVDs. “I have three choices for my lady as the Casa is fresh out of streaming services. The choices are, in no particular order, Big Fish, Clue, and the first season of Game of Thrones.”
; “That is the most bizarre selection of choices. I’m not sure what to think about your taste in movies.”
I shoot her a sheepish grin. “Maybe we should ask one of the drivers next to us. They might have something to suit your tastes.”
“Yeah, like A Romp to Remember or maybe Alice in Underpants?”
“Or what about Saturday Night –”
“Don’t finish that one,” she laughs, waving her hand in front of her face. “Please, God, whatever you do, don’t finish that one. Why do truck drivers have such a bad reputation? I’m sure ninety percent of the guys are decent human beings who are just working hard…”
“Ninety percent?” I laugh. “Do you think ninety percent of the world’s population is decent? If so, you’re completely naïve. You should see what Viv pulls out of some of these trucks. She had to fire someone once, and he didn’t have time to go back to clean out his truck. She came out of that cab with a penis pump and a sticky BDSM magazine.”
“Aw, come on. I didn’t know people actually bought penis pumps. Well, when you put it that way, your selection doesn’t seem so bad after all.”
“Driving truck ain’t an easy life, ma’am,” I say in my best redneck accent. I tip the brim of my fake hat toward her.
“Did you just say ain’t? You’ve been hanging around this neck of the woods for too long. It’s time to get rolling on that education of yours.”
“Pick a movie. Otherwise, you’ll be subjected to my latest podcast of abdominal systemic and portal venous systems.”
“You have no idea how much you just turned me on, Cash Rowland.” Her lips curve up as she narrows her eyes. She runs her tongue between her lips before she breaks out into laughter. “Game of Thrones. I’ve been too busy to see what all the fuss is about, even though die-hard Kelly has tried to get me to watch it with him.”
“What’s with this Kelly guy anyway? Should I be worried about him?” I climb to the back, open a cabinet to the fifteen inch screen, and pop in the DVD.
“I don’t play house well with other girls. It probably has something to do with me being an only child and everything. Add an absent father and the hopping of secondary education experiences, which equated to the diagnosis and symptom of ‘new girl,’” she replies. “I met Kelly two years ago after an event downtown in Madison. We hit it off, and he asked me to move in with him two weeks later since he was looking for a roommate and I was looking for a place to live. Made sense, and we’ve been living together ever since.”
“What kind of event?” I sit down on the bed.
“MMA.”
“His event?”
She nods her head, grabs the bottle of wine and climbs back toward me.
“So your roommate’s a cage fighter?”
“Was,” she laughs as she falls down next to me. “But he isn’t exactly what you would expect from an ex-cage fighter.”
“I don’t want to know. Let’s watch the show. Are you into blood, sex, and fight to the death for honor kind of thing?” I wrangle past her to turn off the lights of the cab as the show begins to play.
“Who isn’t?” She jingles a key chain, flips open a small metal corkscrew, and winds it into the bottle. She stops, noticing my awe. “There’s a mini-blade on the other side of this thing. I always carry it wherever I go. It was a gift from my dad on my twenty-first birthday. Pretty great, huh? I told you he wasn’t one hundred percent jerk, just maybe sixty.”
“It’s pretty great. I never want you to stop surprising me.”
“Don’t worry,” she says before she takes a pull from the bottle and hands it to me. “There’s plenty more to come.”
I take a swig, letting the cheap cabernet burn down my throat. As a general rule I hate all wine, but I’d drink just about anything, except my own urine unless for survival purposes, for the girl next to me. I pass the bottle to Piper before I reach behind her for two pillows, smelling her sweet fragrance. I linger for a second, inhaling with a selfishness that knows no bounds, until I relent and prop the pillows against the wall. The bed awaits.
This is where said girl’s stomach fills with butterflies, a warmth stirring deep inside her gut that radiates to her thighs. Her face flushes and her toes curl at the thought of lying next to the handsome man that she can’t possibly imagine keeping her hands off of. All she wants to do is taste him, feel his strong arms wrapped around her body and nuzzle her head into his hard chest.
Except this is Piper Sullivan. She knows how to pop every man’s dream bubble before he can blink his eyes.
“I’ve got to get some air.” Her body suddenly shoots up, and she squeezes between the seats with the sloshing bottle of wine in her hand.
POP.
My balloon is a sad little heap of latex on the ground.
“Piper.” It’s a declarative statement, not a question. I’m not asking her to come back, but I say her name as if it will be enough to bring her back. She doesn’t stop at the pain in my voice.
“I just need a sec,” she says as she reaches for the door. The forgotten winter brushes against my face as the door swings open.
“You’re not going out there alone, I can’t let you –”
BANG.
The cool air stops and the strings and thumping drums of the opening credits of Game of Thrones blare behind me. I lurch toward the door and tumble out into the April night.
She’s already half-way down the runway lights of my trailer, her hair bouncing back and forth as her pink shoes paddle against the asphalt.
Piper Sullivan is fodder out here in the diesel jungle.
“Wait,” I yell in panic as I sprint toward her. There’s no way I’m letting her out of my sight. She reaches the end of the trailer before I get to her, and I pull her arm harder than I want to. Her body bends back with the force making her stop and turn toward me.
“Cash, just give me a second.” She shoves me in the chest but forgets to take her hands back. Her fingertips are resting on my chest, waiting.
I bring my hands up to hers slowly and clasp them around hers. “I’ll give you all the time you need out here. Minutes, hours, the whole night, but I can’t let you out of my sight. Not here. It’s not safe. You’re one sweet, irresistible taste of candy for these guys. They’ll be swarmed on you like ants before you know it.”
“Weird metaphor,” she breathes. “But I get your point.”
My heart pounds through our hands resting on my chest. I feel the beat pulse through us both. She stares at me through the dim glow of the trailers surrounding us before she pushes up on her tiptoes and lightly grazes her lips against mine. The kiss is a sweet wisp of flavor that’s gone before I know it. She plants her heels on the ground before she turns and pulls my hand with her.
We walk in silence for a few minutes as I try to keep track of how far we’ve gone, but the rows of trailers are blurring with each step. I just feel her hand, light in mine, and the gentle swing of her body. We walk together just like the couples celebrating their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary with their coordinating outfits and three-tiered cake. Just like my grandparents, who never spent a day apart in their marriage or death. Grandpops Harry suffered from a heart attack just hours after Grams passed away in her sleep. Like they say, he died from broken heart.
Piper Sullivan had shattered my heart, ground it into dust, and now was somehow sweeping it back together, slowly and painfully.
A woman’s cry abruptly slices through the sky, stopping us. We’re frozen behind a trailer, both dreading and waiting for another sound.
“LET GO!” The woman’s muffled scream snaps us to the left between two trailers. The scuffling of feet and a struggle echoes, calling us closer.
Piper squeezes my hand and glances up at me with determination I both admire and loathe because I realize quickly how much more courageous she is than me. Don’t get me wrong, we both know what we have to do in this type of situation, but she doesn’t hesitate like the rest of us. We’ll play out the possible dangers of the scenar
ios. She doesn’t weigh the possibilities or the outcome, not for one second. It’s admirable because her lack of indecision and indifference to danger could mean the world to someone else. I rise to her ridiculous lack of trepidation, and we tiptoe toward the noise.
A man in a cowboy hat has his hands wrapped all over a woman in red-heeled shoes that sparkle like a kaleidoscope in the trailer lights. The spikes of her heels are dragging and clattering against the asphalt like nails on a chalkboard. Then he hits her. Nothing much else registers in my head besides these three things. Cowboy hat. Red shoes. Smack.
“We have to,” Piper whispers.
I listen to her real close. Maybe too close.
Chapter 9
Someone once told me that you become a man when you punch another man in the face. I don’t know who the hell gave me those pearly words of wisdom, but I’m about to heed those words and enter manhood as I know it.
“Hey asshole,” Piper yells as she breaks my grip. I try to hold tighter, but she’s storming toward the couple. The distraction makes the Cowboy hesitate just long enough for the woman to break free from his hands. The red shoes clatter toward us and reach Piper first, who wraps her arms around the woman. I dart past the huddled women and tell them to run.
I clench my fist, but all I can think about is who told me that lousy piece of advice and how bad this is going to hurt. I wind back my arm and know the seconds are closing in before the jerk in front of me connects his fist into my face if I don’t get to him first. I know without a doubt, by the way his body moves and the way the rage flashes in his eyes and the way he hit that woman with the red heels that this Cowboy is already a man. Probably a dozen times over. I wonder what number I would be if I don’t move my hand.