Goode Vibrations

by Jasinda Wilder

  Ate all the food, sharing the various options.

  More coffee.

  All without talking much… at all.

  * * *

  Fucked again, slowly.

  Wordlessly. Missionary.

  Her eyes on mine, an aching tumult of unspoken things weltering and billowing between us as our bodies met and joined and crashed.

  She bit my chest and clawed welting lines into my shoulders, and I left fingerprint bruises on her hips from jerking her into me to get deeper, harder, because for as hard as I fucked, as deep as I got, she begged breathlessly for harder, deeper.

  I kissed the bruises, and she licked my welts.

  * * *

  Still, we spoke of nothing real, or meaningful.

  Noon came, after a nap and we finished the last, cold coffee.

  * * *

  Finally, out of food and out of coffee, we both showered and dressed in clean clothes. Me, in convertible shorts that looked like normal dressy golf-ish shorts, but were made of quick-dry togs material, and a clean tank top; her, in cutoff denim shorts that only just barely covered the juicy globes of her taut round ass, so that the underswells were visible for a tantalizing moment at each step, and a seafoam green V-neck T-shirt. I had the unique and breathtaking pleasure of watching her dress, which was nearly as erotic to me as if I’d gotten to watch her strip.

  She wore a blue thong under her shorts, a minuscule string around her waist with a triangle of shimmery, stretchy fabric cupping her sex and another string stretched between her ass cheeks. Her bra matched, and was equally provocative, a pushup style which added extra size and lift to already massive and tight tits, so the lush weight of her breasts filled and overfilled and spilled out of the half-moon cups, leaving her nipples mostly covered and the upper half of each areola bared. Then she had the audacity to cover the artwork that was her body with stupid clothes, which somehow only made her all the more beautiful, in a different way.

  She watched me watch her dress and gave an extra shimmy as she wedged herself into the shorts, a teasing grin on her face which told me she knew exactly what she was doing to me with that little wiggle.

  We packed our things.

  There was a heated, volatile tension crackling between us. Sexual chemistry sparking, waiting to be ignited by a look, a word, a touch.

  But there was something else. Something darker. Heavier. Sadder.

  A sense of ending.

  Once our bags were packed and all that was left was to leave, we stood facing each other at the foot of the bed. Her hands were shoved into the back pockets of her shorts, her hair done in twin braids hanging down to her shoulder blades. Eying me, a million things percolating in those cocoa eyes.

  We’d spoken maybe half a dozen words each since last night, as if beginning a conversation would hasten the end we both knew had arrived.

  “So…” I swallowed. “You’re headed toward Alaska?”

  She nodded. “Yep. Figured I’d see some of Canada.”

  “I was thinking I’d make my way to the west coast, and then make a big loop down into those big states with the four corners that all touch. Can’t remember all of them.”

  Silence.

  “So, you’re heading west, and I’m heading north from here,” Poppy said, and her expression showed a hint of sadness, regret. “I guess this is it, then, huh?”

  Something within me wanted to argue. To say or do something. Go west with me. We can go north from California. I don’t need to be anywhere specific.

  Instead, I just nodded. “Guess it is.”

  She just waited. Gazed up at me, a soft glow to her eyes. “Thank you, Errol.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  A shrug. “A good time. Good conversation. Taking photos together.” She glanced at the bed, smirked. “And…that.”

  I shook my head, huffing a laugh. “You’re thanking me?” I shook my head again. “I’m the one who should thank you, Poppy. That was…fucking unreal. Especially the way you woke me up.”

  She blushed, ducking her head. “I mean, I’m a practical sort of gal. Not gonna let a good erection go to waste, you know?” a hot, lusty grin. “Besides, you more than paid me back.”

  I groaned. “We have to get off this topic.”

  Poppy snickered. “Get off the topic, huh?”

  “Bloody hell, Pop,” I laughed, “You’re such a hard case.”

  She blinked in confusion. “Hard case?”

  “Funny. A comedian.”

  “Oh. In American slang, a hard case is, like, a tough guy.” Her gaze went back to the bed. “I just showered, brushed my teeth, and dressed, or I’d suggest another go for old time’s sake.”

  I let my eyes communicate how I felt about that. “Probably for the best we don’t,” I said, in contradiction to what I wanted, what I felt, what I thought. “We did, we’d spend another day here, in that bed.”

  “What’s stopping us?” Poppy asked, eyes wide.

  “Nothing.”

  A moment, a tableau, in which we both considered the outcome of another day spent fucking, eating, talking.

  It was the talking that had me shutting down. Talking would lead to questions neither of us was brave enough to answer. And I saw Poppy come to the same conclusion.

  “You go first,” she said.

  I swallowed. “I don’t like just leaving you here.”

  She smiled, bright and brave. “I walked from Manhattan to where you found me, Errol. I’m good.”

  “I know. It’s not about what I think you’re capable of, it’s…how I feel about it. Doesn’t seem right to just drive away and leave you on foot.”

  Something crossed her face, then, fleeting but intense. “I know,” she said, cheerful and peppy. “But I chose to go on foot. And I’ll get a ride at some point. It’s fine, Errol. I’ve got this.” A pause. She swallowed, and I wondered how much acting she was doing. “I’m good. Promise.”

  I scraped my damp hair back from my face. Shoved my sunnies higher on my head. “Yeah…yeah, you’re good.” I sighed. “Okay, then. I…it’s a weird goodbye, isn’t it?”

  She nodded and shrugged. “Yeah, it kind of is.”

  “So…goodbye.” Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Bye, Poppy. It was…it was amazing to have to known you.”

  “To have known me biblically, you mean?” she said, smirking.

  I groaned. “You gotta stop with the suggestive jokes or they’ll stop being suggestive.” I met her smirk with my own. “But yes, Poppy Goode, it was incredible to have had the privilege of knowing you biblically.”

  She closed her eyes, briefly. Opened them again, and it seemed to me she forced the smile. “Goodbye, Errol.”

  I shouldered my bags, opened the door. Stood on the threshold, looked back at her. “See ya.”

  Turned, tossed my stuff in the campervan, drove away. Poppy was in the doorway, hands still in her back pockets, leaning against the doorpost, watching. Waved once, as I backed out of the parking space.

  Drove away, then. Hit the junction and went west.

  Alone once more, I should have been excited about the next leg of my journey. Instead, the van just felt…empty.

  A mile, two. Radio off, window down.

  It was a beautiful day, sunny, warm, clear blue skies. I even found an amazing highway-side ghost town, the diner empty as if waiting for cars and customers and cooks and waitresses, a mechanic shop with roll-down doors like sad eyes, a gas station with twin petrol pumps like aged sentinels. There was even a newspaper rolling listlessly down the street, blown by a lazy stream of wind.

  I spent forty-five minutes there, and got a couple hundred wonderful shots.

  It wasn’t the same.

  I drove on, west, and the farther I went, the more my gut ached.

  Finally, an hour and a half west of Dubuque, I found myself pulling off onto the shoulder. Outside my van, watching a lone cow idly browsing among a patch of clover.

  Wondering what was wrong with me.


  Why didn’t I enjoy the open road, now? The quiet, the solitude. The endless possibility.

  The answer was obvious.

  Her.

  She made everything seem…more alive. Better. Brighter. Possibilities seemed…shinier.

  The open road held potential, with her in the van. Now it just seemed like an endless journey to no purpose.

  Why had we separated? I could have gone north with her.

  Could have, or should have?

  Was it just the sex that was appealing? Sure, it had been, by several orders of magnitude, the best sex of my life, and not because she’d woken me up with her mouth on my cock. The way we’d fucked had been…intense. Not just erotic, but…

  Dammit.

  Meaningful.

  The answer to everything hit me like a lorry going 120 km/hr.

  We’d separated because to stay together would have meant opening up the old wounds. We’d fucked a couple times, but to go beyond that, to remain together, traveling, meaningless, idle conversation would run out—had run out already. We’d butted up against the sad bits, as I’d called them. My own and hers.

  I hated talking about Mom, about Dad. Hated sounding all poor-me. Hated bringing any of it up. Hated the pity, the compassion, the sorrow. Hated the discussions of how it had affected me. Hated all of it. Wanted to just…bury it all behind miles of highway, behind stories, behind professional achievements, behind life.

  And getting close to a woman meant opening all that up. Trust me, I’d tried. I once spent six months in one place, and it had not turned out well. Perth, two years ago. I’d done all short-hop assignments and stayed local to Perth, and I’d gotten friendly and then more than friendly with a surfer/bartender named Leslie. Blond hair in a chic, easy-maintenance bob, green eyes, small tits and a sizable ass that looked great in a wet suit; she’d had a penchant for cowgirl, and was prone to gushy sentiment afterward. She would claim, outside the heat of the moment and afterglow, that she wasn’t looking for love, but during? She always wanted an emotional availability from me that I just wasn’t capable of. Hadn’t been capable of then, and wasn’t now.

  She’d always been after me to talk about things. About my tragedies, about how they’d shaped me. She shared hers without reservation, and god was she brave about it—dad never in the picture, mum with a slew of shitty boyfriends, one of whom had abused her mum physically and Leslie sexually, but she’d chosen to not let it make her hard and broken and chose to trust men, as long as they earned and kept her trust.

  Inspiring, beautiful. She was a great woman, Leslie.

  But she’d confronted me one night. Late, after a double-round of sex. She’d stood naked in her bedroom and demanded that I either open up or fuck off. She wanted a partner for life, not just sex. Someone who trusted her with himself, with his heart.

  So I’d fucked off. Told her I wasn’t ready for that, maybe never would be, and I was sorry. Packed my things that night and hopped a red-eye for Thailand, where Jerry had been after me to go for a piece on jungle temples.

  Standing on the side of the road, I realized that now, finally, twenty-four years of buried shit was bubbling up, and that I’d finally come to a point where I had to find someone I trusted to hear it, to understand it, and me.

  And I had.

  She hadn’t pushed me for it. If anything, she’d been only too eager to avoid talking about mine for fear of having to talk about hers.

  I’d made the wrong choice.

  I should have gone north.

  Should have taken that moment, there in that motel room in Dubuque, when we’d been faced with the choice to either jump in or run, and we’d chosen to run.

  I’d been running all my life.

  Time to stop running, I think.

  I had no idea what I would do. What it would look like, feel like, where it would lead me. But I had to do something different, this time. This empty feeling, this…missing her was different. I’ve never missed anyone, before. Never let anyone in far enough that my emotions got involved to the point of suddenly missing them…needing them.

  All I knew was that something was drawing me not west, but back to her. Maybe she’d tell me I was barking up the wrong tree. Maybe she wouldn’t be ready to open up her past to me. Shit, I had no idea where to start, or how to open up. Closing off was a familiar instinct. Staying aloof, staying cool. Keep the past in the past. The present is now, and the future is yet to be written, so what’s the point in rummaging through old pain?

  Why do it at all? Where would it go? Our paths had crossed for, what, forty-eight, sixty-some hours? Two days, not quite three. Some sex, some conversation.

  Say we open up—say I do, she does. We share our pasts and have the whole talk about everything, the thing we’d both been avoiding. Then what?

  She comes with me on all my travels? That’s not her life. And mine isn’t in Alaska, that’s for fucking certain. So, then what?

  Fuck if I knew.

  I just knew I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t go find her, and at least try.

  Took close to two hours to get back to the motel. Well past noon by then. The day clerk was a woman, grandmother age and friendly.

  “Oh, the lovely young dear in room twelve?” she mused, upon me asking. “She left hours ago, I’m afraid. Just after my shift started. On foot, bless her heart. Headed for the junction, I think. There’s a gas station there at the corner, you might ask Darnell if he saw her.”

  Darnell was a black man with a shaved head and a neat goatee and wire-frame glasses. “Yeah, I saw her,” he said, glancing up at me as he counted out the cash in the till drawer. “White girl with li’l bitty booty shorts, an’ a big ol’ backpack. Came in…oh, three, almost four hours ago. She bought…let’s see.” He glanced away, thinking. “Beef jerky, and filled one of those plastic hiking bottles with water from the drinkin’ fountain over there. What else she buy? Oh, I know…candy—M&Ms, Skittles, and…some of them gummy fish in the yellow and blue bags. Swedish fish.”

  “Which way did she go after she left here?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  I felt her path, felt the pull northward.

  Darnell gestured at the northward spur. “Thataway.” He eyed me, then. “Let a keeper get away, did you?”

  I laughed at his insight. “Yeah, mate, I sure did.”

  He patted a handful of cash into a neat stack. “Well, good luck to you, son. Hope you find her.”

  “Me, too.”

  Northward, then. Slow, watching the shoulders. Watching side roads, dirt roads, tracks that led off into nothing.

  Afternoon sun faded into orange, and the hours found me having made the trip from the junction where US-61 crossed the river east before breaking off into US-151 and US-61, going east and north and west and north, respectively, all the way to Sparta, where WI-27 met I-90. Almost two and a half hours, 117 miles. It seemed impossible that she’d have made it that far, but if she’d found a ride anything was possible. Finding her was impossible.

  Had we exchanged numbers? I went through my phone, and discovered we hadn’t.

  What if she’d found a ride and was now miles beyond Sparta? I’d been going slow, watching for her on foot, assuming she’d have stuck to this northward route. But what if she’d found an alternative route? Found somewhere to take photos and I just passed her? I couldn’t explore every sidetrack and dirt road between Dubuque and Sparta.

  Fuck.

  I’d let her get away.

  I couldn’t let her stay gone. Couldn’t.

  So, I refueled and went back the way I’d come. Another two hours plus back to where I’d started—no sign of her. Tried another sequence of spurs north and west—WI-35 following the Mississippi River until it rejoined the 27.

  Woods, fields, farms.

  Dirt roads and silos. Semis and pickups, blink-and-you-miss-them towns. Afternoon turned into evening, exploring offshoots, pausing in gas stations to ask if anyone had seen the most beautiful girl
in the world recently, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a green shirt.

  Evening into night. Where was I? I’d lost track of myself. North of Sparta? Way off the beaten track, full night. Nowhere.

  Resignation rattled in me. I pulled into a truck stop outside Black River Falls—an oasis of light in the midnight darkness, piers of pumps crowded with idling semis, passengers cars on the other side with roof racks piled high, drivers and passengers stretching and yawning and all of us caught in the weird midnight friendliness of strangers crossing paths in this little island in a sea of nowhere nothingness.

  There was a diner, windows facing the lorry side of the truck stop. I got coffee and a cheeseburger, sat alone at the window and ate slowly. Listlessly.

  Watched the huge trucks pull in, refuel, and leave.

  Finished, I sipped a fifth cup of coffee and wondered what I’d do next.

  A semi roared to a stop at a pump. Driver’s door opened, as did the passenger’s door.

  Out of the driver’s side descended a round middle-aged man in baggy jean shorts and a dirty white wife-beater, wearing battered sneakers and an out-of-place cowboy hat.

  From the passenger side?

  A long tan leg, wearing laced-up hiking boots. Body blocked by the door, all I could see for a moment was legs, the boots, the calves, backs of knees as she reached in.

  Even so, I knew her. I knew those sensual, elegant legs.

  Then she hopped down from the high cab, slamming the door.

  She had a black hoodie on, backpack on one shoulder. Those little stubbies left her legs bare and her ass highlighted.

  She rounded the front of the lorry, and the driver gave her a paternal hug, waved at her, pointed as if giving advice—ya’ll be safe now, hear? A smile. A wave.

  And then she angled for the diner entrance, rather than the gas station.

  Paused, though. She stood outside, back to the window, without looking in.

  Leaned against my window, centimeters away from me, without seeing me.

  Brought her cell phone to her ear, and spent twenty minutes on the phone, and I waited.