This is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.
Chapter Four
Sunrise caught us still in various states of undress in the back seat of the Expedition -- in Lisa's case, still fully naked but for her socks. We had positioned ourselves on our sides facing each other, Lisa's back against the backrest and mine just a few inches from slipping into the floorboard. We had done a stellar job of keeping each other warm, covering ourselves in our coats and the camp blanket again and falling into a deep slumber after our orgasms in the steamy cabin of the SUV in the darkness of the wee hours before the engine automatically turned itself off after 30 minutes without moving. We had slept for more than three hours.
The condensation that our exertions had created on the interior of every window had, over the course of night, turned into frost on the cold glass that shielded us from temperatures in the low teens. The first rays of sunlight from the east seemed to be magnified and diffused as it illuminated the frost. It was the brightness and the seeping chill that eventually awakened me.
That and the need to piss again.
As I stirred, it awoke Lisa, who felt my morning wood press against her bare abdomen. She cupped it in her hand. "Mmm, for me?"
"Not this time, baby. It's piss-wood. And I
really
got to go," I said. Once I opened my mouth, I realized that my breath -- my teeth feeling gritty after more than a day unflossed and unbrushed -- was ghastly. I put my hand over my mouth. "Here, Lees, you stay covered up and warm. Gonna be cold as hell in here when I open that door."
I pulled up my clothing, found my docksiders and slipped them back on and braced to open the rear door. Sure enough, the arctic blast flooded in with stunning effect. Worse, I had to leave it open to shield my micturating member from view by those behind us. I watched as the yellow liquid froze almost on contact with the snowpack.
When I jumped back in, Lisa was cocooned fully beneath the coverings, hiding her bare skin from the merciless cold. I popped the fob again and restarted the engine. Now we were just under a quarter of a tank. If the jam wasn't cleared or someone didn't find a way to offer stranded motorists fuel, this could turn dangerous, even deadly. At least the snowy, gray skies of the day before had given way to a cloudless, deep-blue canopy of bitterly cold air.
I left Lisa under the coverings undisturbed until the heater warmed the cabin to a manageable level. When I joined her, still naked, beneath them, I held her close. I could definitively identify her nipples as a light nut-brown color, slightly crinkled against the chill -- not swollen as they had been the night before.
Once the cabin had warmed, we began the search for the clothing she had discarded. Her Pitt sweatshirt was in the front passenger seat. Her pajama and yoga bottoms were in the rear floorboard. Her yoga top was stuffed between the seat and the left-rear door.
"God, I feel gross. I smell gross. We both smell like ... sex. Old sex," she said.
True, her hair was disheveled, and I had what looked like the worst possible case of bed-head. She chose to wear only her pajama bottoms and forgo her yoga pants, its crotch still sticky and infused with her arousal. We abandoned our overnight nest in the rear seat and reclaimed our seats up front. She used the mirror on the reverse side of the sun visor to do what damage control she could with the lipstick and makeup available in her purse. She popped in a cinnamon-flavored Tic-Tac and offered me one. I took it.
I turned on the radio, looking for updates from WTOP while Lisa searched her Droid for updates from the Washington Post, the National Weather Service, the Virginia State Police and Department of Transportation. Midmorning, we received a text from the Transportation Department sent randomly to smart phones along the paralyzed stretch of I-95 that crews would be by soon to rescue us and offer aid. That was encouraging, but it turned out that "soon" was a very expansive, relative term. By noon, nothing. By 2 in the afternoon, still nothing, and gas was running low.
Frustration was building among people who had already spent a miserable night on this frozen stretch of hell that now, in the bright daylight, we were seeing ... nothing. No tow trucks. No police cruisers. No National Guard high-clearance vehicles bringing food and fuel or offering to take the most vulnerable off the highway to safety. There were choppers zooming overhead, but none seemed to be landing, and that only added to the frustration.
The first glimmer of hope came around 3:30 in the afternoon as the low-hanging winter sun began its nosedive toward the western horizon. To our left, in more open southbound lanes of the Interstate, a snowplow was pushing northward, against the intended flow of traffic -- if, indeed, traffic
was
flowing. At least it was clearing some of the compressed snow, loosened by the bright sunlight. Then another plow and another truck dispensing salt. Then, about a half hour later, the first actual passenger vehicles began moving southward toward Richmond. Horns honked and motorists cheered from across the open median, even though our lanes were still stalemated. Then the first tow truck with a damaged 18-wheeler in tow. Then another. I got out of the truck and walked over to the median and could see pulsing blue and amber strobes about a quarter of a mile to the north as the jackknifed big-rig that had been perpendicular to and blocking the northbound lanes was winched back into position to be towed.
Over the course of the day, modesty had largely disappeared. Several times, we saw people -- men and women -- ahead of us and to our rear, out of necessity, openly relieve themselves on the side of the road. It wasn't as though the state had thoughtfully pre-positioned portable toilets every tenth of a mile or so. We still used the doors to the SUV to create at least the illusion of privacy.
Hope began to burn within as the big rig directly in front of us cranked its diesel engine and the brake lights of its trailer flashed to life. A minute of two later, it began to inch forward, so I cranked the SUV and, for the first time in more than a day, put it in gear and eased it ahead.
It took ninety minutes for us to go a mile. It took two hours for us to reach the nearest exit and wait in a long queue of cars at a BP station for a chance to fill up tanks desperately low on fuel. A wave of relief washed over us as I pulled alongside a pump just before our tank ran dry. I filled it nearly to overflowing against the prospect that traffic would stop moving again.
It was now 7:45 p.m., and fully dark. We had just depleted the bag of ham biscuits, the last of the chips and all the Diet Cokes. I had even used my Eagle Scout acumen with a pen knife on my keychain to slice open the cantaloupe and cut it into pieces. We considered hopping off onto U.S. Highway 1, one of the nation's first federal highways once widely known in these parts as Jefferson Davis Highway before the name of Confederate leaders became intolerably toxic, but the reports we saw showed it was less passable in many areas than the interstate because of trees that had fallen across it.
