Brad's Road Trip

I told you it'd be published quick, and voila!

I thought about putting this in Exhibitionist & Voyeur, because there are elements of sex in a public place and outdoors. That's not the point of the encounter, though - it's more a matter of convenience than any deliberate attempt to do things in public. It boils down to a one-on-one hookup with some emotional tangents. So, Erotic Couplings it is.

When you get to the character Lisa, she's pulled directly from the character by the same name in the HBO TV series The Newsroom, plus maybe 25-30 pounds. Usually I like you to use your imagination for characters (outside of the brief descriptions), but figured I'd give you a little insight as to who I was envisioning when I wrote it, since it's someone you can Google. Most of the characters in this series are patterned after people I met on my real-life trip, but since it was more than 10 years ago and things stopped well, well short of where they go with the waitress in this story (i.e. I ordered food, she brought it, and I paid for it and left), I don't have a solid memory of what she looked like. I just remember she was a bigger girl, and she was hot. So.. there ya go.

Special thanks to my editor, AnInsatiableReader. Jibberish goes in, something bordering on readable comes out (she doesn't rewrite, after all.. hard to make a Ferrari out of a skateboard).

*******************

Day 14

Wednesday, June 24

Omaha, NE to Denver, CO

The wonders of nature never cease to amaze me.

Mountains that stretch more than five miles into the sky. Oceans, vast, blue and magical, yet still powerful enough to crush anything on the planet. Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon and the Mississippi River. All creations of Mother Nature.

Mother Nature is also nothing if not fair. So to balance out all the awesome, she made Nebraska. (Kansas, too, but that's for someone else's road trip.)

The map said if I kept driving on I-80 westbound, I'd eventually drive off the Golden Gate Bridge. Experience taught me that this road would indeed give way to other states and geographic features other than farmland.

But if you actually drive through Nebraska, within an hour you'll be convinced that the state goes on forever. The roads are flat with almost no twists or curves, there are cornfields on either side of the road as far as the eye can see, and there's one exit every 20 or 30 miles. The people in the state of Nebraska are some of the best on the planet. I'd hung out with a bunch of them last night, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. But driving through Nebraska is a punishment that should be reserved for felons and Yankee fans.

I was just about to cry at the sheer boredom of it all, but then my thoughts drifted to Kelly, and my smile could have lit up the inside of my car. We'd stayed up talking till well after midnight her time, and I knew she didn't work until mid-day. I figured I would let her sleep as long as Tyler would let her. Still, I was getting antsy just knowing I'd get to hear her voice again within a few hours. Hopefully, at least one of the two packages I'd sent her on Monday arrived today.

The phone rang about 30 minutes later.

"Whatcha doin'?" she asked.

"Ya know, I gotta hand it to you, babe," I said. "I'm driving through Nebraska, and my cock was passed out cold, just about convinced it was never going to see pussy again. Then you come along and say two words, and it's like a Red Bull straight to my sex drive."

"Glad I could be of service," she giggled. "Not even trying this morning."

"I know," I said. "You just can't help yourself." I guessed since she wasn't saying anything, the packages hadn't arrived. It was already close to 10 a.m. in Idaho, and she'd be leaving soon. It'd either show up after she left or sometime tomorrow. I grimaced, knowing I'd have to keep my mouth shut one more day.

"I'm sorry it's so boring," she said. "At least you'll be on Mountain Time soon, right?"

"A few hours," I agreed.

"Good," she said. "It's nice to know that from now on, when I look at the clock, I'll be looking at the same numbers you are."

I smiled. It was sappy, but weirdly enough, I felt the same. "I'm happy about it, too," I said. "What are you guys up to this morning?"

"Tyler just finished a startlingly efficient demolition of what once was an Eggo waffle," she said. "Now he's in front of the TV staring at something that siphons points off my IQ every time I watch it, but is supposedly educational for him. I'm lying here on my bed in the other room, hoping maybe Taco Bell will catch on fire in a way that no one gets hurt but still destroys the store so I don't have to go to work for the next three months."

"They'd still pay you under this scenario, right?"

"If you want to call what they give me a paycheck, sure," she said.

"Can't say I agree with you," I said. "I mean, I would love it if you never had to work again, or at least if you could do something you love instead. But the store catching fire would really make my mom's life miserable."

"True," she laughed.

"Speaking of which," I said. "What are your future plans?"

"Trying to see if I'm viable long-term?" she chuckled.

"No," I said. "I already know that. But it's your turn, and even though I said I'd never ask you another question till you answered the one I asked a long time ago, I'm being the bigger person and throwing you a bone."

"So gentlemanly of you," she said. I could feel the eye roll all the way out here in No Man's Land. "You know, it's not that much different from what I'm doing right now."

"Really?" I asked.

"I want to work in a restaurant. Not this overpriced, high-speed, wanna-be Mexican crap I'm doing now. I want to be in the kitchen, creating recipes and working on them until they're just right. Let someone else handle serving and taking orders and all that stuff. I want to be a chef."

"Nice!" I exclaimed. I hadn't heard this much passion in her voice about anything except her family or me. "And what kind of food will you be conjuring up in Kelly's Kitchen?"

"Italian," she said. "And none of this pseudo-Italian assembly line chain restaurant Olive Garden crap, either. I'd start with all my mom's family recipes and slowly add my own to the menu."

"Your mom?" I asked. "She has a little Italian in her blood, huh?"

"She has nothing but Italian in her blood," she answered.

"You're half-Italian?" I asked, knowing she must be, but still trying to grasp the concept.

"Yeah," she laughed. "Surprised?"

"A little," I said, "but it does explain a lot. That fiery temper, how you're always up for anything, the insane amount of passion you bring to our late-night sessions..."

"Brad," she said. "I might be predisposed to it due to my blood, but most of the reason I'm so passionate about that is because you bring it out of me."

"I know," I said. "But it was always in there. You just had to find the right guy to bring it out."

"There's only one right guy."

I gulped. I'm not used to getting caught off-guard, but that had been happening a lot with Kelly. I wondered if she would say something else, but she didn't.

"I'm glad," I said. I felt I needed to say something, but as we moved on, I also felt we left something unsaid. A very specific something.

"So how did that happen? Your mom being full-blooded Italian and your dad, I'm guessing he's white? You live in Idaho, after all."

"He was born and raised here," she said. "It's a funny story, though. They met at JFK airport in New York. He was at a little coffee stand near his gate, where he was flying to Italy with some college friends for a class trip. He was an international business major. He paid for his drink and turned around, where my mom promptly plowed into him, spilling his coffee all over both of them."

"Haha, that's hilarious!" I said. "Why was she there?"

"She was on a trip with her friends," she said. "They were visiting New York to experience American life. She'd just gotten off the plane he was about to get on."

"Wow," I said. "If that isn't fate..."

"Yeah, pretty crazy," she agreed. "Anyway, they both cleaned up and changed, and started talking while he waited for his flight to board. They figured out that she was flying back to Rome two days before he had to fly back to the States, so she gave him her number and told him to call the day she got back. She cooked him dinner that night, and the rest is history."

"Always comes back to the food, doesn't it?" I asked. "Did your mom ever work as a chef?"

"No," she said. "She moved here to be with my dad. Being in a new country was hard for her. With no work experience in-country, employers hesitated to give her a job, but she found no such hesitation from our esteemed higher education system. My dad taught international business at Idaho State, so she got a teaching degree for real cheap. Then my dad managed to get her a part-time teaching spot at ISU's Culinary Arts school. She started teaching Home Ec at my old high school after dad died. She's told me that she would have loved to be a chef, but it wasn't meant to be."

"Following in what would have been your mom's footsteps," I said. "I like it."

"Sort of," she said. "I want to be the head chef, but that's not all. I want to run the whole operation. I want to be in charge of the décor, the size, the location and most importantly, the menu."

"To do that, you'd pretty much have to be the owner, right?"

"Very perceptive," she laughed. "Not that I have any free time, but what little I do get, I draw up business plans. Sometimes it's for a five-star bistro in downtown Insert Big City Here. Sometimes it's for a regular restaurant in a parking lot in the suburbs. Sometimes it's for a little quiet mom-and-pop café on a small-town street corner."

"A woman who knows what she wants and how she's going to get it," I said. "You do know how very incredibly sexy that is, right?"

"Thank you," she said. "Don't give me too much credit. I have the business plans, but there's one thing I need to get going that I don't have."

"Cash," I said.

"Bingo," she replied, exhaling dramatically.

"Everything in due time, my dear," I chuckled. "I want to talk a little bit more about this restaurant, though."

"Yeah?"

I had planned to make use of the gifts I'd sent her, but since she hadn't received them yet, I came up with a pretty damn solid plan B to send her off to work with.

"How many different places could I fuck you in that state-of-the-art, upscale Italian kitchen?"

"Oooh," she said. "You know, one of the darkest fantasies I have, one I never thought I'd ever live out..."

"Nice," I said. "A challenge."

"One night, just a few weeks after we've opened, and after I've closed up and let you know I'm the only one left in the building, I want you to sneak in through the back door and try to rob the place. I'll have just opened for business - I wouldn't be able to take the insurance hit that would come from getting robbed so soon."

"No, no you wouldn't."

"So I'd have to offer you something else."

"Hmm," I pondered. "What could a brand new restaurant owner like yourself possibly have that I would want?"

"Well, maybe..." she started, her voice feigning fear. "Maybe you'd be interested in another back door?"

**************

The rest of the drive was uneventful. Kelly had another mid-day shift, so shortly after she came three times from her robbery fantasy, I let her off the phone. I sent her one message, a picture of the road sign that signified I was entering the Mountain Time zone. I thought I'd at least get a smile out of her.

Nebraska did seem to go on forever, but sometime around 3 p.m., I finally crossed over into Colorado. At first, the scenery remained the same - flat, boring and seemingly stretching to the moon. About an hour in, though, I could see the Rocky Mountains towering in the distance. The closer I got, the more majestic they were.

My plan was to head to my hotel on the other side of Denver, grab a shower and find a local restaurant for dinner. I wasn't a big fan of eating at the same chain joints over and over again, even if they were in different states. I liked finding the local places that only natives knew about; places like the restaurant Kelly had described to me earlier.

That plan went up in smoke when I realized I was hitting Denver around 5:30 in the afternoon. There were times where my car didn't move for five or ten minutes, and others where I moved all of a mile in that time. By the time I got to my hotel I was exhausted, frazzled from the rush-hour traffic jam, and just ready to eat at the closest place I could find.

Thankfully, there was a Chili's right across the parking lot from the hotel. Figuring there would be a sizable wait at 7:30 on a Wednesday night, I went inside to put my name on the list, planning to go check in at the hotel and unload my car before coming back to finish the wait. Surprisingly, the place was fairly empty, so I got seated immediately.

Before the waitress even got to my table, my mom called. So, I committed the manners faux pas of ordering my Jack and Coke and Bacon Mushroom Swiss burger while holding my cellphone to my ear.

I'd always gotten along well with both of my parents, at least since I'd graduated high school, so I didn't mind being on the phone with them. I wasn't going to turn into a girl and spend five hours talking about shoes with my mom, but a half-hour or hour-long conversation didn't bother me the way it did a lot of men.

While we chatted, I watched the waitress move around my section. The place was only half-full, but they were seating entire sections while leaving others completely empty. So while there were plenty of empty tables, each server was working at their max capacity. Mine had seven other tables, at least three of which had what appeared to be problem customers, or at least those who needed more attention than others. One table had an older couple, with the guy loudly complaining about something with his salad. Another had a family with a baby who'd spilled food all over the floor, and the last was a couple of college-aged guys who were well on their way to being sloshed. She was pretty adept at handling each situation, and even while I was distracted by the phone, I was impressed.

My food arrived, and I found a way to eat it while on the phone. Mom was asking me all kinds of questions about Kelly.

"So what did you get her?" she asked me.

"A gentleman never kisses and tells," I said.

"Try as I may have, I didn't raise a gentleman," she said, and I snorted in laughter. "So, you can tell me."

"Mom, I'm not having this conversation with you," I said. "I'll tell you two things. One, it hasn't arrived yet, and two, you gave me her sizes, and you're the smartest woman I've ever met. You can figure it out."

"I'm just glad you're getting along with her," she said. "She really has a great personality."

I just laughed. "Great personality" was the phrase someone used to describe a potential blind date when they didn't want to lie to you and tell you she looked like a bowling ball that got smashed with a sledge hammer. My mom was the type of person who genuinely meant it, though. She knew I cared about the physical stuff, but as far as she was concerned, as long as I was dating a good woman, she was happy.

"There are a lot of great things about her," I said. "Including her son. Thanks for damn near giving me a coronary, by the way."

"Me?"

"Yeah, that voicemail the other night about you and dad running into Kelly and Tyler at Best Buy, making googly eyes at each other... I definitely thought you were talking about a boyfriend."

"Why?"

"Kelly hadn't told me she had a son yet."

"What?" she asked. "Why not?"

"It doesn't matter, mom, I know about him now and I'm more than okay with it. I just wanted to say thank you. If I ever do have a heart attack later in life, I now know what the early signs feel like."

She chuckled. "You're young. Your heart can take it. Talk to your father," she said, handing me off.

"So you'll tell me everything you got her, Brad?" he said out loud, for the sole purpose of irking my mom.

"Yeah, dad," I said. "An all-expenses-paid trip to the worst part of Montana and a lifetime supply of Cheez Whiz."

"He says he bought her a book about how to embezzle money from your employer," he yelled to my mom. I heard my mom laughing in the background.

My dad and I chatted a few minutes while I finished stuffing my face. I confirmed my plans to pull into town sometime on Sunday night, and as we were finishing up, my waitress came back with the check. She'd tried to talk to me a couple times earlier in the evening, but had always been stopped short by my phone. Now, she was just trying to find an opening in my conversation to ask me the obligatory "Is there anything else I can get you?" and I could tell her inability to get a word in was starting to frustrate her. I suddenly realized how rude I'd been.

"Okay, dad," I said. "I gotta go. I'm at a restaurant, and I've been an ass to the waitress all night. See you on Sunday."

I hung the phone up and turned my attention to the waitress.

"I'm sorry about that, Lisa," I said, looking at her nametag.

"I was beginning to wonder if you were a really horrible looking woman," she said.

"I'm sorry?"

"I've never seen a man spend that much time on the phone before." She grinned as she looked me over, so I took the opportunity to do the same. Everything about Lisa was bigger than average. She was taller than most girls, I'd guess somewhere around 5-10, and even in a ponytail, her long, brown hair hung halfway down her back. Her breasts were at least DDs, and her ass stretched the black uniform pants she wore. She had a belly, but it didn't stand out from the rest of her. She was a big girl, no doubt, but everything was evenly proportioned. The 20 or so extra pounds she carried were distributed evenly around her body and made what would have been subtle curves a little less subtle.

"Hey, I was talking to my parents," I said, looking back up to her face. By the grin on her face, my once-over had taken a bit longer than hers. "I've been away from home for a long time."

"Even Marines get homesick, huh?" I guess she'd seen the tattoo. With a quick glance toward the bartender, she slid into the seat across from me.

"Especially so," I said with a grin. "Doesn't give me the right to be a jackass, though. Let me buy you a drink and make it up to you."

Her face screwed up at that.

"You can't buy employees drinks here," she said, pausing to grab my card and get my name, "Brad." She stood up and put her hands on her hips. "What do you think this is, a strip club?"

"No," I said. I'm not sure why I added the next part: "You definitely have the body for it, though."

I know a lot of women who would take that as an insult, and I'm not sure I wouldn't agree with them. I wasn't sure how she'd respond. Lisa's eyes went real wide, but after a second, she just rolled them and made a "pshaw" noise with her mouth and collapsed back into the chair.

"Whatever," she said. "As far as come-ons go, that wasn't terrible, but..."

"Not a come-on," I said. "Just stating facts. Seriously, I'm just a nice guy who was kind of a dick, and I'm trying to make it up to you. You seem to be pretty outstanding at your job; you don't deserve to be ignored."

"How would you know? You barely paid attention to me," she said.

"I paid more attention than you think," I replied. "Unlike most males, I can occasionally walk and chew gum at the same time."

"Uh huh," she said flatly. "Prove it."

"Ok," I said, smiling. "The drunks over there, right? I watched you gently cut them off, telling them you couldn't serve them anymore but flirting with them just enough that they didn't even notice you'd told them no. Nothing unprofessional, of course; just a few subtle smiles and hand pats that distracted them."