This is part 2 of the "Erotica Made to Order" series. The muse in question requested that her name not be mentioned here.
Erotica Made to Order 02: An Arrangement of Sorts
John's voice on the phone was cool and distant. "I'm sorry to hear that," he intoned. This was his go-to response whenever Carol brought him bad news. No matter the severity or circumstance, his response was nearly always the same- she had lost a diamond earring; the soufflé had fallen; their son had been kicked out of another private school. He was sorry to hear it.
It was as if he had spent years training himself to say it without thinking, a kind of muscle memory that allowed him to elicit the minimal amount of required sympathy but still leave his mind free to think about something else at the same time.
But that was John, always there but never there.
While his reply was not surprising to Carol in any way, she had hoped that this situation warranted a bit of genuine concern or even, though she knew it was too much to ask, some genuine concern for the woman who was, after all, his wife of more than three decades.
The long grey Mercedes lay at the side of the nameless highway, smoke billowing from under her hood. The weak light of the winter sun was fading fast, and before too long she would be very cold and very lost.
The obvious concern she had for her safety didn't seem to concern him at the moment. This was the evening of the big year-end gala for John's firm, after all, and she was already an hour late meeting him there. His tone implied that he was waiting for an apology from her.
"On any other night, I would gladly slide by to pick you up," he began cautiously. "But I couldn't possibly leave until after Roger's speech. You know that."
"What am I supposed to do then?"
"People are taking their seats, Carol," he said. His voice sounded as though had covered his mouth with his hand so no one could lip-read his desperation. "Do you have any idea what this looks like?"
"John, do you even-"
"Carol, I have to go. Call our service. They'll have somebody out there in twenty minutes."
She tried to interrupt, to tell him that she already had called the service and the wait time was more like three hours or more due to a convention or some such bother downtown. She got half a sentence out before she realized that he had already hung up. She paged through her contacts looking for someone else she might be able to rely upon to rescue her tonight, but the battery indicator fluttered a few times like a ham actor at the end of a Shakespeare play and, like her car, suddenly died.
At this moment, as if some karmic comedian in the heavens decided this would be a good time to start snowing, she felt a flake or two fall on her eyelashes. Reaching up to her hair, a few more melted on her hand. She wondered for a moment what the white flakes looked like atop her auburn hair with that recently acquired shock of grey. John liked to refer to it as her "racing stripe." Though he hadn't really intended to make her self-conscious about it, talking about her like a car did make her feel strangely about getting older. Was she a classic whose value only increased with each passing year or was she a rapidly depreciating model soon to be replaced with a newer, shinier one?
She shook her head to rid her mind of the idea. She buttoned her long black woolen coat, tightened her lips in concentration, and took stock of her predicament. With a flick of her key-fob she locked her wounded beast and turned to the nearest source of light.
From this distance (a mile? three miles?) it was impossible to tell whether she had pinned her hopes for salvation on a humble rest stop, a gas station, or some roadside murder factory where cult members grind up passers by and sell them at a nearby diner. She paused for a moment to listen intently but could hear no screams of abject horror coming from the glow ahead. This she interpreted as a sign of good fortune.
The snow was coming down harder now, and she could feel the flakes embedding into the flesh on the back of her slender neck and melting there. She wasn't really dressed for the occasion. And yet there she was, trudging along the shoulder of a busy highway at night in a pair of heels that were never intended to walk in for more than a few yards.
They had been John's favorite during the early years when he pretended to notice this sort of thing. They were made of a flesh tone patent leather with a curved heel and pointy toe that had been popular years ago but had only recently become fashionable again.
She wondered, as she tried not to sprain her ankles on the uneven ground, whether she wore them to remind him of how he used to feel about her or to remind herself of how she used to feel.
None of it mattered now, of course, but dwelling on this seemed like a good idea when her only other option was to think about the cold, the embarrassment, and the painful death that awaited her if one of those hulking trucks passed just a few inches closer.
After what seemed like an hour or more, she found herself in the center of the dome of light on the highway. She looked up at the giant illuminated sign. TranspoUSA Truck Plaza.
In the haze of snow the outline of the facility looked more like a row of shacks, a series of small buildings stuck together like a mobile home with dozens of additions and extensions. Clearly, she thought to herself, fate had delivered her to the murder factory.
But she couldn't stand out there in the cold indefinitely, and there didn't seem like another workable option for her. At the very least, she'd have to wait there for the car service to find her in a few hours or, more likely, in the morning.
As she pushed through the smeary glass doors, the rush of warm air made her woozy for a moment. Thanks to a thick layer of condensation on her glasses, she could barely see.
To the handful of men standing around the counter chatting, she must have looked like a character from a bad fish-out-of-water movie as she carefully peeled off her coat and folded it over her arm. Underneath, she had on the sleek black evening gown she had selected for the gala. So much for fitting in.
