We had kept in touch, of course, Paula and I, messaging each other and even talking on the phone from time to time. Ashley and I had kept to the south for our year and a day. We had been as far south as Naples, Florida from which we had taken an overnight trip to Key West, gotten falling down, puke-on-your-shoes drunk, and made love on a sand beach, something I do NOT recommend. Sand gets in the damnedest places.
We didn't get much farther north than Asheville, North Carolina where we decided we preferred the Gulf of Mexico beaches to the Atlantic Ocean.
We spent a few days in Nashville and Memphis in Tennessee (where the guitar players were so good I damn near went back to the trailer and burned my beloved Telecaster after hearing what truly good music sounded like). We explored the Bayou country of Mississippi where the Cajuns still seemed to live in the 19th, or maybe the 18th century, where they talked of
gris gris
bags and Voodoo in the present tense.
Arkansas had been boring but Oklahoma, another place that seemed to be stuck in the 19th century where anyone who had played for the Oklahoma Sooners was still a god to most, had been the home of some of the wildest sex I encountered in our year and a day.
Ashley wanted to visit, of all places, Tishomingo where Blake Shelton, her favorite country and western singer (and after nearly a year I was fucking TIRED of C&W music) had a bar called
Ole Red
after one of his hits. While there I spent a delightful night with a skinny granny age appropriate for me, who insisted we go across the state line into Texas and watch a high school football game in a stadium that seated 10,000. She was from Texas originally, with the delightfully Texas-sounding name of LindaSue (that's how she pronounced it, all one word), and had grown up in that culture where football was a religion.
Later, we stopped at an honest-to-God A&W Root Beer Stand (who knew such things still existed), and, while the teenagers were cruising in their cars and pickup trucks she went inside to use the bathroom, and when she came back she made a production of hanging her bra and panties from the rearview mirror to a string of thumbs up from the carload of teenage boys next to us.
"You GO, granny," one of them called, "show us your tits."
She giggled and did that thing only a woman seems to be able to pull off, crossing her arms and peeling the oversize T-shirt that pledged her love for someone named Dak Prescott that she was wearing off in one smooth move.
"Sorry, baby," she called, "just one."
The driver honked his horn and the car erupted with cheers.
When LindaSue turned back to me I saw that her right breast was a nice C cup with a large, dark areola, tight and wrinkled with her excitement, and an even darker nipple pointing straight at me from low on a sagging breast where the pale skin was highlighted with a roadmap of delicate blue veins. Where her left had once been was a delicate scar line.
She had an odd look on her face as she said, "well?"
I grinned and traced the line of the scar, a very fine line slightly hard under warm skin, and said, "you're unique and beautiful."
Her shoulders sagged and she crawled across the center console, threw her arms around my neck, and kissed me, a hard, almost desperate kiss, drawing another honked horn and round of cheers from the car next to us.
I chuckled and said, "Okay, granny, now cover it up before you get us arrested."
She pulled the T-shirt back on then and gave me a sidelong look. "Take me back to the park, David," she said, meaning the RV park.
I punched the call button for the carhop (yes, it was THAT kind of place) and felt a little vibration in the truck. When I looked over I saw LindaSue squirming out of her jeans.
"What?" she asked, giggling, "it's a long ride home."
She got her seat belt on, waved the jeans at the car next to us drawing a final round of horns and cheers, and leaned back.
"Drive slow, sugar," she said, her hand slowly moving down her belly to settle between her legs.
The little blue arrow started following the blue line as I found my way through the town, Denison I think, if it matters, and then onto Highway 91 for the 50 miles ahead.
Her womanscent started filling the cab of the truck as her fingers played.
The country we were driving through was flat and, well, "agricultural" is a good word. We would see maybe two cars a minute, it was that kind of an area.
She was looking around and said, "slow down, sugar."
I took my foot off the gas and let the truck slow from the steady 58 miles per hour I had been driving.
"What?" I asked.
"Hold on," she said, leaning forward, looking.
"There," she said suddenly, "turn here."
I almost missed it, a little road marked by two small reflectors.
I made the turn and stopped. "What?" I asked, "gotta pee?"
She giggled and said, "don't you recognize Lover's Lane when you see it?"
She did the crossed-arm thing and peeled off the T-shirt.
"Drive," she said and the giggle in her voice stripped away at least 50 years.
We were off the highway about five miles when she said, "here."
It was just a wide spot but I could pull off far enough to get the truck clear of any stray car that might happen by, not that I thought that would happen.
The truck had barely stopped when she opened the passenger side door and got out, looking like some natural creature that had just risen from the earth.
"Ouch," she said, kind of jumping from foot to foot and ruining the image, "tell me you have a blanket, or at least a tarp or something in this truck. There are STICKERS!"
I chuckled and got out of the truck, more slowly than she had, even with shoes I was being careful.
I reached into the bed and pulled out the old moving pad I kept there for those times when I had to crawl around or wriggle on my back when setting up the travel trailer.
"Come on," she said, stepping deeper onto the prairie, taking those mincing high steps we've all taken when we were unsure of our footing.
There was a little bit of a dip, kind of a roll in the earth, that took us out of sight of the truck.
"Right here," she said, doing a slow turn, her arms outstretched, looking like a ballet dancer practicing for something.
So I flipped the moving pad like a bed sheet, spreading it on the ground.
She kept turning, until she was pretty much in the middle of the pad and then sank, slowly, with amazing grace, onto her back.
"Come on, David," she said, laying back and holding her arms out, "let's be 18 again for a while."
There was enough moonlight that I could see her and the odd asymmetry of her single breast hit me right between the legs and I found myself, to my surprise, suddenly hard.
So I peeled off my own T-shirt, this one proclaiming that "I might look like I'm listening to you but in my head, I'm playing my guitar," kicked off my shoes, pulled off my socks, and pushed my jeans and boxers down. That line for the Blake Shelton son I had heard about a thousand times as my year and a day progressed, "I fell down, tryin' to kick off my jeans" flashed through my mind and I started laughing.
That transitioned into a full-blown fit of giggles as she lay there, smiling up at me.
"Come on, honey," she said, her voice husky, her pheromone laden womanscent powerful even in the open like this, "I think tonight's the night I give myself."
I kicked my pants clear and lay on the pad beside her, kissing her, and brushing the stray hair from her face.
I realized she was role-playing at least to some extent and kissed her again.
"I don't have a, you know," I said, doing my best to sound like an awkward 18-year-old, "and I don't want to get you pregnant."
She giggled and said, "oh, everybody knows you can't get pregnant your first time."
And so we made love, under the moonlight and the stars, the dusty Oklahoma, or maybe we were still in Texas, I wasn't sure, breeze cooling our skin.
I played with her breast, trying to remember what it had been like that first time. I kissed it with puckered lips, feeling the warmth and weight of it. I deliberately stayed away from the scar line on the other side, figuring that could wait for later.
I let the backs of my fingers brush across the wiry hair between her legs, barely touching the full lips down there.
I cried out when her fingernails dug into my back.
"Please, honey, don't make me wait anymore," she whispered, those nails raking down my back, making me wonder if she was drawing blood.
