Author's Note: Hey everyone! This here is my first submission to the site in a while and I hope everyone likes it. Fair warning though, this involves some recreational drug use, the use of a homophobic slur said in anger and some obscure references. If you're into stories just for sex, this might not be for you. It doesn't start until after quite a bit of talking. There's definitely some sex tho', both gentle and rough-ish, with some dirty talking.
Super huge thanks to the awesome LaRascasse for editing this monstrosity of a story. He was patient, incredibly helpful and reined in some of my worst tendencies. If you notice anything you don't like about it, think I goofed on the one line in Spanish or that I know very little about auto-repair...well, that's on me and not him. He's the best.
Anyways, enjoy
*
"I'm hot," Gabby said as she tilted her head up, somewhat counter-intuitively towards the sun.
She thought about what she said. She didn't mean it in the sense of physical attractiveness, although she knew that there was some truth to that too. Not that she thought there was any one way to look "hot". She rejected that paradigm. Still, if she ever doubted whether or not she fit into the traditional concept of Hollywood-approved beauty, she would always remember when she'd been asked as a Sophomore by some sleazy photographer guy if he could take nudes of her for some "Coeds of the Pac-12" special some men's magazine was running. She'd turned him down. She didn't have any hang-ups about nudity, mind you. She just didn't like the way those magazines objectified women and presented that narrow definition of beauty that she did, though, fit into.
No, Gabby was hot because it was hot - the sun was out, it was the dead of summer and they were somewhere in the desert. Reasons for anyone to be uncomfortably hot.
Gabby thought about that. All the confluences that had to happen for her, just one of seven billion souls to be on this big turning world orbiting that big ball of fire up there. How its rays were both amazing and fearsome, capable of creating life and taking it. How the weather, something seemingly random, caused huge ripples in people's lives, ripples that she knew created other ripples. She wondered about those ripples. What would happen because it was hot today, she wondered. Would someone die? Someone be born? She smiled at the thought. Maybe two people would be working somewhere together and, because it was so hot they'd be wearing a little less than they normally did and they'd talk about the heat and realize they liked each other and then they'd make love. What ripples would that have?
Gabby's mind had a tendency to wander when she was stoned.
And she was stoned. She could feel it, the joint she'd smoked at their last stop. Her mouth was dry and her hands felt heavy as bricks and her mind just kept wandering all over the place. She hadn't intended to smoke the whole joint, it was powerful stuff, but Fin had taken a long time eating and she'd strolled off and lit it up and before she knew it, she'd burned it down to the crudely made cardboard filter.
"It's crazy that it's hot, huh?" Gabby said, turning her eyes from the sun and back towards the road. There, at the side of the road, Fin was looking sadly at the rusted, beaten looking husk of a 1986 Pontiac Parisienne. Not that Fin knew anything about cars. Gabby didn't either. She only knew the make, model and year because they'd only bought it a week ago.
Fin was Gabby's boyfriend. Well, Fin would have said that anyway. Gabby would have said "Traveling Companion." She would have meant it both literally and figuratively. Figuratively, it meant that Fin was someone Gabby had been introduced to during her Senior year at college as a guy who sold weed and various other soft drugs and was a good guy to know for when she was so inclined. They'd hit it off and started sleeping together. True, Gabby knew, some people would think that meant they were boyfriend and girlfriend or something along those lines but Gabby tended to reject those labels. They were together for this chapter of her life, traveling down life's path together. She didn't think it would last forever though.
It meant they'd decided to go on a trip, in every possible sense. They'd both graduated and decided to spend the summer driving around the country. Going wherever they wanted. True, Gabby thought, Fin would also make references to hitting enough music festivals and concerts to unload whatever weed and molly he had before he "joined the real world" when the summer was over but that didn't bother her. She wanted to go to those festivals too and knew that Fin was still financing most of the trip through that. She did reject the notion that the world Fin wanted them to join was any "realer" than the one she was in now although, she knew, that was just the difference in who they were. Fin thought they were just in some dumb, drugged up college phase. For Gabby, it wasn't about the drugs. Even when she wasn't high she didn't want to just fit into either the suburban yuppie thing Fin was pushing her towards or the pretentious, hipster-y stuff her other friends seemed bound for. Desperately looking for "authenticity" in some gentrified urban neighborhood where you paid twelve dollars for an artisanal peanut butter sandwich seemed just as fake to her.
Gabby just wanted to forge her own path, do her own thing. So she was traveling with Fin. For now.
"Although I do kind of want a peanut butter sandwich," Gabby said to nobody, continuing her thought process out loud.
Fin rested his hands on his hips and looked at her, wiping the sweat off his brow in what Gabby thought was exaggerated annoyance.
Gabby began walking back to the car, sort of. She stood on one foot and then hopped to the other foot, holding her arms out so as to balance herself. She did it only a few times until the jumping motion caused her discomfort. Sometimes she wished she had smaller boobs. Or that she'd worn a bra. She looked down at her chest. Her shirt, a loose and flowy chemise with a nice little neckline had been very comfortable and cute when she'd put it on that morning at the motel was now clinging noticeably to the sweaty skin of her large breasts.
"Fin, do you ever wish I had smaller boobs?"
"Jeez, Gabby, how high are you?" Fin asked.
Gabby paused for a second as she performed an internal diagnostic.
"Really high," Gabby said, reporting her findings "Do we have anything to eat or drink?"
"You should have had something to eat when we stopped," Fin said, ducking his head back under the hood of the car.
"All they had were burgers." Gabby said.
"You could have had fries," Fin said
Gabby stopped. She wanted to say that just about every fast-food place fried their fries in animal fat but she couldn't. At that moment she had lost any sense of her righteous indignation about the practices of the fast-food industry. Her munchies were in control now. She could have had fries and desperately, more than anything in the world, she wanted french fries at that moment.
"Fuck, why didn't I order fries?" she wondered wistfully.
Fin slammed the hood of the car down.
"Dammit, Gabby" he said, "I'm trying to fix the car."
"Did you?" Gabby asked hopefully. She didn't mind being in the desert, with its amazing shades of browns and reds, stretching as far in front of her as she could see. It was an incredible landscape. She wished she could paint it. She wished she could paint.
"No," Fin said, "I told you we should have gone with the Oldsmobile,"
Gabby frowned. Buying crappy cars, driving them until they busted, that had been Fin's idea. He'd even compared it to rescuing animals from a shelter, knowing that would make it impossible for Gabby to refuse. Finding old machines and giving them one last taste of the highway, that was how he put it. Gabby had wanted to just buy a decent van and have a regular place to sleep at night.
"Fritz spoke to me though." Gabby said, patting the hood of the brown Pontiac she had christened as such. "It had a vibe that told me it'd take me where I wanted to go."
"Well, did you want to get stranded on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere?" Fin asked, clearly exasperated. Gabby sighed. She sometimes really didn't like Fin when they weren't in a similar state of sobriety. He had that rich kid tendency to complain when everything didn't go his way. Gabby, who'd been raised by a single mother and, at times, her grandparents had developed her easy-going ways because, so often, things didn't go her way. A busted car wasn't the end of the world.
More still, Gabby realized something thrilling as Fin described where they were as "nowhere". She didn't know where she was. She didn't know what the nearest town was in any direction. She didn't even know what state they were in. Gabby tried remembering the road markers but there'd been so many over the last few days. 191? 160? 491? It was one of those.
"Something good will come of this," Gabby said, leaning back against the car before jumping forward. Her butt was covered by her cut-offs but the hot metal was not pleasant against the backs of her thighs.
Fin shook his head as he looked at her.
"Nobody's even driven by for an hour." he said as he pulled his phone from his pocket, "Lucky for you one of us is responsible."
If she'd been sober, and in the mood for a fight, Gabby would have said that it actually wasn't the most responsible thing in the world to have had your father buy you a 700 dollar smart phone and pay for the admittedly impressive coverage that got him a signal even where they were but, well, Gabby didn't have time for that. All thoughts of protest at Fin's categorization of their various levels of responsibility were waylaid by something that, in her state, seemed far more pressing and relevant.
The weird looking bug on the ground. Gabby was entranced.
2.
It was a long time until the tow-truck arrived, the sun still high in the afternoon sky. Gabby had spent most of that time in the back seat of the car, feeling like a pirate who'd found buried treasure. She'd forgotten about the little farmer's stand they'd passed the previous day and the small bag of carrots she'd bought. They weren't french fries, no, but they were indescribably good in her altered state. Crunchy and sweet and still fresh enough that they parched much of her thirst. Gabby thought they very well might have been the best carrots ever grown.
Fin, however, seemed to only be annoyed by the delay. Seemingly paranoid and jumpy at every noise or car that drove by. Gabby had offered Fin the other joint in her pocket in an effort to mellow him out but he'd refused, citing concern about law enforcement. Gabby knew he was paranoid about all of the drugs in his suitcase. Gabby again found herself wishing Fin hadn't brought them. True, Fin had said that selling them would pay for most of their trip but Gabby still didn't think it would be worth the stress.
As Gabby thought about getting arrested, she realized an uncomfortable truth. Fin wasn't joining her on her wavelength but they were equalizing, just not in the way Gabby had wanted.
Coming down from her high meant she was beginning to share some of Fin's impatience with their situation. Gabby may have been described by most as a "free spirit" and that may have been code for space cadet or something even less charitable but she wasn't stupid or entirely carefree. She knew that spending the night in the car wasn't ideal, that the Desert had coyotes among various other things. So she was more than a little relieved when she heard a car approach them and slow down. More so when she looked out the window and saw that, indeed, it was a tow-truck.
