Tesla Girl

Here's another bit of story fluff that I hope you all will enjoy. It is my first time categorizing a stand-alone story as Mature. I've written May-December (okay, May-September) stories, but this is the first where I thought the main hook was that differential.

If you haven't read any of my stuff before, you should know that I'm not here for realism, instead seeking the plausibly ridiculous narrative. If you need the gritty truth, there are many other great authors for you!

Sit back and enjoy the ride.

----------

TESLA GIRL

Bernadette caught sight of herself in the mirror in the hall on her way to the garage. She stopped and stared at herself, feeling suddenly dissatisfied. She looked fine, of course. She was just going out to Brenda's ranch for a couple of hours to help stuff the gift bags for the meeting next week, and then swing by the store on the way back home. She didn't exactly need to doll herself up... she never did anymore, really. Her usual casual business attire of knee-length skirt and high-necked, creamy white blouse was certainly fine. Brenda was a friend, but also an employee after all.

God, that sounded like a woman with a stick well and truly up her ass, Bernadette thought wryly. That really wasn't her, was it? No. Of course not.

But she still didn't bother to change clothes. Just as there was no need to doll up, there was no need to go back and dress down either. This... was the way she dressed.

Looking out the front windows of her house, her mood rose as she observed that it was going to be a truly great summer day for a drive. It was sunny and hot, with clear skies. During the day on a Sunday, there wouldn't even be much of any traffic out in the desert.

The car was fully charged, and she decided she would let it run a little bit. She snorted. She had not yet really had a chance to put it through its paces, and yet her Tesla had still gotten more action than she had in recent memory.

Bernadette shook her head at her mental tone again, then shrugged it off. She did not have a stick up her ass, she had responsibilities... up the ass. A thirty sev... um, thirty-

something

-year-old woman, one who had had to learn how to run a decent-sized company with no more notice than the arrival of a military chaplain at her door when her husband had been away on a training deployment,

had

to live a serious life.

Her normally sober face broke into a smile as she slid into the Tesla. She had finally let herself order it the day that she realized that she was not going to drive the company into ruin. Once she did finally place her order, Bernadette had had to wait seemingly forever for Elon to get around to making her goddamned car. She had almost canceled her order twice, during bad weeks where she thought she might have run the firm into the ground after all, but all had turned out well and she'd had the bright red car now for almost a month. It still gave her a thrill every time she so much as sat in the big, spartanly luxurious vehicle, with its sci-fi reminiscent interior.

Her feelings of vague dissatisfaction faded as she eased the car silently down the driveway and onto the road. In what seemed like moments, she was out of the built-up area and the Tesla was sweeping her smoothly off onto the open desert roads. The two lane roads out here were wide and straight, with wide shoulders. The legal speed limit on them was fifty-five, but even in her consciously conservative mindset, Bernadette was amused at the fiction of that.

Subconsciously, she was outright contemptuous. These roads out here were built like drag strips, interrupted by nothing but the occasional, highly visible in advance, stop sign every mile or three. She felt herself easing up to seventy with almost smug satisfaction. Her father had been a gear head, and she knew her way around speed a little.

Easing away from yet another isolated stop sign, she found herself at almost ninety without even thinking. She smiled when she saw the number on her display, then realized that she should be shocked at herself, and let her foot off the pedal. The car slid backwards to a more sedate rate. She shook her head. She had not yet really plumbed the limits of the car's speed, but she knew it could go faster than she had just taken it. Far faster.

She had bought the souped up version, after all. It had been an almost unconscious decision, just a click of the mouse when she ordered it on the website.

When she accelerated again after the next intersection, she caught herself as she passed eighty. Without realizing that she hadn't slowed down, she looked around for cops. A ticket would be the kind of embarrassment that a woman in her position ought to avoid, right? She shook her head at how far-fetched that concern was. The last time a police officer had driven these roads, a barn had been on fire.

She checked her speed again. Eighty-four. With a naughty smile, she flicked on the cruise and auto-steer modes.

She leaned back, released the steering, and gloried in the sensation. She almost shivered, and used her free hands to smooth out her clothing. Her fingers lingered as they tidied the silk of her blouse where it covered her breasts, but she did not notice that consciously. Her nipples did, though.

After the glory of the road out, the gravel driveway of Brenda's ranch was agony as she rolled up it at a 20 miles per hour crawl. When she parked, she popped out and went up Brenda's front steps with a bounce in her step that had not been there when she had left her own home.

*

Brenda's large dining room table was strewn with piles of things for the gift bags. Some piles held materials for the meeting, such as the agenda and some PowerPoint slides for Bernadette's presentation, but most of them contained snacks or candy, or some company swag, and there were even drink tickets for the hotel bar.

The two women fell into an easy rhythm of filling the bags, and Bernadette actually found herself singing along with the Bon Jovi album that Brenda had playing on her stereo. Her blonde host smiled at that.

"You are in a good mood today, Bern," Brenda said, almost teasingly. "What have you been getting up to? Who is he?" she added, more hopefully than expectantly.

Bernadette blushed a little. "There is no he, in theory or practice, Brenda," she said repressively. "I just enjoyed the drive out here, that's all," she added almost sheepishly.

"Well, your car is a dish, that's for sure," Brenda replied, teasing harder, but also feeling real concern for her boss and old friend. "But unless that model comes with some strange options I don't know about, there is more to life than work and driving fast." Then she ducked out of the way of the logo-imprinted stress ball that Bernadette hurled at her. The two laughed, but Brenda kept pushing.

"I mean, really," she said, becoming serious. "He wouldn't have wanted you to just be alone like this. You know that, right? Pretty soon people are going to stop calling you Boss, and start calling you Mother Superior!"

Bernadette almost blushed again. She was quiet for a moment. "It's not like I'm still being 'faithful' to Tom," she said softly at last. "But dammit, I have a business to run--one that you... and Barton and Kenny... had to teach me to run with absolutely no notice or experience. My calendar, as well as my mental bandwidth, is full," she finished firmly.

Brenda looked at Bernadette somberly. "A company is an even worse lover than a car," she said after a moment. "You really are fading into a stick in the mud, Bern. Come on," she began to cajole, trying to lighten the mood once more. "I'm betting, despite how you dress all the time these days, that you could still absolutely rock a bikini almost as well as you did back in college. Throw one on, go to the pool, and see what kind of 'mental health enhancement' you can attract."

Bernadette snorted derisively. "Oh, sure. That's all I need. A bunch of horny country club husbands making passes at me..."

"Ah ha!" Brenda said triumphantly. "At least you admit that you'd attract a bunch of them!" She laughed as she successfully ducked a veritable hail of the foam balls... until Bernadette finally tagged her with one right between the eyes.

"You had better pick up all those stress balls off the floor," Bernadette said smugly. "They belong in these bags, not all over place behind you..."

*

After the women had finished filling the bags and stashing them in Brenda's Suburban for Monday, they shared a lemonade on the porch... all blessedly without any further randy pestering by Brenda. Bernadette was feeling uncommonly relaxed and might have stayed longer, but Costco was calling and she had a long shopping list.

She reached the end of the gravel and once more pressed the accelerator as the Tesla met good asphalt. Bernadette snorted to herself, 'Mother Superior my ass!'

She turned right, deciding to take the long way on the open desert roads around and back toward town and Costco. The more open asphalt the better, she admitted to herself.

Soon she was lost in the feeling of acceleration and speed. She wasn't going as fast now, instead reveling in playing with acceleration and braking. The car could do plenty of both, though she found herself agreeing with Car & Driver that the brakes were a little less robust than she was comfortable with on a car this fast.

Just after crossing a larger state highway, she eased to a stop at yet another pointless, deserted stop sign. Suddenly, she was aware of another car on the road with her, the first she had seen almost all day. A bright blue and white Corvette was whistling up behind her. It was a dammed good-looking car, even in her rear-view mirror, and Bernadette gave it the eye as it slid closer to her.

To her surprise, rather than stopping behind her, the driver swung it wide into the oncoming lane and pulled up beside her at the stop. Its engine growled throatily as the driver revved the motor-head's dream of an engine.

Really? Bernadette didn't deign to look over.

The engine quieted and she heard a voice calling, "Hey there, Tesla Guy! I hear tell them cars are fast. Wanna go?"

She looked skeptically at the driver, who had rolled down his passenger side window and was leaning across. He was a big, rangy, blonde youngster with an arrogant but friendly look on his face. She suddenly realized that he wasn't seeing her through the glass of her side windows, heavily tinted as they were against the sun that baked this part of the country.

She rolled down her window in turn and looked at him skeptically.

When he saw her, his face went pale. "Oh, hey! Um, howdy ma'am! I... uh," She swore that his hand twitched up, toward his forehead, as if to tip a hat, stopping only when he realized he wasn't wearing one.

He couldn't be more than twenty-five, and was probably less than that. His sudden discomfiture at discovering that he had challenged a conservative-looking, middle-aged woman to a drag race amused Bernadette unaccountably. Before she realized it, she said, "Oh, so you want to race me?"

!

What had she just said?

Race? Please... that wasn't her. She was just teasing him--teaching him a lesson. Besides, his Corvette looked like about a five-year-old, manual transmission model. It was admittedly a sweet ride, but in her Tesla... she'd crush him like a bug.

"Oh... pardon, ma'am," the boy stammered. "I didn't mean no disrespect. I was just being playful like. I'll just..."

"Here to the next stop sign. Dead stop to dead stop, and don't go over the line or you lose," Bernadette dictated race terms before she could stop herself, remembering a scene from a movie she had loved when she was younger. "Ready?" she smiled.

The young man was confused for a moment, then embarrassed. But he looked at her again for a moment, and rallied quickly. "Uh, sure! I'll see you when you get there," he said, his bravado returning.

Bernadette laughed. It felt good, actually. "Ha! I'd say you can enjoy the view up my tailpipe, but this car doesn't have one," she replied. Inwardly, she winced. That remark could have been taken in several ways. "We go on three, right?" The kid nodded. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him even cock an eyebrow as she pressed her hair back against the head rest in preparation. "One... Two...

Three

!" Bernadette called out.

Her foot slapped the accelerator straight to the floor. Much as she loved the speed and power of the car, she had never quite dared to floor it, ever. Even from a dead stop like this. But she had pushed that pedal hard enough in the past to have an idea of what was coming. Despite her head being already back, brushing the head rest, she still felt it snap back from the acceleration as the Tesla leapt from the line like a shot.

She had always loved the snarl of a high-performance engine, and the Corvette to her left certainly delivered that, along with a squeal of tires so brief that it told her the kid knew his way around a clutch better than she had honestly expected. The sound all too quickly faded though, falling off almost instantly as the 'Vette moved from her peripheral vision to first her side view, then immediately to the rear view mirror. She inhaled sharply at the acceleration. It really was wildly more powerful than she had expected. By the time she had taken that single, involuntary breath, the car was at 60 miles an hour.

Her fingers dug tightly into the handles of the Tesla's aircraft control-shaped steering yoke, and she held on, standing on the pedal as the car just kept accelerating. She felt the, unfamiliar of late, burning sensation of being

alive

suffusing her soul.

It should have been silent in the cabin, but her ears were filled with a screaming noise. It took her more than a moment to realize the sound was her, whooping with a glee more intense than she had felt in ages! Now that she was aware of it, she whooped again.

Her gleeful sounds cut off with a gleep when she looked over at the display and saw that her speed was 123 mph and still ticking upward swiftly. She flinched and let off the pressure on the accelerator slightly, shooting a glance into her rear-view mirror. The gorgeous Corvette was still back there, well behind, but not as far back as she would like. And now that she had relaxed the pedal, it might even be starting to close a little.

Not today! Her determination to win this race and make sure that blonde boy was put in his place suddenly re-asserted itself. Her foot touched the floor once more. Her smile returned unbidden to her lips.

At 139 mph, she chickened out again on further acceleration, but managed to make herself keep her speed right there. It was only a moment or two, however, as the next stop sign was suddenly, alarmingly in view. She let off the pressure with her foot and she surged forward gently against the seatbelt as the car began to slow. She actually moved to the brake and began to press lightly. The motors whined as they drank more of her momentum back into the batteries, and the sedan slowed harder. It was the first time the yoke had even so much as trembled in her hands.

For an instant, she feared that she had waited too long to slow, and would overshoot the finish. Then she realized that she had not and she shook with triumph.

At last, she stood on the brake and the car lurched to a halt, a foot or so from the white line. The Corvette did not appear in her side window. Looking back, the driver had pulled to a stop behind her, almost meekly, wordlessly acknowledging her victory. As she looked in the mirror, a big hand shot out of the driver's window, brandishing a thumbs up.

Still shivering, Bernadette rolled past the intersection and crunched to a stop on the sage-scattered shoulder about fifty feet beyond. The 'Vette followed, a bit like an eager puppy. Almost unable to contain herself, she opened the door and slid out and to her feet, looking back at the gorgeous but humbled muscle car. She was too intoxicated at the moment to realize that her body had just produced more adrenaline and endorphins in the last sixty seconds than it had in the last year. All she knew was that she had a quite appropriately shit-eating grin on her face.

The door of the other car swung open and the driver started to emerge. It took him a while to get out. The Corvette was a low car, and he was a tall guy. She was more sure than ever that the boy was indeed in his early twenties, but he had a mature, hard physique. He wore the kind of cowboy boots that cost nine hundred or more for a pair, tightly fitted jeans, and a plaid shirt that sported the western-style, double-pointed yoke over his discernible pecs that just screamed 'cowboy'.

If the clothes had been new, and the jeans designer, she would have been certain, in combination with the six-figure sports car, that such an individual was, as her Texas-born mother-in-law would have said, 'all hat and no cattle.'

But the boots had seen hard use, the shirt, while spotless, was soft, wrinkled and lived-in, and his jeans were simple, dusty Levis. That, combined with the Corvette, convinced her that this kid might have no hat at the moment, but he and his family likely had a metric shit-ton of cattle.

As his eyes landed on her, he smiled a huge, wide, genuine smile, filled with gleaming white, perfect teeth. "Damn, ma'am," he exclaimed enthusiastically, "you whipped my ass. You could break some boys' hearts with that machine."

"I didn't break yours?" Bernadette asked amusedly, suddenly finding that she wished he'd say yes.

"Nah," the boy said, approaching and moving his eyes to the nice but sedate-looking Tesla. "Like I said a'fer, I just wanted to see if she was as fast as I'd heard. I reckon I learned now, didn't I?"

She just stepped back a step, inviting him to continue his admiring, appraising walk around her sedan. It was purely coincidental that, by letting him pass, she got a good look at his backside. He filled out those jeans

well

. "I didn't get your name,

car

-poke," Bernadette mused, following him as he walked because... she decided that she wanted to. That was a seriously nice ass that he had.

"Oh," he said, turning to her and actually flushing a tiny bit. "My manners... I'm Clement, Clement Davies, ma'am." His hand again moved abortively toward a non-existent hat.

The 'ma'am' was getting tiresome, but she could not help but let some amusement into her voice as she replied, "I'm Bernadette, not ma'am, Clem."

"Clement, ma'am," he corrected her, western country manners drilled too strongly into him to drop the ma'am without more effort. Or perhaps he was just teasing her with the honorific? "Clem is my Pa, and so was my grandpa and great-grandpa too. For my part, I figured out right early on that if I gotta carry around an antiquated name, I might as soon use it all. So I'm Clement." His words were wry, but his smile was genuine.

Bernadette leaned against the car, looking him up and down. He was as impressive from the front as from the rear, she was forced to admit to herself, not liking that she was looking so closely. He had the kind of rangy strength one saw out in this part of the country, strength that came from hard, energetic work from a very early age. It wasn't an uncommon look around those parts, but his hair, eyes, smile, and height did make for a far above average looking package.

She smiled in return. "I admit, I do love this car," she said smugly. "Want to take a ride?"

Where the fuck had that come from? As if he'd want...

"Really?" Clement exclaimed quickly. "That would be truly fine!" He sprang around to the passenger side, as if eager to go before she could change her mind.

That displayed remarkable intelligence, as change her mind had been what Bernadette had been about to do. Now... it would be rude to back out, she told herself.