The haze of static turned into music so abruptly as Ginny crested the hill that she almost yelped in surprise. One minute she was getting nothing but a slow hiss that threatened to send her to sleep mid-drive, the next she heard the Beatles clear as day. "He says one and one and one is three...got to be good looking 'cause he's..."
Just as Ginny was starting to sing along, the words became a garbled mess as she coasted down the next hill, then faded back into static. She sighed, twisting the dial with one hand while using the other to navigate the winding downhill road, desperately seeking out another signal to help keep her awake. She would have laughed at the irony if she wasn't so annoyed-here she was, on her way to the biggest musical event she was ever likely to have a chance to witness, and she was driving a car without even so much as an eight-track.
No matter how carefully she adjusted the dial, though, Ginny couldn't get the Beatles back. She started turning the tuning knob slowly and steadily, going up and down in a desperate search for something other than white noise. With Babs chickening out at the last second, she was making the long drive to the festival all by herself. She needed something to keep her awake and driving.
A squeal of distortion melted into something Motown that Ginny didn't recognize, and she left it there for a moment. It was still music, even if it wasn't the Dead, and music beat silence any day. Ginny felt like she could never get enough of it-she studied it during the day, she practiced and played it all afternoon and every evening, and she still slept with the radio on. This drive was probably the longest stretch of silence she'd endured in years.
The Motown singer went faint and tinny as Ginny rounded another curve, and she fiddled with the dial a bit to try to keep the station coming in clear. She caught the end of the song and snatches of the beginning of another, but by then the music was more static than song and she gave up trying. She started searching for another station.
It took her almost five minutes to find anything, though. Ginny was technically past the Rockies, but she was still probably five hours' drive from the nearest big city and driving through winding foothills that seemed to block every radio signal with capricious malice. When she finally did pick up something, it was so distant and staticky that she didn't even know what she was listening to. Probably just her imagination, so bored by the moonless night and the endless stars overhead that she was transforming the crackling hiss into music through the power of suggestion.
Ginny turned the volume up, hoping to make out the melody. She thought she heard fragments of 'Cosmic Charlie', but that was probably just wishful thinking-this far out in the middle of nowhere, she was more likely to hear Tammy Wynette than the Grateful Dead. Still, she hummed the tune to 'Cosmic Charlie' anyway, making it fit the nebulous sounds she heard on the radio and imagining herself listening to them live in just a few days' time.
The song ended, and another one picked up after it. At least, Ginny thought another song was playing-she could definitely hear music now, albeit fuzzy music that sounded like it was coming from one of those distant stars overhead, but she could also hear someone talking in a voice too garbled to make out. Some sort of crosstalk, probably. She'd experienced it a few times on the long drive, when driving through an area that was right on the edges of the signal strength of two different stations that shared the same frequency. One second you were listening to one song, the next you were listening to two at once.
She turned the frequency knob with a safecracker's finesse, trying to clear out the interference and get the music to come in clearly, but all she got was a little less static in the mix. She couldn't get the speech out of the music or the music out of the speech, and neither one of them would resolve into anything intelligible.
The road curved north, though, and Ginny found as she followed it that she heard the music slightly clearer. She still didn't recognize the tune; whatever was playing, it was nothing she'd heard on her radio back home. It sounded vaguely psychedelic, with distortion coming from the instruments as well as from the signal, but not like anything she'd ever heard before. Ginny found herself fiddling with the knob again, trying to bring it into closer focus.
That almost turned out to be a mistake-Ginny lost the station entirely once or twice in her efforts to get it to come in clearer-but she finally got it to come in reasonably clearly. She still couldn't get rid of the man's voice underneath it all, but the music reduced his endless speech to an unintelligible murmur. Ginny let go of the dial and decided that would have to be good enough for now. She turned up the volume and hit the gas pedal, crossing her fingers and hoping that the music would last her through at least until sunrise.
Once the sun came up, she'd probably be good to drive the rest of the way. Maybe she'd have to pull over once or twice to rest her eyes, but she was sure that she'd get there in plenty of time. And then...Ginny let out a happy sigh, her thoughts already drifting ahead to the music festival. She imagined listening to the Dead, or to Santana, next to some cute guy with long hair and an easy smile. She pictured herself putting a joint to her lips-the last time she'd tried marijuana, she'd spluttered and coughed until she nearly choked, but in her fantasy, she let the smoke drift lazily in and out of her lungs.
The man in Ginny's fantasy smiled at her. She smiled back, knowing what was going to happen next and welcoming it. The other people around them wouldn't notice; they were wrapped up in the music, just like she was. And if they did notice...well hell, who cared? She had nothing to be ashamed of. She was proud of her body, and she was a grown woman. They would understand if she undid her skirt and let it fall open onto the soft grass. She was in the moment, that was all. She was letting it all wash over her and doing everything that seemed right and natural. It was perfectly real to her, and perfectly amazing the way he touched her between her legs. She gasped at how wet she was already.
His fingers were soft, strong, and confident as they found her clit. Ginny whimpered, thinking about his cock as he unzipped his fly and let it out in the warm evening air. She wanted it so much now, her body aching to be fucked with an intensity so great that it almost terrified her. On any other night, she knew, it would have. But she knew that this moment would be special. This was everything she had ever dreamed of, everything she had ever wanted. This was the perfect seduction, and she wanted nothing more than to give in to it and let herself melt under his touch. She would let herself be filled with the music, filled with the thick seductive smoke, filled with his-
Ginny's reverie was interrupted by a loud, rhythmic buzzing noise that seemed to reverberate through the cabin of the old pick up truck. She whipped her hand away from her crotch, a bit startled at how easily she'd fallen into her waking dream of unabashed lust, and gripped the wheel tightly as she steered off the rumble strips and back onto the road. It was veering slightly south again, she realized, and she hadn't even noticed. She thought about pulling over and closing her eyes for a little while, but she wasn't sure how long she would sleep if she did.
She rolled down the window instead, hoping that the cool night air would help clear out the cobwebs from her brain. She shifted in her seat, trying to keep her eyes moving so that she didn't succumb to highway hypnosis again. It didn't help that as the road slowly angled southward, the music grew fainter and more interspersed with bursts of static.
She drove a little faster, hoping the road would curve back to the north, but all she wound up doing was accelerating its descent into white noise. The voice that she'd almost stopped noticing degenerated into a warbling squawk, and Ginny imagined it urgently telling her to turn back now while she could still hear it. She caught herself drifting onto the rumble strip all over again, and angrily wrenched the wheel to the left to follow the road as it curved more sharply.
