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“Jesus, lad, you’re soaked,” John says, snapping the heater knob all the way to the right. Beneath the tape deck it roars to life, drizzling out the smell of rubber and scorched dust, and the young hitchhiker extends his hands to the heat pouring out of the vents. Even his teeth are chattering. “We’ll get you warmed up.”
The hitchhiker’s a young thing, shivering and drenched and hunched over in the seat like he’s trying to climb into his own gut for warmth.
“Thank you, I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I’m dripping everywhere—geez, your seat’s getting soaked—I’m so sorry, thank you again for stopping.”
“It’ll dry,” John says, casting another sidelong glance at his young passenger. Folded up like he is, he can’t make out his height or his build, but he doesn’t seem large at all. He looks to be somewhere in his mid-twenties. Looks healthy, looks tired. Sweet face—blue eyes, ruddy cheeks. John drags his eyes back to the road.
“There’s a truck stop up the road a ways,” he says. “We’ll get you changed into some nice, dry clothes.”
“I left my pack somewhere,” he says miserably. “Idiot.”
John shakes his head. The lad’s clearly having a rough time of it. He himself seldom picks up hitchhikers and wouldn’t have pulled to the shoulder for this one were it not for the rain. He worries for them—foolish kids, naive. But he’s a man who keeps himself to himself.
They fall into silence. The rain has thinned to a drizzle and the far horizon is cloudless, the highway diminishing to a point beneath fierce and pure prairie blue. John decides he’ll drop him off at the truck stop with a dry change of his own clothes—chalk them up as lost—and consider his good deed done. He’d gotten him out of the rain, hadn’t he? Certainly he can handle himself from here on out. The wisest choice, really—the most prudent, anyway. John stares resolutely at his knuckles, wrapped white-tight around the wheel, refusing—hopefully not conspicuously—to return the gentle, curious looks the young man keeps giving him.
Henry hadn’t realized how large John was until he unfolds himself from the cab and hops down. His white v-neck pocket tee clings to his broad shoulders and heavy arms, which are covered in faded tattoos. He doesn’t wish to stare, but keeps stealing little glances as they cross the parking lot and pass through the diner to the shower and restroom in the back: he makes out an octopus, an anchor, some Latin he can’t understand. In the locker room John slings his bag down into the bench and digs past a couple of beaten paperbacks and through who knows how many strata of clothes until he comes up with a t-shirt exactly like the one he’s wearing and a pair of sweats.
Henry takes them behind the dividing wall—a dingy stall, disused showerhead watching him like an alien eye—and undresses, thinking of his luck.
John’s the third trucker to pick him up today. The first had talked at him for the entire two hours Henry spent in his cab, a meandering monologue covering everything from his ex-wife’s sexual proclivities to baseball, a sport in which he was apparently an expert due to his having played for a few months on the city league. He opined on Gerald Ford’s dick size, explained how his brother had cheated him out of a a cubic shit ton of money in an affair involving wholesale office supplies, and at least three times told Henry he could look at the deck of dirty playing cards he kept in his glove compartment. His cab smelled inexplicably of raw onion and spoiled milk.
The second guy—well, he wasn’t a bad guy. He’d been quite nice about the whole thing. It’s just—he’d made certain assumptions. He had certain expectations. And Henry had refused. Politely, of course—in fact, there were mumbled, tense apologies on both sides. By the time it was over with, Henry had been deposited back on the shoulder without his bag just in time for the first soft, chill drops of rain to hit his shoulder.
Ironic, he thinks as he peels himself free of his soaked layers, that he would gladly oblige John in the same fashion. He listens to him pissing noisily on other side of the dividing wall and imagines the quiet Englishman’s gaze heavy and appreciative on him as he strips down. He wonders if his body would please him. He wonders what it would feel like to wear the man’s clothes like a collar, his scent like a lead. A slice of heat goes through his belly at that thought and he tries to wipe the idea from his mind. Probably has a sweet old wife somewhere, a son his age. Grandchildren, perhaps. He inhales deeply of the white cotton shirt wadded in his hand before pulling it on. It’s worn soft, smells like woodsmoke and, slightly, sweat. It hangs loose on his arms, flaps around his thighs. He pulls the cord of the sweatpants as tight as they’ll go and they still hang dangerously low on his waist, enough that he clutches them to him as he follows him back into the diner.
When John sits down, his shoulders slope inward as though they’re trying to conceal their own breadth. He bows his head over his coffee cup, seemingly just letting the heat warm his face. His dark eyes are expressive and clever, his serious mouth framed by a week’s worth of stubble. He’s handsome in that very way men in old paintings are sad, all exhaustion and difficult secrets.
“I can pay for mine,” Henry says stupidly, pulling his eyes back down to the menu.
John smiles blandly, inscrutably.
“Geez, you’re quiet.”
The heavy brow lifts incrementally; a trace of humor creeps into his expression. And Henry feels like he’s just won a prize at the state fair, a blue ribbon to pin to his chest.
As they eat the sun sets in all shades of flame and flesh. Henry is bright, though not educated—I did get my diploma, he notes with a grin, first one in my family—and John’s soothed by his chatter. It just takes a few questions here and there to keep him going. He’s from a real churchy town in Kansas, John learns, and is headed for any city he can get to. He’d been traveling with a friend who looked out for him, he explains, and something in the way he says friend, a moment’s pause on either side and a skittish flicker in his gaze, slides beneath John’s skin. Like he’s trying to feel him out, speak to him in code.
But John lets it pass. Mostly, he listens; mostly, he watches the way the boy—not a boy, he reprimands himself, he’s twenty-four—shapes the words and lets them go, his face bright and quick and always changing. Then it’s dark, the stars blinking against the black. They can see their breath on the air when they step outside, sailing from their lips to drift together in the cold.
“Your turn,” Henry says once they’ve been driving for a few minutes. He’s curled up against the passenger side door, his legs slung up onto the bench seat. His stockinged feet inches from John’s thigh. “You got a wife, kids?”
John smirks one-sided at this, shakes his head. Then, hoping to cut off further inquiry: “I’m rather a private person.”
“Come on,” Henry says, extending his leg so his toe just grazes John’s thigh. Playfully. “Nobody’s a private person all the time.”
“One can try to be,” he says. He recognizes the slyness in Henry’s tone, the way his body is oriented in offering to him, yet still he holds his silence. God, how simple it would be to just—rest his hand on his shin, just stroke his thumb against the hard, slender curve of his calf. He’s such a beautiful young man, supple and slight, and the way he’s cocking his head now—pressing the ball of his foot harder into his thigh—John sighs and lets his hand alight as softly as a bird on his ankle. That will have to suffice.
It does not, apparently, suffice, for moments later Henry’s crawled across the bench seat, curling himself so his head rests against the side of John’s chest and his folded lap brooks the gear shift. Instinctively, John lifts his arm and lets it fall around Henry, but he doesn’t dare look down at him in case he vanishes like the cool, clear waters that taunted Tantalus.
Once he’s sure John is comfortable holding him against him, Henry ventures a hand to his thigh. John stiffens, his breath trapped in his throat for a moment. Henry studies the side of his face and sees no sign of anger there, so he keeps his hand where it is even though it trembles.
“Do you know what you’re after, lad?” John asks softly.
Henry nods. “I do. I think I do.”
“You’re certain?” His tone takes on a buttery sternness that makes Henry’s blood hum. Henry nods, and the way John looks at him, all hungry and pleased, is… better than sugar, better than Christmas, better than climbing the highest tree.
“Yeah,” Henry nods. “Please, please. I’ve been thinking about it this whole time.”
John gives him a considering look, then slides his fingers up the hem of his own shirt on Henry’s body. The skin beneath is milk-smooth, sun-warm, and Henry’s mouth goes slack and glad with just that light touch.
“What, pray tell, have you been thinking about this whole time?” His eyes are back on the road, his gaze forward, but his fingers sweep ghostweight curves along the shallow well of his waist. Henry feels like he’s going to shiver his way out of his own skin, it’s so nice.
“Oh—I pretended you were watching me when I changed. Wanted your eyes on me. Wanted to know if it’d make you hard, watching me.”
“Jesus, lad.” Then, more sternly: “Give me something to watch, then.”
Henry, hands shaking, arches his hips up off the seat to wiggle the sweatpants down to his thighs. He’s already achingly hard. John rakes his eyes down his body, then nods. “Shirt too.”
Henry takes off the shirt. “Just don’t crash,” he half-teases.
But John likes him at the periphery, the motion and weight of him—how he cannot quite have him yet. It draws out the savor of it til he feels his lust like actual hunger in his gut. A rumbling, a pang. He grunts as unzips his fly and gives Henry another sidelong look. Even in the dim light of the cab he can make out a farmer’s tan on skinny-strong arms, a belly just soft enough to show that he’s got appetite. From a sparse nest of hair juts his ruddy uncut length, darker than the rest of him. This he takes in his hand, staring with dumb, naked want at John’s own.
“Do you like it, lad?” He asks softly. He’s generally a humble man but of his cock he’s justifiably proud. It’s a thick, rosy thing, seemingly crafted to please. Henry’s not the first man to stare, but, John decides, he looks the prettiest doing so, his eyes hooded and his lips softly parted.
Henry then commences to breathlessly enumerate all the things John could do to him. “God, I’d love love love to suck you off,” he says wistfully. “Probably choke though.” Then he gives a little whimper and twists his palm over his leaking head before asking excitedly, “You ever, like—use a guy’s thighs? I’ve always wanted to try that. Just lay me down on this here seat, like—d’ya have any Vaseline? Fuck, John, just want you on top of me—” He snatches his hand up off his own prick and catches his breath.
“Were you going to come?” John asks.
Henry nods.
“That won’t do,” John says. “Sit on your hands til we get there.”
“Yes, daddy,” Henry says. Sulky, flirtatious. Something in John’s chest twists, bristling. He shouldn’t like it, this boy half his age calling him that, but god help him he does. He pulls off onto the next sideroad he sees and parks in a dirt turnaround in front of a dark field. For a moment they’re still and quiet, staring startled at each other, and then John twists, rises, and pins Henry to the seat. He wraps his thighs around John’s waist as John licks his mouth open, but he can’t stay there long, for he wants to taste him all over, wants to feel every inch of him, finger every notch and chart each warm plane. Henry rolls against him, whimpering and grabbing and trying to keep up.
He lies still, though, as John undresses, watching raptly. John’s heated through by the directness of that unblinking blue gaze, as pure and expectant as bathwater. Embarrassed, too—old man, he thinks, with too much heft to his belly, the silver hair too thick across his chest, but before his shirt’s even all the way off Henry is grabbing for him, laying scattershot kisses all the way down from his padded collar to the gentle swell of his belly. He leaves his jeans on—there’s something about being completely naked that’s always felt comical, humiliating—like a shaved ape. But Henry’s completely naked now and it’s beautiful, natural. A river of warm, supple light beneath him. He reaches past his head to the glovebox and gropes around for the small tub of petroleum jelly he prays is still there.
Finding it, he repositions so he’s kneeling on the seat and then, with a grunt, he maneuvers Henry neatly onto his knees and elbows.
“Oh! You’re strong!” Henry gasps softly, settling so he can feel the pull of gravity in the curve of his spine, each vertebra tugged minutely, radiantly apart. He closes his eyes and breathes in the smell of the seat—industrial, he recalls a summer job once at a factory where they built boat engines, the smell all scorched and oily—and of his own sweat, and then there’s a weight on tailbone. Slippery velveteen. It’s John’s cock, his fat fucking perfect blessing of a cock, well-greased and slotted right into the cleft of his ass.
“Beautiful,” John murmurs as he drags it down, passing over the wink of his asshole and instead decisively thrusting it between Henry’s thighs. “Now, can you be a good lad for daddy and squeeze those lovely thighs together? Tight as you can—ah. It’s a soft, gratified gasp, but it echos down the halls of Henry’s body like a shout. He didn’t realize this would feel so delicious for him too: with each thrust, John glides along his balls and the blood-heavy underridge of his prick. It’s not enough to bring him off but more than enough to drive him mad, huffing and whining as he reminds himself to keep his thighs tight for John. Because he’s his good lad. Beautiful. And if he is perfect—maybe he will be permitted to stay, at least until the clouds clear and the rain has risen as vapor back into the far, pure blue of the horizon.