I looked down. Trevor’s nak*d ass was poking out, half his body covered by my blanket and half his body covered by nothing at all. I, on the other hand, was giving quite a show, way more flesh exposed and plenty of the good parts. Trevor’s arm covered my belly, but my ass and tits and curves were on display like some sort of potting shed peep show for the weirdo who was now mouthing something I couldn’t read.
Narrowing my eyes and staring at him more didn’t make a difference, so I needed to get my ass out there. If I stood up, though, he’d see me nak*d. It’s not like plenty of men hadn’t, in this area at least, but I didn’t feel like showing off just now. Especially after I had just peeled back every layer of my body and soul for Trevor.
Tap, tap, tap. Trevor shifted and then snored and I shooed my hand toward the window. “Turn away,” I said in a croaky half whisper, half loud voice, trying to keep from waking Trevor but succeeding only in sounding stupid.
Miraculously, the man figured out exactly what I wanted and turned around, the back of his closely cropped hair showing up in stark relief even if I hadn’t really caught a good look at him in the front. Wiggling into my jeans and my blouse, I figured what the hell, and skipped the underwear. I didn’t need a bra to tell some guy to go away.
I tiptoed over to the door and opened it. Creak it went. Damn! I didn’t oil the hinges, I didn’t do anything to the outside of this pile of wood. I didn’t want to tip anybody off to my little place. As I opened the door and light shone in I gasped, the sound abrupt and halting, even coming out of my own lungs.
There, before me, stood the most perfect man I’d ever seen in my entire life. I don’t mean perfect like Trevor, who was, objectively speaking, the most perfect man. I mean physically perfect, like God’s hand reached out of the sky and custom sculpted the face, the body, the look, every bit of it. It was as if whatever it had taken to make this ideal human being had involved sucking all of the good out of the men in this part of north-central Ohio, an uneven distribution of exceptional quality that had been poured into this specimen, making every other man look like a gremlin. Fat gremlins, around here.
“Uh…uh…I’’m – ” I stuttered. “Um…yes?” I said, my mouth going dry, my throat clicking as I swallowed. I had just found the most exceptional man last night, standing nak*d by the side of the road and he’d turned out to be one of my biggest music crushes. And yet, every part of my loins – once again – were on fire for this Greek god.
“Is Trevor here?” he asked.
I could have watched this man’s face move, the muscles twitching and turning, bending and dancing in perfect harmony with the words that came out of those luscious, perfect, symmetrical lips and been happy in that kind of stupor forever, as if his features were a kind of meth that didn’t cost anything but your dignity. Like a child who caught Santa, I gawked, dumbfounded and shocked by the implications of finding out what I’d thought had been imaginary was real.
“Excuse me,” the man said slowly, as if I were a bit slow. Which, right then, I was. “Excuse me, but I’m looking for Trevor Connor.”
He looked around me, craning his head, and then stepped back as if self correcting, too polite to barge in. No barger was he. This wasn’t some alpha male-wannabe who came in all cocky. Instead, it was like looking at a Calvin Klein model or one of those breathtaking men in Vogue you knew was g*y – gayer than gay.
Oh, please don’t let this one be gay, I thought.
Oh, for God’s sake Darla, another voice popped in. You don’t need to be thinking about what this guy does with his dick when you’ve got your own dick in the bed behind you.
Down, girl.
“Uh…yeah. Yeah,” I stammered. “Trevor’s right here.”
I pulled the door open, the creak sound making Trevor groan and then shove a pillow over his head to block out the light. My wits came back and I sighed heavily, enjoying searching this man’s face as I said, “Joe! You must be Joe.”
His features broadened, stretching with relief. I wanted to lick him all over and make all his worries go away. Stop it, I slapped myself on the inside. Trevor, Trevor, Trevor, Trevor, Trevor.
“Oh, thank God he’s here,” Joe said. “Because I went to 26 Old Farm Road which is here,” he pointed two feet away at the trailer, “and once I got to the front door…” He looked down at his shoe as if dismayed. The bottom of his pants was torn and his shoe, which had been a nice white leather Nike, was now torn along the edges and had deep black streaks on it. “After my foot fell through a rotten board on the porch, I pulled it out. By the way, do you live there?” he asked. Answering “yes” was clearly not the correct answer as his brow furrowed and he scowled the most adorable scowl I’d ever seen. It was like watching a kitten frown.
“No,” I said ferociously. “No. No, no, no, no, no,” I added, shaking my head. What the hell was I doing? Of course I lived there.
“I live here,” I said, turning, my hand smacking against the side of the shed, a little piece of rotten board falling off and clattering to the ground, failing to help me in my lie. We looked at each other, equally embarrassed. Except, we were both embarrassed for me.
“Oh, so…umm, a person in there, I wasn’t sure who the person was, but the person…” If he said the person one more time I would have no choice but to smack him. It was obvious he couldn’t tell whether Mama was a man or a woman. She got that a lot. Probably, it was the low smoker’s voice combined with her weight. That and the fact that she hadn’t done anything with herself since Daddy had died. Eighteen years is a long time for a woman to go without anything special.
No, not that. Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean no makeup, no nice clothes, nothing. She just ate and watched her stories on TV, and went on the Internet and entered sweepstakes contests and lotteries. If that seemed about as pathetic as it sounded, that’s because it was. On the other hand, we had more swag than you could ever imagine. Corporate logos on t-shirts and water bottles and little stuffed animals from all sorts of products – you need something like that, stop by the trailer and grab whatever you want, as long as Mama’s not looking. No one needs three hundred pop can cozies, right? Except Mama. All of it her winnings, as she called it, cluttering up the trailer but it gave her something to look forward to whenever the mail came.
“That’s my Mama,” I said quietly. His eyes widened. I would have read him the Communist Manifesto in the original German if I thought that there was a snowball’s chance in hell that I could just stare at him. The planes of his cheekbones were entrancing, the way the skin folded around his eyes, dark and sophisticated, an exquisiteness to the waves of his bluish-black hair. He had the bone structure of a model and the whole package of a man who was beauty personified.
Composing himself, the gears turning in that gorgeous head, he finally replied with: “OK, yeah, her. Well, so, Trevor’s supposed to be there.”
“No, he’s here with me.”
“This is your house? You’re Darla?” he asked.
I pulled the door shut quickly and then realized that my br**sts were hanging right around my bellybutton. Dammit! I actually did need my bra. And shoes would help too. “Just a minute,” I said, my finger in his face buying me a second as I scurried back into my little home.
Fumbling to pull off my shirt, I looked down at Trevor. Should I wake him up? Tell him Joe’s here? This was going to be the end, and any second now he’d be gone. This couldn’t be the way that it ended. And yet, it had to end, didn’t it?
I felt kind of stupid, now extra stupid, for telling him what had happened with Mama and Daddy’s accident. There was really only one person I could talk to about that and she was out in Boston right now. Why was I thinking about Aunt Josie when I had the most incredible man I’d ever found by the side of the road – OK, the only man I’d ever found by the side of the road, but he was still pretty f**king incredible – in my bed, covered in my scent, my juices, our minglings still floating through the air. And then another guy, standing outside my little house, waiting for something.
Whatever it was, I needed to figure out how to give it because pretty soon people were going to start to really nose their way in to my business.
Socks. Shoes. Bra. A little deodorant and a quick brush through my hair and I stepped back outside, grinning wide. Again I was dumbstruck. It was like looking at someone not quite human. When Joe smiled politely, of course his teeth were perfectly straight and so even it was as if they’d been filed down. Dimples appeared as the smile deepened into a grin and he said, “Trevor’s passed out?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, nodding.
“Did he get high again?” There was a resignation in Joe’s voice and I took the moment to search his body up and down; yellow Polo shirt, faded jeans, white sneakers – nothing special in the clothes department. He could have been any guy in Cleveland, or Columbus, or Pittsburgh, but the way he wore them, how the clothes hung on his angles, on his bulging muscles was…all of this was making me drool and sigh and turn into an insipid idiot.
So it was time to just be a regular idiot and say, “No, not high. He’s just tired.”
“Ahh,” Joe’s eye’s twinkled. “You rode him hard.”
I pulled my face back a bit. “That’s awfully presumptuous of you.”
“What is?” he said languidly, a sharp contrast to the nervous man he’d been just moments ago.
“Assuming I slept with Trevor.”
“Not a commentary on you, Darla,” he said, protesting, holding one palm out. “I just know Trevor too well. There’s no way he would be picked up by a woman hitchhiking nak*d and not sleep with her.”
Joe
I’d spent the better part of the last two hours this morning being chewed out by Trevor’s mom, who kept asking where he was and demanding I put him on the phone as I catapulted myself as fast as possible through the lost journey down I-76 in the bowels of Pennsylvania and, now, Ohio. I had the set of clothes he’d abandoned in his basement, along with his iPhone and wallet. Idiot.
Of all the fuck-ups Trevor had been involved in, this was easily the biggest one and it tasted a little too much like one of those Hangover movies, which are very funny in a frat-boy way but that leave much to be desired when you’re the friend who has to rescue the main character. If this woman Darla had a Capuchin monkey in that little potting shed where Trevor was snoring behind her, then that was it. I was done.
Darla came out of the shed, closed the door and smiled at me like a crazy, wild woman. What the hell had Trevor gotten into? This place looked like something out of My Name Is Earl. This wasn’t funny anymore. Eleven hours of driving had been bad enough. Doing it alone, listening to all of the recorded lectures for my health care law class, which I had to get an A in, in order to secure my spot at BC Law, had been bad enough. But showing up here and being ocularly devoured by this curvy, bouncy chick who had just bagged Trevor was over the top.