A Reluctant Virgin's Road Trip

"Sugar," Deidra chuckled, "You must be new at traveling! When I said 'ride fee,' I wasn't talking about paying in dollars, honey! Cash isn't the currency mother truckers accept for 'riding on a dime!'

Lily Anne's face looked like a tennis ball had just hit someone. It was a feeling coming over her — like one of the reverend's communes with the Lord.

Hannah chimed in, "What my sister means, Freckles, is that reverend looking to get into your coochie for giving you a ride in his eighteen-wheeler, sugar girl?"

With the force of a tsunami, the meaning of Deidra's words gob-smacked Lily Anne's fried brain. Yesterday she'd taken Roger's asking if she was traveling on a dime comment as 'traveling low cost' or like 'hitchhiking.' People don't pay to hitchhike; it's just the kindness of a stranger to another traveler going the same way! At least that's what she had thought!

A wave of nausea crept up and hit Lily Anne at the realization that Roger and Mandy planned all along to fuck her in that big new tricked-out luxury big rig! That she escaped with her virginity was a miracle! Maybe the Lord had sent Prince Albert to rescue her! Did that mean the Reverend David and Sister Samantha Jane had some part in the design Fate had for Lily Anne on this mother trucker, cross-country, westward-ho road adventure? The emotional toll began to show. It started in her mind and then rolled to her stomach as she began to retch.

Deidra hit the brakes and pulled the big rig over onto the shoulder of the double-lane divided highway. Lily Anne held it long enough to make it out the door as she gagged and began throwing up into the weeds alongside I-40W. What little she'd eaten last night spattered across the ground and onto her now totally grunge-look tennies.

"Walk it off, Freckles," Hannah mumbled as a few big rigs roared past them.

The gusts from the airstreams of the big rigs roaring by hit Lily Anne and staggered her a bit. She was dizzy from exhaustion, and not having eaten at the diner didn't help either. To make matters worse, she needed to pee. That wasn't in the escape plan. Mandy had said, 'Gotta be quick.' Lily Anne reacted as quickly as she could. She was getting better at following directions now that it directly impacted her survival.

Leaning against a tire of the candy-apple red big rig, she told Hannah, "I gotta pee."

Hannah's facial expression was one of exasperation tinged with a sense of sympathy for the kid she and her sister had taken in on the spur of the moment. She'd come across as scared and wearing that lost puppy look, pleading for help in the Love's Fuel Station restroom. Her sister had already said yes, so Hannah followed her decision. It was a twin's pack agreement that bonded the two of them. Where one went, so did the other. It was an innate bond between twins, a bond not breakable by any means.

"Girl, there's a bush ... think of it as just hiding your tush and letting your golden flow go. Just get behind it and piss!" Hannah murmured while shaking her head. She was beginning to think the rescued waif was going to be more trouble than the lending of a helping hand to aid her at the Love's Fuel Station. Pulling over on the side of the road wasn't in their schedule. After all, time is money, and babysitting a lost soul on I-40W wasn't paying even a dime.

Lily Anne didn't put up a fuss just squatted and did it behind the bush. She watched the golden flow puddle and slowly form a stream running downhill. At least it wasn't running around her tennies or spattered on them like the stuff she threw up. She was already embarrassed enough at nearly having puked in the girls' eighteen-wheeler. It would be worse to add emptying her bladder in the truck while trying to hold it for who knows how long as they rolled down I-40W until they came to another nice clean bathroom.

Hannah grabbed some paper towels and a plastic bag from inside the cab. "Clean up your face and wipe that shit off your shoes with these," she said as she thrust the paper towels into Lily Anne's hand. "Put 'em in the bag when you're through, Freckles," she added. Then admonished, "Don't let the wind snatch them up to litter the highway!"

Lily Anne felt like a fifth grader being berated by a teacher for making a mess in the art room. She knew, however, that this wasn't art. It was the fear of being controlled by others without any recourse. A fear that empties your stomach as a triggered reflex. She listened and obediently followed Hannah's admonishments.

Back in the cab, Deidra handed her a bottle of water, "Drink some of this. It'll kill the taste and get you rehydrated. You look too damn white, ghostlike, right now, Lily Anne," she commented as she set the big rig into motion and slowly picked up speed.

Deidra's experienced driving soon had the big rig back onto the blacktop and gradually back up to speed. Once things were settled in, she watched Lily Anne down a few swallows of water.

"Not pregnant, are you, sugar?" Deidra inquired, glancing again to check on Lily Anne. "Not even just a little bit?" she smirked as an afterthought.

"No! ... And there's no such thing as being a little bit PG!" Lilly Anne answered. It came out a bit terse. She'd just puked her guts out and wasn't in the mood for crappy stuff like that.

"Easy, girl! Just trying to lighten you up. Morning sickness comes on like that, you know?" Deidra answered back.

"Sorry," Lily Anne answered, easing her tone a bit, "it just seemed to hit me ... the fact that earlier yesterday, some guy named Roger and his wife tried to force me into sex with them. I don't think he did, though ...."

Lily Anne's answer was not the whole truth of it. She wasn't about to give out the details to total strangers, not like she did to the police back at the restaurant yesterday. That was when she thought the detectives might help catch Roger and Mandy. There was no need to reveal any of that to the twins—nothing they could do to help her.

The trio rolled westward-ho on I-40W quietly for a while as Lily Anne's chaotic life events tumbled around in her head. Lily Anne lay back with her eyes closed. The thoughts of the time with Roger and what might have happened when she was out like a light from the Roofie he gave her replayed in her thoughts.

'What if Roger did — have sex with me? How would I be able to know?'she wondered. The thoughts of what he had done to her after he gave her that Roofie and told her it was an aspirin had her worried. He'd bitten her tits and mauled them, leaving purplish bruises. She knew the marks were there, and so was the soreness. Supposed he had put his cock in there ... while she was out ... wouldn't that be sore too? How would she know? Her mind was flooded with a quagmire of chaotic thoughts.

"Lily Anne, girl, you said you didn't think he had sex with you. Well, that's a bit out there in thought, sugar. Either he did, or he didn't. Were you too drunk to remember or ..." Hannah finally asked. She was curious as to why Lily Anne wouldn't know if that Roger guy had or had not done it to Lily Anne.

"I don't drink," Lily Anne declared empathically. That was meant to clear the air about being too drunk to remember ...

At that moment, Lily Anne realized she'd put herself in one of those blond moments of saying too much already. Maybe, she thought it wouldn't be too much to share if the twins had some answers to her unasked questions. Her teachers had often said, "The only dumb question is the one you don't ask. The rest lead to answers you can use!" Right about now, Lily Anne knew she had serious questions and that if she didn't ask someone, they would undoubtedly be dumb questions.

"Albert," she reticently told them, "the retired cop who rescued me says he thinks Roger gave me a Roofie. When I woke up in Albert's truck, I couldn't remember what had happened after I drank the pill and the water. Roger said it was aspirin and would help the pain from when he ... well, after he made me suck him. Later, I found out he'd done other things. So, I don't know if he had sex with me or not."

For the next few minutes, Lily Anne laid most of her grief out in the open for the twins. How they would take that, she didn't know, but at least it was out there, and perhaps they had some idea of what to do.

"Mother trucker!" Hannah blurted out.

"You mean fucking trucker!" Deidra chimed in. "Lily Anne, do you know if those other things include sticking it to your cunt? Like, are you bruised down there?"

"I didn't feel like he did anything there. I don't know how it would feel if he did."

"You don't know? Why are you still a virgin? Never had sex then, sugar?" Hannah questioned incredulously.

"No," Lily Anne's answer came out softly.

Her answer caused some concern for Deidra. Freckles looked damned young as Deidra had a closer look at her. Those owl glasses and truckload of blond freckles plastered all over her face and arms painted a picture of a fresh runaway. She was running from whom, and just how old she is, became a prominent thought in her mind.

"So, how old are you anyway?" Deidra quietly asked as she fixed her eyes on her sister's face. She saw it register her same thoughts — an underaged kid on the lamb.

Deidra's thoughts at the rest stop focused on helping a girl in dire need. They'd perhaps picked up a runaway waif on the lamb from her parents. An underage kid — a damned lot of trouble for her and her sister, if that's what she turned out to be.

"I'm eighteen-and-three months," Lily Anne answered as she looked at Deidra's hard-doubting stare.

Hannah's remark came out without comfort, "Girl, even if you weren't an eighteen-year-old virgin, you might not be able to tell if that bastard did something to you. Even some virgins get pregnant. Even a teenager in the Bible got knocked up by a 'hand of God coming upon her.' So, they say.

We know a woman's daughter a few doors from our mother's place. She claimed she was a virgin and still got pregnant. Her stepdad didn't take her virginity, he just came knocking at her front door, and his dick left his swimmers in her slit. They just got through the cracks in her hymen, and ... well, nine months later, she had herself an immaculate conception newborn."

"Honey," Deidra added, "Hate to break this to you, but you should get yourself checked out at a medical place. And real soon! Did you take a 'morning after pill' like Plan B just in case?"

"I don't know what you mean ..." Lily Anne's blank stare spoke for her as she responded to Deidra's advice, "What's a morning-after pill?"

Deidra glanced at Hannah. It was a mutually shared thought, 'This girl is too damned naive to be out on the road alone. She's gonna get herself fucked over bad, or worse.'

"Plan B is a pill you take after you realize you've had sex without some protection, like a condom, Lily Anne. Haven't you heard of birth control; you are on a pill for that, right? That's the Plan A part of the equation: birth control and condoms, sugar. The Plan B is a pill that helps prevent pregnancy; it's not an abortion pill. You have to take it right away, within seventy-two hours. Women call it 'the morning after pill' 'cause they usually wake up lucid enough to realize that they've had unprotected sex the night before," Deidra lectured.

Lily Anne's conversation with her mother about sex covered abstinence and waiting after marriage for sex. So, those conversations were not about birth control and morning-after pills. Neither were any conversations about running away from home in their conversations or the consequences of possibly doing so!

"What have I gotten myself into?" Lily Anne's childlike voice filled with a tremor as she spoke.

The tears washed over her lower eyelids and rolled down her cheeks. The cry and sobs sounded like Samantha Jane's in the early morning hours as the reverend tried to cast that demon out of her in vain. David had relentlessly pounded Samantha Jane's body up in the overhead sleeper, ramming deeper and harder until she couldn't cry any longer.

Lily Anne's thoughts drifted back to the morning hours when she felt that demon's hands slipping between her legs beneath the blanket as she lay in the front seat. Wide awake, she felt the slickness pooling between her thighs as her fingers stroked her clit fervently. Felt it sharing in Reverend David's hell-steeled cock pounding he gave Samantha Jane in the middle of the night. Lily Anne hadn't been able to stop the lust that filled her. She knew it was wrong to enjoy the pleasure her hands gave herself while Samantha Jane was being pummeled just above her head. Lily Anne couldn't help herself; the lust and sexual cries from the reverend as he took Samantha Jane were what she wanted to feel.

Lily had forced herself to fight the screams trying to escape her throat as she came and came again, listening to David's groans — up to and including the last one as he finally seeded Samantha Jane's womb. As Samantha Jane's sobs subsided, Lily Anne fell asleep in the early morning.

Leaning against the twin's big rig seat, Lily Anne pondered those events. Perhaps Samantha Jane had needed help; Lily Anne thought as the tears coursed down her cheeks.'Too late to think of that now!' she realized, maybe having let Samantha Jane remain like a sheep in a wolf's lair.

Lily Anne had bailed out at Love's Fuel Station and Restaurant, leaving Samantha Jane to her fate. She silently vowed she would do as Sammi asked as she dropped her a blanket; she would pray fervently for Sister Sammi Jane. There was nothing else she could do; it would be up to the Lord to rescue Sister Samantha Jane.

As the big red eighteen-wheeler headed westbound on I-40, the twins tried to console Lily Anne. They offered her knowledge about what many mother truckers on the road felt 'travelers on a dime' were: another commodity; to be bought, used, and re-sold. They taught her about the sex traffickers that roamed the freeways and how they plied their trade; how girls on their own got roped into the business and became chattel wandering down the Interstate roadways.

Deidra and Hannah gave Lily Anne a boatload of knowledge about STDs, pregnancy prevention, and real-life survival lessons. Between those, they shared with Lily Anne a Plan B contraceptive dose the twins carried with them — just in case things got out of hand. Assuring Lily Anne, it would be safe, perhaps, with some side effects in the next few days: some cramping, some aches, and possibly some tenderness in her breasts. Those would pass in short order, the twins assured her.

Lily Anne White had spent another harrowing night on the road and acquired a few more life lessons. In the daylight journey with the twins, she learned that men in white collars are no different from men without collars. There are good ones among men, such as Albert, she figured. Good ones among women, too, like Deidra and her twin sister Hannah traveling the Interstates. The trouble was that it was too damn difficult to figure out the difference between the two kinds: the good and the evil.

One had to sharpen one's perceptions and hone one's abilities to spot the lambs from among the wolves. After all, a wolf isn't concerned with the undereducated sheep's knowledge of sexual predators of the world all around them. The wolf's concern is how many unknowing sheep he can entice into bed with him. Or, like Roger, it wasn't only enticement a wolf could use; a wolf also had coercion and fear as tools. And, for wolves, prey who look cute with freckles and act like sheep ... are the ones that make good bed partners, willingly or not, out on the Interstates.

Lily Anne watched as the miles rolled by. The green forestlands had rolled into grasslands and prairies as they journeyed toward Oklahoma City. Along the way, Lily Anne had unfolded her map and marked the stops they made and the times. She made a few notes in her journal, feeling more at ease between conversations with the twins. Hannah helped her with how to read the mileage tables and with some basic math skills on calculating times. She pointed out that the big rig's onboard computers handled all those calculations for them but found it amusing to be teaching a teenager life skills in map reading. Lily Anne learned from Oklahoma City that it was still another 1,460 miles to California's Pacific Ocean coastline. By truck still some twenty-nine hours of road time to go.

Hannah pointed out Oklahoma City and I-35 South on Lily Anne's map. The twins were headed down I-35 South into Texas to deliver a long-haul load.

Deidra watched as Hannah pointed out the pending fork in the road. Quietly she spoke. Her words were filled with an experienced woman's eighteen-wheeler wisdom, "Lily Anne, honey; this is as far west as we go. For us, it's south to Dallas from here. You can still change your mind, turn around, get on a Greyhound in Oklahoma City, and get safely home to Myrtle Beach. Or you could use that lucky 1865 silver dollar you said your grandpa gave you and decide. Heads, go westward ho or tails — go back home by Greyhound. You know, Lily Anne, you could also just decide on your own, without that coin, and get back safely home.

"I know," Lily Anne sighed, then added, "I truly appreciate you rescuing me just like Albert. I'll give it some thought. You've helped me a lot. I started this trip in the dark, both literally and figuratively. You've given me a great deal of knowledge. I'll keep all of that in my heart. Thanks to both of you all."

Hannah studied the owl-faced waif's look of wonderment as she spoke and asked, "Do they love you back home, Freckles?"

"Yes, they do!" Lily Anne White chortled with a smile; Albert had asked her that too! It brought out the same smile she gave Albert. The one that seemed to align the dimple in her left cheek with those light freckles that shimmered upon those high cheekbones. Those freckles sprinkled up and down her arms and legs like tiny orange starbursts seemed to glisten in the hot western sun.

"Then Freckles, it might be best for you to head home and get some hugging on your folks and your grandpa. It's not as safe as you might think out here, Lily Anne White," Deidra replied while pulling off an I-40W exit for a fuel stop.

The twins dropped her off at a Love's Fuel Station and Restaurant, stuffed with survival knowledge and a handful of Plan B pills just in case. Lily Anne bought them lunch. It was the least she thought she could do to repay them for the help in calming her fears about Roger. They shared their knowledge about Plan B pills. Deidra and Hannah had especially shown great support in getting her out from under the weird Reverend David and his unfortunate bride or sister, whichever the case was.

Lily Anne used one of her graduation gift cards and paid for the meals. It left her roughly two hundred seventy dollars in cards to make it to the west coast and back home to Myrtle Beach again.

Just as Lily Anne had watched Prince Albert amble out of her life, she watched Hannah and Deidra clammer into their big red eighteen-wheeler and rolled out of the Love's Fuel Station and Restaurant. This time, though, she'd gotten a hug and a big western wave from the Interstate trucker ladies as they moved southbound down I-35 toward Dallas, Texas.

Back in the restaurant, in a corner booth, she sat with her map spread out and her journal and pens. She penned her experiences as neatly as she could, just short entries -- jarring it would be to see if a reader found it. Imagine how it would be to see those journal words: 'Early morning hours June 19th -- mouth raped by a wolf and rescued by a prince in Memphis, Tennessee. No help from the Memphis PD. Early morning hours June 20th -- Awake in the cab of another eighteen-wheeler, frigging myself, listening to Reverend David pounding his cock into Sister Sammi to drive the demon out. Still June 20th morning -- saved by Deidra and Hannah, twin truckers. Got lotta advice on PG stuff Mom didn't tell me. Still thinking west -- money has almost gone.'