Road Trip 02: Off the Mat

This is the second chapter of a multi-part story about a cross-country trip of self-discovery and adventure, with several different stops and a story (or stories!) at each. I'm writing this as I go, though I have a good idea of what will happen as our hero heads west. I hope to include stories from several genres in the overall series. Each chapter is more or less a standalone, but some of the overall character development, and some of the references, will make more sense if you read the previous entry.

CHAPTER 2: OFF THE MAT

Instead of responding, she just sat up, and pulled the t-shirt up over her head, and there she was. She glowed in the soft light of the room. She let me look, and returned the gaze with a kind smile, knowing that old feelings were waking up in me. Whatever guilt or hesitation I'd felt melted away as I sat up to touch her. She guided my hand, feeling her warm, supple skin, her taut nipples under my fingers, her soft hands on my wrists. We sank back down to the bed together.

Day 2 - Monday, September 25, 2019

Today was a cloudier day than yesterday had been, and colder, with the temp hovering at around 50 degrees when I got on the road after lunch. I'd had a leisurely morning, sleeping until around 8, then lying around in bed for a while. I thought back to the previous night, the frustrating encounter with my nameless woman and the fantasies it had given me later. I sank back into them as I lay there, and enjoyed myself again, waking myself up with a morning jerk before showering and gathering my things.

Today I was off to Pittsburgh, about a three and a half hour trip south, where I'd see Katie. Kate, she went by now. I tried to think of how long it had been, and I realized I hadn't actually seen her since graduation, a year and a few months ago. We'd texted, sure, and even seen each other over Skype a couple times for impromptu reunions, but not in person. So I looked forward to that.

Katie - I knew I wasn't going to be able to call her anything else, just out of reflex - had been my first college friend. We'd been seated next to each other the first day of orientation and had hit it off over music and movies, both of us with a predilection toward indie music and stupid comedies. As that first month of school wore on, she became my first in a lot of categories, from first college girlfriend to first lover to first broken heart.

That broken heart had come just before winter break during that freshman year, when she texted me that she was coming by, late at night. I thought I was getting a booty call, but she arrived sobbing. She'd just hooked up with a girl in her chem class, and it made her head spin, and a whole bunch of other things, and that she needed to take a break from me. We talked some, and sat in silence some, and I might have yelled a little, more out of hurt than anger. And then she left, and I sat in stunned silence for a long time.

Katie ended up dating that girl from her chem class - Olivia - for the next couple years, as she realized she was gay, or at least bi leaning heavily toward women. Katie was from western Pennsylvania, and had grown up in a family where that was not acceptable, and it took her a while to come to grips with it. It took me a while too, less because of the revelation of her orientation and more because of my own reaction to being dumped by the only girl I'd ever slept with. But we reconciled a couple months later, and Katie morphed from girlfriend to close friend. We both navigated women together; she talked to me about Olivia, I talked to her during that tail end of my freshman year when I suddenly discovered the joys - and occasional pains - of casual hookups. She talked me through a stormy relationship early sophomore year. And then, sophomore year, she introduced me to a transfer student who lived down the hall from her. That turned out to be Sarah.

We'd all been close, the three of us, as Sarah and I first danced around each other and then got together that cool night on the lawn during spring break. Katie had seemed even happier about it than either of us were. The four of us - Sarah, Katie, Olivia and I - hung out regularly. We lived together in a quad senior year, at least until Katie and Olivia split up. Sarah and I had consoled Katie together, all while looking at each other over her, a silent promise that it wouldn't be us. We counseled her through a period of wildness after, too, when she hooked up with a couple girls and a couple guys. We were all each other's support network, but she needed it most then.

The experience had led us all to be pretty open with each other about sex. Katie knew our details - even if we hadn't told her she'd heard a lot of them through thin walls anyway - and she told us hers, sometimes in vivid detail. Never anything beyond knowing and talking, though I fantasized about that every now and then - and of course they both knew I did. We knew everything about each other.

Or, we thought so.

Maybe because of that, and maybe with a little guilt of her own for what she'd done to me freshman year, Katie took it hard when Sarah cheated on me last spring. Not as hard as I had, of course, but pretty hard. She wouldn't tell me, but I got the sense she'd called Sarah and yelled at her on my behalf, maybe more than once. So when I told her about my cross-country plans, she'd made me promise to come spend a couple days with her and her girlfriend Del in Pittsburgh, so that's where my GPS was taking me.

The drive was pretty empty overall. After the majesty of Niagara - I'd gone down for another look this morning - anything would have seemed dull, but western NY and western Pennsylvania certainly did. Though I-90, which I merged onto outside Buffalo, skirted Lake Erie, you basically never actually got a look at it. This was a main trucker route, too, which made driving less fun and occasionally less fast. I merged onto I-75 south of Erie PA and followed that down the western edge of PA, which was largely flat farmland dotted by industry for the first seventy miles or so. Then it started to get into the Appalachian foothills.

I'd been to Pittsburgh several times before. I'd seen my Phillies play here, against the Pirates, a couple times. Sarah and I had been out to see Katie a couple more in the past year. I liked the city. It got a bad rap but it was a vibrant place, with cool little neighborhoods, a good food scene, and some really scenic views. As I approached it I reminisced about the last time I'd been here with Sarah, going up the Monongahela Incline, a funicular railway that inched up the steep banks of the Monongahela River to the high ridges above the city. We'd gone up at sunset, and shared a romantic moment, alone in the car, holding each other and kissing as we ascended. She was fucking Todd at that point, I now knew, and I struggled with the fondness of the memory and the bitterness of the reality before shaking it off and focusing on the road.

I got into town a little after four. Katie wouldn't be home for another hour and a half or so, but she told me to meet her at the bar Del ran, a local lesbian bar. I felt more than a little awkward walking in, but when Del saw me she waved me over, and that immediately made me acceptable to the scattered patrons who had, probably rightfully, eyed me warily.

Her given name was Dolores, but she told me once after we first met that she'd given that name up by fifth grade. She tried out a few others before settling on Del, which was a pretty awesome name, I had to admit. Del was one of the cooler people I knew: Puerto Rican, butch, with short cut black hair, tats up and down her arms and who knew where else. She still smoked cigarettes, and she still listened to punk, and she seemed timeless to me. She was older than Katie by about a decade. She worked the bar here, and essentially managed the place, as the older women who owned it were semi-retired. They paid her decently given that she took over a lot of what they had done here. She handled the bills, did the hiring, booked the occasional gig. The bar, Steel Magnolias, was kind of a legend in town, and she wanted very much to own it someday.

She and I sat at a table in the corner catching up. I hadn't seen her since The Breakup, and I gave her the sordid details. She had all the right reactions, listening to it as though she hadn't heard about it endlessly from Katie already. She asked about my trip, I gave her the vague outline. Told her a bit about last night's adventures, though I left out many key details. She declared all of that ridiculous, though she liked the visual of the woman hula hooping in a bikini. I asked her about the bar, and she gave me a couple stories from the last year - a nasty fight, a pretty bitter love triangle situation, a couple Men Behaving Badly stories, which made me appreciate the frosty reception I'd gotten a bit more.

Katie popped in around 5:30, right when she said she would. I leaned down and she threw her arms around me. She hadn't changed much since that day we met freshman year, honestly. Still tiny, hovering around five feet. Still with jet black hair that looked dyed but wasn't. Still wide eyed with an innocent looking face that drew you in. Still with tits that defied her slight frame, and a thin waist and hips that only accentuated her chest size. I remembered the first time I'd seen them unleashed freshman year, only the third pair of bare breasts I'd ever seen in person and maybe still the best. I'd once admitted to her I still thought about them at times when I jerked off, which she actually found both funny and endearing.

"Hey, Danny." She said, after releasing me. Katie was still the only person in the universe who called me that. "It's really really good to see you."

"Good to see you too." She ran a hand over my cheek and jaw, tracing the beard I'd grown after Sarah.

"This looks good, how long have you had it?"

"Three months." I answered, and she did the math and knew what that meant.

"Well, it looks damn good on you."

"Thanks. And, thanks for inviting me down here."

"Are you kidding? I haven't seen you in forever, especially just you and me!" The identity of the absent party went unspoken, at least for the moment. "I took tomorrow off so we can hang out, see the sights."

"Awesome! Del, you joining us?"

"Nah, you kids have fun. Someone has to pay the bills. But we doing dinner tomorrow?" She asked Katie.

"Yes - you're going to love this place, Danny, the chef is a friend of Del's."

"Sounds great. What's on the docket for tonight?" I asked.

"I have a surprise for you..." Katie said, a twinkle in her eye. She fiddled with her phone a minute and held it up.

"Holy shit, for real?" She was showing me tickets to a Phillies-Pirates game for tonight at PNC. "How did I not even check their schedule?"

"You've been preoccupied, but I got you." She looked very pleased with herself.

"I'm covering the bar until close tonight, so you two will have to go be bored watching baseball without me," Del said with a smile. Del was a hockey girl.

We didn't have a ton of time to get over to the park for a 7:05 start, so we caught an Uber to downtown and walked over the river on one of Pittsburgh's iconic yellow footbridges, named for Pirates legend Robert Clemente. It was PNC Park on a weeknight in late September, which meant the Bucs were already long eliminated, so the crowd that filtered in was probably 50% Phillies fans. I'd grabbed my maroon cap from my car before we came over, earning glares from the few, the proud, the Pirate fans in attendance.

I might have been an out of towner, but I could still claim a deep love for this beautiful ballpark. Our seats were on the third base side, giving us a great view of the bridges and the city skyline as the sun went down. Another shot for my IG feed here, this time a selfie with Katie, the view behind us.

We talked while we watched, and caught up more - mostly her catching me up to speed. She seemed careful, at least at first, to bring up Sarah. Knowing Katie she was just giving me time; we didn't have those kinds of boundaries, so I assumed it was coming sooner or later. In the meantime, we went into reminiscence mode, swapping stories we both already knew from college. Friends, in-jokes, embarrassing stories. I talked about quitting my job, she talked about working at the local art museum, giving tours. Katie was a college artist and still dabbled but was content to work around it rather than try to work in it, at least for now. I made her promise to show me what she'd been working on later, though.

"I think you'll be... let's go with intrigued." She'd said, cryptically.

"How are things with Del?" The game was scoreless into the fifth, a pitcher's duel. We followed it, but the quiet rhythm of the game made it easier to chat, as did the emptiness of the seats around us.

"As good as anything could be." Her face lit up as she said it, with a warm smile that looked good on her. Katie had always been a pretty dramatic person, so to see her... well, almost serene in her love was buoying for me.

"I'm happy for you. She's been really good for you. You seem..." I paused for a word.

"Less batshit crazy?" She had that look she got when she thought she was calling me on something I didn't want to say out loud.

"Something like that, yeah." I laughed. "Seriously though, you seem a lot more comfortable with yourself, and with the world."

"I am. Yeah. I like that. I don't know. She makes it really easy to be me in full, is I guess the best way I can put it." I thought about that, and wondered if that had been true with Sarah. I guess it was one of those things you didn't really understand until it existed. After a moment, she continued.

"At a certain point, I just kind of had to get over myself, right? If this incredible, talented, accomplished, driven woman wants to spend all her time around me, well... maybe I'm actually pretty great."

"Have you considered that it might be because of your tits?"

"Oh, she fucking loves them, too. But no. It's not."

"Speaking as someone who also likes being around you, I believe it."

"You also like my tits."

"I do."

A bit of silence then, as the Pirates took the field for the top of the seventh.

"So how's the sex?" I had to, after all that.

"Best of my life, sorry, friend."

"I'll settle for second place." She just looked at me with a skeptical expression, and just the tiniest edge of a smile.

"Probably not second, but you are first among men."

"I'll also settle for that."

"I will admit to you, and Del knows this, that every now and then I miss dicks. I don't really ever plan on not being with her, and every bit of sex I've ever had with women is better than every bit of sex I've ever had with dudes, but... hey, I'm bi, and every now and then, I miss dicks."

"What does Del think about that?"

"She's cool with it. Once last year, after we talked about it, I hooked up with a guy I knew. Didn't fuck him, that was sort of part of the deal, but we had fun. Scratched an itch, that's all. Then I went back and she fucked my brains out."

"Sounds like a good time had by all."

It was at that moment that the Phillies center fielder drove a ball out to right to give my club a 2-0 lead. Half the sparse crowd cheered as he rounded the bases, while the other half fumed. The pause gave the conversation a reset.

"So what's the road trip about?" She asked, a roundabout way to get to another thing that was clearly on her mind.

"What do you mean, what's it about?"

"I mean... most people don't just upend their whole lives and move across country without a plan."

"Well, to be fair, my life got upended for me." A pause.

"Yeah. It did. And that sucks."

"I had genuinely thought we were going to last forever, literally until she said the words. There wasn't doubt in my mind on that, it wasn't even a question. Even after I saw the text, in the back of my head, I assumed there was a reasonable explanation and we'd laugh about it and we'd fuck and we'd be good forever."

"What did she say, when she told you?"

"It was so... matter of fact. Cold. Just 'I'm sleeping with Todd.' Like she was telling me she wanted pizza for dinner."

"I just... I don't get it. Todd is nice and all, but dude." She was on her third beer.

"I guess now I have to disagree about the nice thing."

"Ugh, yes, he is not nice, he is a fuckhead." She took a drink. "And she's a bitch." I winced. "No, Daniel, for real. You are allowed to call her a bitch now. I grant you permission. The universe grants you permission."

I wasn't going to say it, but I appreciated that she did. And she called me Daniel, which meant she was deadly serious. I thought about that for a bit, rolled the word around in my head. It fit.

For a while, we just watched the game, talking her and there about little pieces of it - a nice play, a bad call. The Pirates scored one in the seventh, and tied it up in the eighth, and we settled in for a potential extra inning experience.

"I'm running," I said in answer to her now 20 minute old question about my trip. "That's all. I know it, you know it. Things sucked and so I'm getting distance, in all the ways."

"Are you going to regret that?" She asked, sincerely.

"Fuck, I don't know. Maybe? Maybe I'll be back in three months, living with my parents, being sad still. But maybe not, and I kind of have to find that out for myself right now."

"I get that."

"And look, night one, I got a lap dance from a topless stranger, so we're doing okay so far." That got her attention real quick.

"You are going to need to explain that statement immediately, young man."

I launched into the story. Del got the edited version - maybe not the PG-13 version but certainly not the NC-17 one from my hotel room. Katie pushed me on it, though: after I told her the broad strokes, she went for detail.

"How were her tits?"

"Not as good as yours, but whose are?"

"True. But still, you must have been going nuts. Have you... been with anyone? Since Sarah?"

"Not unless you count the internet, which you shouldn't."

"Yeah, so real life boobs in your face, a real life booty on your lap, and a seasonal drought. You must have been going crazy."

"Big time. I kind of booked it back to the hotel after."

"How many times did you jerk it?"

"Two that night, once the next morning."

"Men. So limited." I laughed. The Phillies went down in order in the top of the ninth, giving the Bucs another shot to take it before extras.

"Did you think about trying to get her back there with you?" She gave me a prodding look.

"Well, no." I saw the look that came over her and headed her off at the pass. "She was real clear that wasn't happening, they had to go. No shot."

"And if there had been? Would you have taken it?"

"Katie, I don't know. It hasn't been that long-"

"Four months, and a week or so."

"Well... okay. But it still feels weird."

"It'll feel weird until you do it. Then it'll be fine. You need to get off the pity bench here."

"Look, I... I want to. I'm just still dealing with it."

"Just, as a friend, promise me: you'll let yourself have fun this road trip. Especially if that involves falling into bed with some random woman."

"I can promise that. I'll have fun."

"And sex."

"Yes! Fine! I will leave a trail of broken hearts and used condoms across this nation. Happy?"

"That's a disturbing image, but I'm glad you're practicing safe imaginary sex at least." Play resumed in the bottom of the ninth as the leadoff hitter roped a single into center.

"I realized on the drive down this is the longest I've gone without sex since my first time. Since you." I looked at her.

"You know what's weird? We never really talk about that," she said. "We've talked about everything, but... not really that."