Roadwork

Negotiating the uneven asphalt of a deserted North Carolina highway, the car scuffled uncertainly over the undulating surface and vestigial potholes. Peering through the windshield at the halogen-covered terrain, the passenger in the front seat cast a furtive glance towards the driver's grip on the steering wheel and released a barely audible moan. He then caught a glimpse of his silhouette, unkempt, untamed, dangerous. The driver's shadowed semblance darkly bespoke (yet in quiet, huskily whispered hintings) of the erotic savagery lurking within, and the passenger hazarded a look towards the driver's bulging bliss, tucked just below belt and zipper, and mercifully slumbering beneath its denim cage.

The passenger avoided eye contact with his pilot, lest his own evidently longing stare (if he would just look) threatened to betray yet another honest attempt at fidelity with his wife, who , was, sitting in the back seat directly behind him. . How many more tears and infections would she have to endure for this to end? How many more trips to secluded rest stops would she be making to fetch the sobbing, sullen wretch she would inevitably find hunched underneath a leaking urinal? NO, he steeled his resolve against the pungent Aryan's siren song, checked his shoes—again— to ensure proper tying (he was wearing sandals), and just sat, an idiot in this familiar position, and suckled his hidden, restless tongue.

Yes, this urge could be fought, perhaps even ignored. Best yet, even forgotten. Yes. No.

Of course this would end badly; how could it not? Had he not observed, first-hand, the calloused indifference that the driver greets such prospective dalliances? Who was he to think he was so special? Did he deserve—or really even want—the agony of sleepless nights and self-doubt that surely would result from the inevitable rejection? How many half carafes of white zinfandel and valium cocktails could wash away the bitter aftertaste of copper, bleach, and tears? No, better close his wanting mouth and steel his resolve against the erotic mercenary sitting in the seat adjacent to his own.

The more he attempted to shut him out, though, the worse it became. He began to drift away, awash in fantasy and trembling in lust. Suddenly, things, events, shifted and the passenger awoke to find himself in a white-marbled room, barefoot and cold-toed on the chilly stone. As he slowly turned and examined the dispassionate and featureless walls, he noticed the draft creeping up toward his bared knees. Glancing down, as if through gauze, he wondered about the clinging silk kimono—thigh-high, no less—now clothing , the only garment in place between his freely perspiring body and the dreamscape. Oh.

As if summoned by an inaudible cue, the driver appeared before him. However, the driver now became the rider, his mount a newly broken palomino, evident, as his dream logic suggested, from its foam-flecked flanks and disheveled, flowing mane. The beast's wildness merely augmented the rider's savage nudity. He rode the horse barebacked, his knees working as pincers and gripping the horse's rippling sides. He steered his steed toward him, nudging him ever so closer to the trembling, silk-robed waste crying in the corner, who, at this time, came close to fainting upon observing that cock, rising and falling with the slow cadence of equestrian, hoofbeat. He could see it—with every step taken, the shaft brushed against the horse's neck and the sensitive, satin cluster of eager nerves seemed to beg for the flick of his knowing tongue and the feel of his spit as it dried upon it. And with every step taken, its tumescence was evident, a searing probe signaling, a pearled bead of anticipation pooling on its tip—that sweet prelude, sticky, addictive—waiting for his crimson proboscis to take its harvest home.

They were no more than ten feet removed from another, this horseman and his other, and the distance was closing—he was definitely approaching, and as he neared, he did so alone and without transport. The mount he dismissed with a thought; two brown spots disappeared suddenly from sight and periphery. The passenger then saw himself as the rider's mount, and imagined the metallic aftertaste of the bit and bridle he would gladly don for this role. As his mouth grew crowded with imaginary pain, he could hear as the metal cloaked his screams, concealing how much he loved it. And him. His oriental robe now felt leaden, expansive. He swallowed heavily, still refusing to gaze into the cloudless depths of of sky-bright eyes, focusing instead at the torso—oiled, hairless, nipples pierced and hardened—of the slowly approaching incubus. Bad choice.

The faceted hoops piercing the tender skin seemed fashioned from some brilliant, alien alloy, refracting the brown, erect areolas into a million skewed replicas that were wreaking havoc in his retinas. Averting his eyes further southward offered little respite—the bunched and bundled abdominals he sported as trophies promised nothing but firm, measured thrusts—a piston from a monstrous machine. He refused to let his eyes rove any further downward—definitely not past the navel. Yet even as his eyes passed over the umbilical marker, he discovered with a cry that he needn't go any further than that--his lust's object had risen to greet his gaze—that honeyed cock was fully turgid and had risen to meet him. The shaft's roadmap of latticed veins contrasted the Mediterranean tint of uncircumcised flesh, now taut against the weapon's girth, which stood there waiting, like a threat.

He was then slammed back into consciousness and awoke to a setting sun seen through a windshield, recently squeegied. He suddenly became aware of his own painful tumescence—or rather, lack of it. A sudden shift of weight in the passenger's seat suggested discharge; an unnecessary and furtive tucking of shirt into pants confirmed it: his fingers were sticky and well- lubricated from the swampy boxers, and were, subsequently, surreptitiously and hastily wiped on a waiting floor mat. As he flexed his fingers against the drying remains, he glanced dully at the gearshift, which seemed yet another phallus to mock him back towards despair. The driver, oblivious to his passenger's hallucinatory equestrian fantasies and growing agitation, stared into the roadway's distance and busily picked his nose.

The tunneling digits threatened to break the erotic spell permeating the car, yet the earnest upward inquiry of probe into a hirsute and open orifice slammed the passenger firmly back into the waiting realm of fantasy and dream. The driver's nose melted and morphed, becoming the dimpled cheeks of his own ass, smeared and swolled with reddened prints denoting heavy-handed aggression. His hungry mouth of an anus puckered and twitched expectantly, the starfish expanding and contracting with its own pulse and prescience. The driver's sudden swerving into the passing lane snapped him back to the painful and painfully unrequited present. He felt the welling tears, felt his face becoming brightly flushed with shame and longing, sensed his bowels shifting toward purgation and fulfillment. In an effort to offset these embarrassments, he quickly reached over his head for the reassuring grasp of his wife's loving hand. Her hand found his easily—soft, effeminate, gentle, uncalloused. He snatched his own back, disgusted.

Feverish and dangerously delusional now, he feigned sleep in an attempt to exorcise his agony. The closed lids, rather than offering needed sanctuary, became the screen onto which were projected the rapid edit chiaroscuro of the drivers' tradesman hand's-- pinching, pulling, punching, probing him with staccato urgency. Those fingers guiding Thor's hammer cock thundering through his colon valley . Finally, thankfully, reason and sanity fled from his waking thoughts and he found himself in the welcoming black of his unconscious, silent and unsullied by dream.

He awoke as the car pulled into the entrance of the driver's sprawling country villa. The passenger's mouth was a desert of bile and hate, his salivary glands repulsed and refusing to produce. As he choked on his rancid tastes, he leapt from his seat and ran towards the house and into the nearest bathroom. As he splashed his face with the faucet's icy water, he glanced warily into the mirror perched just above the ceramic basin. The site was pathetic: kohl-eyed and gaunt, his reflection hid nothing; anyone who saw him would know. HE would know. SHE would know. He turned from the glass, disgusted and vengeful, vomited noisily into the toilet and masturbated furiously, the resultant tears and newly-acquired saliva his sole lubrication.

His isolation seemed complete. With the lurking menace of manly blonde concupiscence just two dry-walled barriers removed, his eyes revisited the reflection above the sink. The mirror buckled and shattered, the shards knifing outward, filling the room with millions of glassed prisms, weirdly bending the light, shifting, reforming, settling and coalescing into one thing— that hopeless, destroying cock. His wife opened the bathroom door, thus releasing him from his penile apparition, and asked him why he was crying and kissing the mirror. He attributed his questionable position to the searching for an impacted caraway seed that was causing unimaginable pain below the gum line. He could see the gears turning in her mind as she rewound memories of prior dinings and snacks; unable to recall such a meal, she questioned the source of the aforementioned seed. Quick on his feet, he said it came from a pack of crackers he had discovered in the seat cushions of the car and left it at that. As she had done innumerable times in the past, she swallowed through the lie's transparency, patted his shoulder, turned quietly and let him be.

He stayed with his wife in the guest room that night, rejecting the host's invitation for nocturnal drinking and drug use. Fortunately, everyone had retired early that evening and his wife was already snoring through the heavy sleep of alcoholic overindulgence. Sleep , he knew, would not be visiting him that night, or any night in the foreseeable future. He lay still for several hours, prowling through the confines of his insomnia in a futile search to reach the other side. Pointless.

He crept out of the bedroom and through the silent, slumbering household. The host's terrier padded up and looked up at him quizzically, and fortunately, silently. He made his way to the veranda, dog in tow, and slipped outside into the quiet light of a diminishing full moon. The terrier game him a sideways glance as he self-fulfilled his own fantasy. His tears now flowed unabated—steaming rivulets of boiling hate—and splashed onto the dog's white fur benath his feet. The orgasm's concussion slammed through him and he howled his anguish to an abandoned, unresponsive sky; the terrier , meanwhile and unbeknownst to him, had left to go urinate and search for scraps of refuse in the yard.

The next morning , as he sat at the breakfast table, he gave an extended sigh and pointedly looked at the host and asked him of his plans. The host, rider, driver—for he was all of these, and much more—glanced up from his plate huevos rancheros and made eye contact with him, the first time the passenger had allowed him to do so in many, many days. The glance was easy, innocent—l ethal. The driver suggested another road trip; the passenger agreed immediately. The passenger suddenly felt light in both step and spirit; any semblance of lingering grief or remorse immediately dispersed as the two locked gazes, and he bounded upstairs for a quick shower and fresh change of clothes, kicking the dog as he skipped by.