Route 66 Pt. 02

An hour into New Mexico, Aurora stirred and I leaned down to kiss her sticky forehead.

"So, in four hours we can make Albuquerque," I said.

"Nah, that's too long," she replied. "Let's just find a town with a diner... and a motel... with a pool."

That sounded good to me.

But nevertheless, we were in godforsaken New Mexico, so it was still nearly an hour before I saw the signs for a town that promised both food and sleep. The sun was sinking but still bright in our faces when I finally pulled off the highway and in to the gravel parking lot of the Apache Inn.

Aurora was awake by the time I turned off the ignition. "I'll be right back," I promised her.

"Just a sec," she said, and I paused and admired the magnificent sight of Aurora bending over the seatback to fish something out of her duffel bag in the back seat. It turns out she was looking for a pair of high-heeled sandals. I had to shake my head as she kicked off her sneakers and replaced them with the three-inch heels.

We were just going in to the office of a dusty motel. I always loved having this statuesque woman at my side regardless; but she seemed to like towering over me by four or five inches, rather than just by one. She came around the car and hooked her left arm around my right elbow, and off we went.

We entered the tiny office, where both an asthmatic window air conditioner and a box fan in front of that were rattling away. Behind a knotty-pine counter top, a lanky man of indeterminate age looked up with a bored expression on his face... until he caught a look at Aurora, at which point he perked up.

"Can I help you?" he asked, looking at Aurora rather than at me, as he uncoiled from his ratty desk chair and rose to his full rangy height.

"Sure," I replied. "I assume we can get a room for the night?"

He nodded slowly and made a point of perusing a hand-written ledger in front of him. I took a second to observe him -- he had lank, sandy hair and matching stubble on his weathered face, but probably wasn't more than maybe 40 years old, although his languid manner had led me to think he was older. Then I glanced back over my shoulder at the mostly-empty parking lot. C'mon.

"Yep," he drawled, looking back up at Aurora again. "Twin beds okay?"

Aurora laughed, and did that flirty thing women do with pushing their hair behind one ear, palm forward... damn her.

"Ummm... do you at least have queens?" I asked.

Aurora laughed again and bumped shoulders with me. "C'mon, don't be picky."

The guy behind the counter smirked. "Just kidding," he said. "All our rooms are two doubles. Hope that's okay."

"That's fine," I said, pulling out my wallet. I instinctively reached for a credit card and then remembered that it was 1964, so I took out cash instead.

He looked at the bills as if I had handed him gold doubloons, then shrugged and started making change. "Of course," he said, risking a glance back up at Aurora, "I've got a queen-sized bed in my trailer."

What the fuck?

But Aurora just giggled again, then turned and started walking toward the door. "I'll keep that in mind," she said back over her shoulder, as I waited for the jerk to give me the room key.

We were in Room 8, halfway down a long single stretch of doors with peeling paint. I caught up with Aurora as she was lifting her bag out of the back seat of the Ford. She hugged me and gave my ear a flick with her tongue.

"What an asshole," I muttered.

"What?" she said, acting clueless.

"Twin beds," I grumbled.

She laughed. "Yeah, I noticed that. Cock-blocked as soon as you walked in the door."

"As soon as he took one look at you," I countered.

"Mmm," she agreed. "You love it."

I had to smile. Yeah, she had me there. I was a sucker for being teased. I didn't even want to tell her how I had reacted to his mention of the queen sized bed in his trailer.

I handed her the room key. "We can walk to the diner from here," I said, nodding to the adjoining property. "I'll put the top up and lock up. You go ahead."

Two minutes later I let myself into Room 8. I could hear the shower running in the bathroom. I looked around... wow, I thought; I had wondered if the decor would be retro, but it may have been original. Even the TV was an old tube TV. I turned it on, and waited for it to warm up. Gradually, a gray-scale picture filled the tiny screen. Death Valley Days. Perfect.

I stretched out on one of the two beds. I pulled my cell phone out of my breast pocket, to check the news, but I couldn't get signal. Maybe it really was 1964.

I had almost dozed off when the bathroom door opened, and my beautiful traveling companion came into the room, wearing a white bikini and drying her lush brown curls with a tiny towel.

"Hey babe," she said, and my heart swelled with joy and pride. "I really want to take a dip in that pool. But I think a shower first is a good idea... for both of us."

I agreed and got up off the bed, while Angelica dug around in her bag and pulled out a sheer floral sarong. I watched her knot it so that it hung off of one hip "just so," and my heart rose into my throat with longing and pride.

She stepped up to me, placed a hand on my right cheek, and kissed the left. "Take a shower," she instructed. "I'm going to explore a little bit, and then I'll join you in the pool."

Explore? Explore where, I wondered? We're in the middle of the fucking high desert, and you're wearing a bikini.

Meanwhile, she had stepped back into her three-inch sandals, turned to blow me a kiss, and closed the door behind her...

Ten minutes later, I was in the pool. It was warm as bath water, but still felt good after a long day on the vinyl car seat of a '61 Ford.

Thirty minutes later, I was still in the pool. Still alone. Where the fuck was Aurora? Of course I had one idea in mind, and I knew she knew I had one idea in mind. She loved teasing me, and making me jealous.

Anything was possible, I figured. There were a half-dozen cars parked in front of a half-dozen closed doors around the building. And at the end of the sidewalk, there was the dusty little office where the lean, angular middle-aged man who had checked us in had ogled her. Might she be in there, flirting with him, letting me wonder and stew? Absolutely possible.

I leaned back against the edge of the pool, arms outstretched on the ledge, and closed my eyes. I almost didn't hear her approach. As it was, by the time I turned around and found her behind me, she was already looming over me, a black silhouette with the sun behind her, sarong shifting in the hot breeze.

"Hey there," she said, kicking off her wedge sandals.

"Hey," I replied. "Where ya been?"

"Around," she said, easing herself into the pool beside me, and commenting. "Ooh. Warm. But, yeah, anyway, looks like there's more here than meets the eye."

"Seriously?" I asked, skeptically.

"Yeah, there's a house behind the motel that has a yard full of lawn ornaments."

"Uh huh."

"They're all lighthouses," she giggled; and I laughed too, scanning our desert surroundings.

"And there's a historical marker up the road," she promised, wide-eyed.

"Ooh."

"Anyway, I got some tips from Carl about some nearby hiking trails for tomorrow morning," she offered.

"Carl?" I repeated "The motel clerk?"

She turned around and pushed off the side of the pool, backstroking into deeper water. "Part-time motel clerk," she corrected me. "He's also a cowboy," she added, dramatically rolling her eyes up into her head as if to say "dreamy," then closing them and allowing herself to submerge.

I waited for her to surface before smirking back my rejoinder, "Part-time cowboy."

She laughed and splashed me.

"You're still pissed about the twin beds," she teased.

I scowled.

"Maybe he thought I was your daughter," she suggested, breast-stroking back to me.

"That occurred to me," I admitted, "but I distinctly remember walking in arm-in-arm."

"Hmmm," she agreed. "Yeah, I guess so... so I guess the only explanation is that he decided as soon as we walked in that I was with you, and he was going to hit on me right in front of you anyway," and she poked me in the chest with each syllable of that last phrase.

"Maybe," she continued, "It didn't take him very long to size you up."

Size me up? My jaw dropped open. She laughed at my expression. She couldn't see that under the water, inside my loose swimsuit, my penis had grown rigid. She probably knew anyway.

***

Dressing for dinner, I thought again about Carl, the weathered, droll part-time cowboy who had checked us in, who had "sized me up," who had so brazenly mentioned his queen-sized bed to the woman I was with. I had guessed he was forty, although his sun-beaten face appeared older. But he also looked timeless, just like the furnishings in this sixty-year-old motel. I wondered if he might be more attractive to Aurora than he first appeared to me.

I thought about the game that she and I had been playing, pretending it really was 1964. I could imagine that our host would have dressed and looked no differently in 1964 than he did today. I pictured him, then, as a wrangler born in the 1920s. Maybe he had been in World War II. Fighting and then fucking his way across France, greeted between the welcoming thighs of liberated mademoiselles, with and without using the Army-issued condoms.

I imagined, then, how striking my companion would seem to a man like that. He may well have never met such a confident, athletic woman who was over six feet tall, with pierced nipples, who shaved her pubic hair other than a narrow landing strip. I wondered if he would have any idea what a cuckold was.

I found myself feeling diminished, and humiliated. And I was hard again.

She had had a year to get to know me, to figure me out, to make herself my favorite dancer and me her most loyal customer. She knew just what drove me crazy.

I flashed back to that day in the showclub, the day we had started planning this fantasy adventure. Aurora had left me to go work the room. I had watched her chat up a young Hispanic guy. Not bad looking, damn it. Shorter than me, stocky. Hard-looking. Maybe a laborer, but I didn't want to make assumptions. Probably macho, though. And dominant.

At one point, I saw him lean forward, and look past her shoulder, at me. Making eye contact. Then his head disappeared from my view again, back behind her cascading halo of light brown curls.

Then she was standing up. Walking toward me. With the young man trailing behind her, the fingers of their hands loosely intertwined as she led him across the room. In a moment they were both towering over me in my seat.

"Warren, this is Rodrigo," she informed me, suppressing a smile, her brown eyes twinkling.

I reluctantly transferred my gaze from her to him. He was looking down at me with a mix of curiosity and disdain. "Hello, Rodrigo," I said. He just gave a nod and a grunt.

"Rodrigo would like to take me back for a private dance."

I inhaled abruptly. "Uh huh?" Aurora was still stifling a grin, and Rodrigo was smirking.

"Rodrigo would like for you to pay for it," she continued.

Rodrigo cocked his head and shrugged, as if to say, "It wasn't really my idea, dude, but... yeah, now that she mentions it..."

I intentionally flinched; let Rodrigo stare me down for a second, then looked away. I sighed and reached for my wallet.

This wasn't the first time Aurora had played this game with me. She knew I got a kick out of jealousy; even more out of a bit of humiliation. I handed Rodrigo and twenty and a ten.

"That's the dance and the wristband," Aurora said, feigning disappointment. "You should give him enough to leave a nice tip."

I sighed and laid another ten in the young man's open palm. And then another. He stuck the bills in his jeans pocket and shook his head a bit. Aurora pursed her lips but gave me a little wink. "Thank you, Warren."

"Later," Rodrigo mumbled to me. I waited until they had turned to head to the private rooms before I squirmed to adjust my shameful erection. Aurora was leading the way, still wearing her red hooded sweatshirt, which came down far enough to hide the waistband of her g-string, so she appeared to be naked from her waist to her shoes, her delicious round cheeks rising and falling with each step.

Just before they left my view, Rodrigo drew back his hand and gave Aurora a shockingly loud open-palmed smack on one buttock. I gasped and my heart jumped into my throat. The presumptuous bastard! But Aurora didn't even acknowledge it as they disappeared around the corner.

To be continued.