The Forever Girl Ch. 01

"Hmm." I said.

"He's cheating on me. I can feel it," she said. "Something about him this whole weekend."

"Maybe I better check in with Janine," I said, trying to change the subject. "She might have some news on the storm and this traffic jam."

I pulled my phone from its cradle on the console, hit Sis's number on speed dial and waited. Nothing. Then the ominous words on the phone screen: "No Signal." I rechecked the settings to make sure cellular function was enabled. It was. Still, no signal.

"This is Verizon. You got T-Mobile, Lees. See what you get," I said to Lisa.

Lisa tried to dial Janine on her Droid. Same bad news: no signal. She gasped as she showed me, a stricken look on her face.

"Storm must have knocked out power to cell towers," I said.

I tried turning on auxiliary power without cranking the engine, but couldn't figure out how to do it with a fob instead of an actual key, so I turned on the engine again to see what we could learn from terrestrial radio stations in the area. The whole FM spectrum was useless -- shit-kicker country, some Spanish-language station, a couple of Top Forty pop stations in Richmond and Fredericksburg, a stuffy PBS story about women's rights in Myanmar, and some hillbilly evangelist screaming at me about the hellish consequences of not knowing "Jay-zus-ah." Nothing resembling news, traffic or weather.

The AM band wasn't much better. Talk radio was filled with protofascist nutjobs like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity interviewing Q-Anon conspiracy morons. One station carried a Washington Capitals hockey game. Finally, WTOP, Washington's legendary news station, was faintly audible over the static. From what I could hear, this backup stretched from Doswell, Virginia, on the south, perhaps best known as the Kings Dominion theme park exit several miles behind us, northward nearly to Woodbridge, Virginia -- a D.C. commuter suburb. That's a distance of about 45 miles. That could mean hundreds if not thousands of stranded vehicles and motorists, but nobody knew for sure because Virginia Department of Transportation roadside cameras were knocked out by the storm, conditions were too bad to put a chopper in the air, and the State Police couldn't make their way through the mass of stopped, wrecked or disabled vehicles.

Still sitting there in her yellow Pitt-logo sweatshirt and PJ bottoms with her calves tucked beneath her, she broke down. I reached toward her in a vain effort to comfort her, rubbing my right hand along her arm. She cried alone for a minute or so, then reached over to me, but the center console was in the way.

"I'm sorry, Jake, but I'm scared, and when I'm scared I need to hold somebody," she said through her sobs.

I rolled the driver's seat backward, lowered the backrest a bit and reached over to her, helping her scoot her tight bottom over the prominent hump of the upholstered leather console and into my lap, hoping she didn't feel my still swollen manhood through our layers of clothing. She leaned into my chest and continued to sob. I reached behind the passenger seat, grabbed her warm overcoat and pulled it over her.

Lisa's hair still smelled of mint-infused conditioner, and her skin of the lavender-scented soap her mom, Lillian, placed in all the bathrooms of the North Georgia lakeside mountain lodge. At about 5-feet, 7 inches, and just under 120 pounds, and me at just over six feet, she wasn't a burden and fit perfectly on my lap, her right side against my semi-recumbent torso, her back to the driver's side window, her legs curled neatly atop my thighs underneath her topcoat.

Eventually, her crying abated and her breaths became long, slow and even. She was asleep. Sound asleep. Her nose was nuzzled against the left side of my neck just beneath my jawline, her left arm resting across my chest and her hand warming itself in my collar-length hair along the back of my neck. With my free hand, I killed the engine again and slipped both arms underneath the overcoat and around her waist.

Within minutes, warm and reassured by Lisa's quiet peacefulness, I was asleep beneath her.