The Forever Girl Ch. 04

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

Chapter Four

Sunrise caught us still in various states of undress in the back seat of the Expedition -- in Lisa's case, still fully naked but for her socks. We had positioned ourselves on our sides facing each other, Lisa's back against the backrest and mine just a few inches from slipping into the floorboard. We had done a stellar job of keeping each other warm, covering ourselves in our coats and the camp blanket again and falling into a deep slumber after our orgasms in the steamy cabin of the SUV in the darkness of the wee hours before the engine automatically turned itself off after 30 minutes without moving. We had slept for more than three hours.

The condensation that our exertions had created on the interior of every window had, over the course of night, turned into frost on the cold glass that shielded us from temperatures in the low teens. The first rays of sunlight from the east seemed to be magnified and diffused as it illuminated the frost. It was the brightness and the seeping chill that eventually awakened me.

That and the need to piss again.

As I stirred, it awoke Lisa, who felt my morning wood press against her bare abdomen. She cupped it in her hand. "Mmm, for me?"

"Not this time, baby. It's piss-wood. And I really got to go," I said. Once I opened my mouth, I realized that my breath -- my teeth feeling gritty after more than a day unflossed and unbrushed -- was ghastly. I put my hand over my mouth. "Here, Lees, you stay covered up and warm. Gonna be cold as hell in here when I open that door."

I pulled up my clothing, found my docksiders and slipped them back on and braced to open the rear door. Sure enough, the arctic blast flooded in with stunning effect. Worse, I had to leave it open to shield my micturating member from view by those behind us. I watched as the yellow liquid froze almost on contact with the snowpack.

When I jumped back in, Lisa was cocooned fully beneath the coverings, hiding her bare skin from the merciless cold. I popped the fob again and restarted the engine. Now we were just under a quarter of a tank. If the jam wasn't cleared or someone didn't find a way to offer stranded motorists fuel, this could turn dangerous, even deadly. At least the snowy, gray skies of the day before had given way to a cloudless, deep-blue canopy of bitterly cold air.

I left Lisa under the coverings undisturbed until the heater warmed the cabin to a manageable level. When I joined her, still naked, beneath them, I held her close. I could definitively identify her nipples as a light nut-brown color, slightly crinkled against the chill -- not swollen as they had been the night before.

Once the cabin had warmed, we began the search for the clothing she had discarded. Her Pitt sweatshirt was in the front passenger seat. Her pajama and yoga bottoms were in the rear floorboard. Her yoga top was stuffed between the seat and the left-rear door.

"God, I feel gross. I smell gross. We both smell like ... sex. Old sex," she said.

True, her hair was disheveled, and I had what looked like the worst possible case of bed-head. She chose to wear only her pajama bottoms and forgo her yoga pants, its crotch still sticky and infused with her arousal. We abandoned our overnight nest in the rear seat and reclaimed our seats up front. She used the mirror on the reverse side of the sun visor to do what damage control she could with the lipstick and makeup available in her purse. She popped in a cinnamon-flavored Tic-Tac and offered me one. I took it.

I turned on the radio, looking for updates from WTOP while Lisa searched her Droid for updates from the Washington Post, the National Weather Service, the Virginia State Police and Department of Transportation. Midmorning, we received a text from the Transportation Department sent randomly to smart phones along the paralyzed stretch of I-95 that crews would be by soon to rescue us and offer aid. That was encouraging, but it turned out that "soon" was a very expansive, relative term. By noon, nothing. By 2 in the afternoon, still nothing, and gas was running low.

Frustration was building among people who had already spent a miserable night on this frozen stretch of hell that now, in the bright daylight, we were seeing ... nothing. No tow trucks. No police cruisers. No National Guard high-clearance vehicles bringing food and fuel or offering to take the most vulnerable off the highway to safety. There were choppers zooming overhead, but none seemed to be landing, and that only added to the frustration.

The first glimmer of hope came around 3:30 in the afternoon as the low-hanging winter sun began its nosedive toward the western horizon. To our left, in more open southbound lanes of the Interstate, a snowplow was pushing northward, against the intended flow of traffic -- if, indeed, traffic was flowing. At least it was clearing some of the compressed snow, loosened by the bright sunlight. Then another plow and another truck dispensing salt. Then, about a half hour later, the first actual passenger vehicles began moving southward toward Richmond. Horns honked and motorists cheered from across the open median, even though our lanes were still stalemated. Then the first tow truck with a damaged 18-wheeler in tow. Then another. I got out of the truck and walked over to the median and could see pulsing blue and amber strobes about a quarter of a mile to the north as the jackknifed big-rig that had been perpendicular to and blocking the northbound lanes was winched back into position to be towed.

Over the course of the day, modesty had largely disappeared. Several times, we saw people -- men and women -- ahead of us and to our rear, out of necessity, openly relieve themselves on the side of the road. It wasn't as though the state had thoughtfully pre-positioned portable toilets every tenth of a mile or so. We still used the doors to the SUV to create at least the illusion of privacy.

Hope began to burn within as the big rig directly in front of us cranked its diesel engine and the brake lights of its trailer flashed to life. A minute of two later, it began to inch forward, so I cranked the SUV and, for the first time in more than a day, put it in gear and eased it ahead.

It took ninety minutes for us to go a mile. It took two hours for us to reach the nearest exit and wait in a long queue of cars at a BP station for a chance to fill up tanks desperately low on fuel. A wave of relief washed over us as I pulled alongside a pump just before our tank ran dry. I filled it nearly to overflowing against the prospect that traffic would stop moving again.

It was now 7:45 p.m., and fully dark. We had just depleted the bag of ham biscuits, the last of the chips and all the Diet Cokes. I had even used my Eagle Scout acumen with a pen knife on my keychain to slice open the cantaloupe and cut it into pieces. We considered hopping off onto U.S. Highway 1, one of the nation's first federal highways once widely known in these parts as Jefferson Davis Highway before the name of Confederate leaders became intolerably toxic, but the reports we saw showed it was less passable in many areas than the interstate because of trees that had fallen across it.

So we made for the ramp back onto the Interstate where cars appeared to at least be crawling along -- perhaps no faster than a person could jog at times, but better than it had been a day earlier.

It took five full hours to push beyond Fredericksburg and Stafford County and into the immediate outer suburbs of Washington -- Prince William County -- where the Interstate had been largely cleared of snow and the state had opened its high-occupancy and toll lanes to ease the congestion for northbound traffic. By the time we reached Fairfax County, traffic still was not at posted speed limits, but was moving with some regularity. Seeing the illuminated Washington Monument and Capitol dome was nothing short of cathartic as we exited onto the the George Washington Parkway to the Francis Scott Key Bridge and crossed the Potomac into Georgetown.

I found an open curbside parking slot just outside Janine's and Lisa's apartment building at a quarter til 2 a.m. Janine and Lisa had been texting furiously, and Sis was standing just inside the glass door of the front entrance waiting for us. She reached out to hug Lisa, but Lees waved her off. "Don't. I'm gross. Shower," Lisa said as she kept walking.

Lisa had located as much of her belongings as she could within the Expedition cabin and stuffed them back into her rollaboard and two smaller bags that I was now lugging into the apartment building behind her.

Janine stood there, eyeing me with a mixture of pity and amusement. She threw her arms around me for a moment and then recoiled. "Lees is right. Gross." Janine took one of the smaller bags, we rode the elevator in exhausted silence to the fifth floor and I put Lisa's bags inside her bedroom.

I could hear the shower running in the bathroom and Sis was standing there with a glass of Glenfiddich, my favorite Scotch.

"Tell me about it. How did you two survive one another?" Janine asked, knowing the uneasiness the question would cause me. Nobody would ever know me better than she would. We had literally been together since we were clusters of cells, embedding themselves into the wall of our mother's uterus. It was almost supernatural, the way I could tell what she was thinking and vice-versa.

"Well, we had to find ways to conserve fuel and share body heat. Luckily we were able to do both," I said, taking a deep gulp of the Scotch to brace myself.

"Bro, what happened? And you know better than to bullshit me. I know the difference between plain body odor from too long between showers and the smell of sex. That's why Lisa made a bee line for the bathroom," she said. "As a lifelong owner of a fully functioning vagina, I can assure you that you smell like one."

"As I said, NeeNee, we had to find ways to stay close and keep warm -- it got down to 12 degrees outside that SUV overnight -- and one thing led to another," I said. "We ... explored each other."

Sis rolled her eyes. "Did you fuck her?" she asked.

"No." I looked her in the eye, and she could tell I was telling the strict truth. "We did pretty much everything else, but no, I did not penetrate her. At least not with that," I said, motioning to my crotch.

Janine nodded, not an ounce of surprise registering in her demeanor.

"Jake, Lees is a complicated girl. In some ways very naïve, and in many ways very perceptive. There's this innocence about her, and in some ways she's very old-fashioned. She's somewhat fragile and vulnerable, and I won't have you hurting her," Sis said.

I nodded. "Understood. I will say that my attitudes about -- my feelings for -- her changed significantly in the 42 hours since we left Georgia in that SUV and now. And that complicates things because of Peter."

Janine frowned. "Maybe not so much."

She pulled out her phone and started tapping its surface, looking for something, talking as she did.

"Peter and were on the same flight back two days ago, as you remember. We landed at National, and it was warm and rainy. I told him I was going to Uber into Georgetown and asked if he didn't want to share one since his apartment in Roslyn near the Key Bridge on the way here. He said he thought he'd take the Metro instead. Well, that seemed off because his place is a good three blocks from the Metro station and that wouldn't be any fun in that rain, so we went our different ways. I smelled a rat, so I turned and followed him a safe distance behind and instead of heading up the escalator to the train platform at National, he stayed on the lower level, ducked out a door toward the pickup line and hopped into a candy apple red Beamer. Some blonde hugged him as he tossed his bag into the trunk, and off they went," Sis said. "I'm air-dropping you the video."

My phone gave off that sonar-sounding alert and I hit accept. Within a few seconds, I was watching NeeNee's smoking-gun video of Peter hugging some blond hottie, jumping into her passenger seat and zipping away. I took another sip of the single malt and enjoyed the mellow burn of it.

"Well, Lisa knew," I said, nodding.

"But I haven't shared this with her yet. I didn't want to do that to her stranded out there on the highway. How could she know?"

I told her how she had been texting and trying to call Peter throughout the drive and had received no response. I told her about how he had disappeared for long stretches within the Mercedes-Benz Georgia Dome during the football game and was evasive with her about the reason. I told her about the emotional distance Lisa had sensed from him before the two of you headed to the Atlanta airport on New Year's Day.

"She may not have known about this specific woman, but ... she knew," I said. "I'd wait 'til in the morning to show her this. Let her get a good night's sleep first. She's beat. It'll piss her off and bum her out, but it won't surprise her."

Sis nodded her agreement.

"Bro, what's next between you and Lees? If you don't mind me asking. The reason I bring it up is she's kind of got a thing for you; has for a long time. Talks about you constantly. Asks about you. You should have seen her light up when I told her that you'd agreed to take the New Year's trip to see her folks in Georgia."

I stared at Sis, blinking stupidly. "Really?"

"Guys. So clueless," she said. "She does, and that explains what happened between the two of you in that SUV overnight. I'm guessing that until you hit the jam-up, she was jabbering nonstop like a parrot. Right?"

I nodded.

"That's what Lees does when she's nervous, when she's around someone whose approval she seeks. It's a coping mechanism for her, allows her to dictate the dialogue and keep it on terrain where she feels safe. Then, when she saw y'all had run into troubling, uncertain and maybe dangerous circumstances, she got really scared and suddenly went quiet, right?"

I nodded again.

"Yep. Then you took charge, showed her a plan for getting through it and began putting the plan into effect because that's what an Eagle Scout does. That put her at ease and let her know she was cared for, and the physical closeness to someone she's interested in made the rest possible," Janine said.

"That ordeal last night was the perfect storm of circumstances that compressed into a single night of opportunities that might have otherwise taken months to play out, if ever. The universe opened a brief window for you two."

I stared vacantly at Sis, my mouth open in amazement.

"You noted that the two of you did pretty much everything short of intercourse. Well, that's what she does," Janine said. "Bro, Lees is a virgin."

"How can you possibly know that?" I said.

"She talks to me like I'm her older sister. She told me. You and I are four years older than her, after all. Remember I told you she's old-fashioned in some ways? Well, she's fairly liberated but careful about sexuality. Her mom raised her not to be ashamed of it. I've heard her and Peter in her room go pretty far, but those doors are pretty thin, and I've heard her shut him down once he tries to penetrate her. She'll get up and open the door, and that would bring everything to a halt and piss Peter off no end," Sis said. "It's sort of like this reverse Sir Galahad thing: nobody's getting his business inside her until she knows in her heart he's the one."

"Much as I dislike Peter because he's an insufferable Ivy League prick who treats Lees like dirt, it figures that since he's never gotten past third base after dating Lisa for more than two years, that's why he hopped into Blondie's Beamer -- and who knows what else -- then went radio-silent on Lees."

Janine seemed wiser than I've ever seen her. "I don't know what all y'all did in that SUV and don't want to know. But that you did as much as you did in such inhospitable conditions should tell you a lot," Sis said.

I gulped down the rest of the Scotch. My look confirmed all she had surmised without my uttering a word. Sis smiled as she walked me to the door. Just as I heard the shower shut off, Sis opened the door.

"Bro, I do think you'd be good for her. Just be gentle and caring with her. Lees isn't your ordinary girl, and there will be ups and downs with her, but she's so worth it," Sis said.

"I would hug you, but go find a shower ... and a washing machine."