Rest Stop Relief

I drove four hours down Interstate 5 with the radio mostly static and my right knee aching from holding the same position, and when I finally pulled into the dust-coated motel lot outside Bakersfield the neon sign above the office buzzed like a fly stuck in a jar. Half the letters were dead so it read something like V ACA Y INN, which felt about right for a place charging sixty a night.

Brendan was already there, leaning against the door of room fourteen with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, and when he saw my Corolla rattle in he grinned the same grin from his photos, only wider, because he was nervous too. He was twenty-four, tall in a stretched-out way, warehouse shoulders under a plain gray shirt, and six months of daily messages had built him up in my head so much that seeing him in the actual flesh felt almost unfair.

"You're real," he said, pushing off the door.

"You're taller than your pictures," I said, which came out wrong, like an accusation, and he laughed.

"Everyone says I photograph short. Which is a weird problem to have."

I grabbed my duffel from the passenger seat and followed him inside. The room smelled like bleach and old cigarettes that had given up trying to hide. The AC unit under the window rattled every few seconds like it was clearing its throat. There was a cracked mirror in the bathroom door and a bedspread so stiff it could probably stand up on its own. I dropped the duffel on the floor next to the dresser and sat on the edge of the bed to get my boots off, and that's when I said it, because I'd been holding it in since the Kern County line.

"You really dated Selina?"

Brendan shrugged and dug through the little ice bucket for nothing in particular. "It was nothing serious. Few months, two years ago. We're just friendly now, that's all."

Two years ago he'd been twenty-two and she'd been twenty-five and apparently fantastic, if her online presence was anything to go by, which I had made the mistake of checking twice. Selina with the travel blog and the festival photos and the laugh that got reposted. I knew it was stupid. I knew comparing yourself to somebody's past is like arguing with a photograph. But I couldn't shake the image of the two of them together, her hand on his arm at some party I'd invented in my head, and it sat in my chest the whole drive down like a stone I'd swallowed somewhere around exit 210.

"That's a very casual shrug for a very loaded question," I said.

"There's nothing loaded. We dated, it ended, she's cool. You're the one sitting here, aren't you?" He came over and sat on the bed next to me, close enough that our knees touched, and the mattress squeaked like it was a dying animal. "Sammie. Look at me. I drove an hour out of my way to meet you because six months of talking to you has been the best part of my days. Selina's a footnote."

"A footnote I keep rereading."

"Then let's do something about that." He said it slow, like he'd been thinking about it longer than he'd admit. "Break the tension. This room has enough of it to power the sign outside."

"Like what, exactly?" I asked, and I'll admit my voice did something on the exactly part, dropped half an octave without my permission.

"I don't know. Something honest. Something where we can't pretend." He rubbed his palm on his jeans, which was his tell, I'd learned that from a hundred video calls. "We could, I don't know, show each other what we like. Not do it to each other yet. Just. Show."

"Show each other," I repeated.

"Yeah. Like, side by side. Watching. Telling each other what we'd do if we were allowed." His ears had gone red. It was, honestly, the cutest thing I'd ever seen on a grown man. "If that's weird, forget it, I'm throwing it out there because the alternative is us circling this bed like two cats for another three hours."

I looked at him for longer than was probably smooth, running the idea through the filter I keep for men I've only known through a screen. Six months of messages. Six months of him never once pushing, never once making it gross, never once typing anything I had to scroll past. And here was a proposal that was somehow both the boldest and most careful thing anyone had ever offered me in a sixty-dollar motel room.

"Fine," I said. "But I'm not going first."

"Deal."

We undressed down to our underwear without ceremony, or rather with a great deal of awkward ceremony, him turning halfway away then changing his mind, me getting a sock stuck at the ankle and cursing. He wore gray boxers. I was in a plain black bra and my good panties, the ones I'd packed with intent, and when I turned around from the dresser he was already sitting cross-legged on the bed facing me, so I sat across from him the same way, knees nearly touching his, the mattress complaining under both of us.

"Rules?" he asked.

"You don't touch me. I don't touch you. We say what we're thinking." I swallowed. "And if either of us says stop, we stop, no arguing about it."

"Deal," he said, and his hand went flat against his stomach like it was waiting for permission from somebody upstairs.

I started slow, just my own fingertips dragging up the inside of my thigh, feeling my own pulse jump at the contact, watching his face while I did it. He watched my hand like it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened in Kern County, and his fingers curled under the waistband of his boxers, hesitated, and slid down. I heard him exhale through his nose.