The Quiet End

Three days on the road and I had her mouth on my mind the whole way, which is a dangerous thing when you're running a forty-foot trailer through construction zones on I-70 with nothing but coffee and podcasts to keep you company. Her name is Silvia Blake, she's forty-nine, and I've been meeting her in various motel rooms and borrowed apartments for six years now, ever since a rainstorm put me in a truck stop diner outside Terre Haute and she was sitting at the counter with a paperback and a bowl of chili, forty-three years old back then, fresh off a divorce, and she looked up at me when I sat down two stools over and said I hope you're not going to eat that way you drive, fast and sloppy, and I laughed so hard I nearly choked on my coffee.

We've been doing this ever since, her in her city with her archives and me on the road with my routes, and neither of us has ever once brought up moving in together or meeting anybody's family or any of that stuff, because the whole thing works precisely because it stays simple. The one promise we did make, the first year, was that we'd both get tested and that neither of us would sleep with anybody else, and we've both kept it and kept up the paperwork, so there's never been a reason to put anything between us.

By Thursday morning I had a load delivered in Kansas City and another one not due until Monday in Denver, which meant I had a weekend with nothing in it, and I called Claudia, my dispatcher, from the truck stop shower building with my hair still wet.

"I need the weekend off," I said. "I know you need me in Denver Monday, but I'll leave Sunday night and be there."

"You better, Flynn, that load's tight," she said, and I could hear her clicking around on her keyboard while she talked, the way she does. "You driving all weekend or what?"

"Something like that," I said, and she made a noise that meant she didn't care as long as I showed up, and that was the end of the business part of the call.

I sat in the cab with my phone for a while after that, because the hard part wasn't asking for the weekend, the hard part was this. Six years in and I still felt like an idiot typing it.

*Ran my deliveries. Got the whole weekend. Coming to you.*

I watched the screen for a couple of minutes, long enough that the dash clock rolled over, and then the reply came, faster than I expected.

*Come. Not the motel, come to the library. Basement archive, I'm alone until seven, nobody comes down here. You remember the marble entrance, go through to the back stairs, down two flights.*

Then a second message with the address, and then, after a pause long enough that I figured she was typing something careful and then thought better of it, a third.

*Hurry.*

I read that one about nine times and then I put the phone in the cup holder and started driving, and I did the math while the miles went by, something like eighteen hours if I took my legally mandated breaks, which I did, because I'm not an idiot and because I wanted to arrive in one working piece. I ate a gas station breakfast at sunrise somewhere in Missouri and a gas station lunch somewhere else and I thought about her mouth through most of it, the way her lower lip gets caught between her teeth when she's reading something good, the way she kisses like she's arguing with you and winning, and by the time the skyline of her city came up out of the flat brown farmland in the late afternoon light I had been thinking about nothing else for a day and a half and my hands were kind of steady and my brain was not.

I left the truck at the depot lot on the edge of the city and walked the six blocks to the library with my duffel over my shoulder and the low sun turning the old buildings orange, and the library is one of those 1920s piles with a stone face and lions out front and a lobby full of marble that echoes, and I went past the front desk without stopping because I'd been down those back stairs once before, three years ago, when she'd stayed late cataloging and called me on my lunch break and said get over here, and I remembered the way well enough.

The stairs down to the basement archive are narrow concrete steps with a metal handrail painted that institutional green, and the air changes as you go down, cooler and damper, and there's a smell down there of old paper and dust and something slightly moldy that I remembered from last time, and a single fluorescent tube flickering over the long metal worktable in the middle of the room with the shelves going off into the dark on both sides like the rows of some underground warehouse. She was at the table with her back to the stairs, sorting pale gray letters out of an acid-free box with white cotton gloves on, and I could hear her humming something tuneless, and I stood at the bottom of the stairs for a second just looking at her, forty-nine years old, silver starting in her dark hair, bent over a box of Civil War letters like the world could wait.

She heard me before she saw me, because the stairs announce everybody, and she turned around and the humming stopped and she took one glove off, then the other, dropping them on the table, and she didn't say a word and neither did I.

I crossed the room in about four steps and we hit each other hard enough that I heard a box of letters slide, and her mouth was exactly what I'd been driving toward for eighteen hours, open and hungry and tasting faintly of the tea she always drinks cold out of a thermos, and she made a sound into my mouth that I felt more than heard, one hand fisting in my jacket and the other going straight up the back of my shirt to skin like she was checking I was real. I walked her backward and she let me, and her shoulders came up against one of the tall shelves and a couple of books shifted somewhere above us in the dark and neither of us cared, and I had my hands up under her blouse, palms flat on her ribs, her skin warm after all that cool basement air, and she pulled her mouth off mine just far enough to breathe.

"God, you smell like diesel," she said, and then she pulled me back in before I could answer, which was a fair response, because I hadn't driven eighteen hours to discuss hygiene.

My hands found the clasp of her bra through the blouse and she laughed low in her throat, not breaking the kiss, working her hips forward against me so there was no possible misunderstanding about what either of us wanted, and I felt her fingers go for my belt with the same directness she applies to everything, no ceremony, no asking how my week was, just her and me and a flickering light and a hundred years of somebody else's love letters in boxes around us and nobody due upstairs until seven.

"Letters can wait," she said against my jaw, half a laugh in it, as I pushed her blouse up past her ribs, "all of them waited a hundred and sixty years, they can wait another hour."

I told her she had a romantic streak a mile wide and she bit my neck for that, and down at the end of the room the fluorescent tube flickered twice and kept buzzing, and above us somewhere a book finally lost its balance and dropped with a slap of dust, and we both jumped and then we both laughed and then we both went right back to it, because six years will teach you exactly which interruptions matter and which ones don't, and that one didn't.

She got my belt open and then stopped, hands on the buckle, and looked up at me with that expression she gets, the one that means she's just decided something, and then she put both palms flat on my chest and shoved. Not hard, but with intent, and I went backward until the backs of my legs hit the rolling stool she keeps at the end of the worktable, the one with the cracked vinyl seat and one wheel that squeaks, and I sat down on it hard enough that it rolled a foot and squeaked the whole way, and she followed me, stepping in close between my knees.

"You sat down," she said, like she was commenting on the weather, and then she swung a leg over my hips and settled herself on my lap, knees on either side of my thighs, and the stool took it fine except for that one wheel complaining, and she put her hands on my shoulders and started moving her hips.

I got my hands on her waist and just watched for a second, because there's something about Silvia like this, forty-nine years old and taking what she wants with her lower lip caught in her teeth, silver in her dark hair falling loose out of the clip she'd worn up all day, that makes the six years of driving past her city feel like the smartest decision I ever made. She ground down against me slow at first, working it, and I was already half hard from the kissing and the neck-biting and all of it, and I got the rest of the way there fast, my cock pressing up through my jeans against the cotton of her panties, and she felt it and made that low sound again, deeper this time, and pushed harder.

"Six months," she said, not stopping, her breath coming shorter now, "six months, Flynn, that's the longest you've ever gone."

"I know it," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to, because she'd found a rhythm now, her hips rolling in a slow circle that dragged her clit right along the seam of my jeans, and every pass of it went through me like the vibration off a big engine. "I know it, I'm sorry, Kansas City ran long and then the Denver load had me by the throat."

"Shut up about the loads," she said, and I shut up about the loads.

She leaned in and kissed me again, and this one was different from the first, less frantic and more deliberate, her tongue sliding slow against mine while her hips never quit, and I got one hand up under her bra from the front, pushing the cup down until her nipple was against my palm, and it hardened right there, and she gasped into my mouth when I rolled it between my fingers. She was breathing hard now, little punches of air against my lips, and the stool squeaked in time with her, one squeak per rotation, and I remember thinking, in the small distant part of my brain that wasn't busy, that if the evening crew came down those stairs early they were going to get an education, and then her hand went between us and pressed flat over my cock through the denim and I stopped thinking anything at all for a while.

She worked me like that for a couple of minutes, grinding and stroking, both of us panting, and I could feel how wet she was through the cotton, a warm damp spot right over the head of my cock, and my hands were on her ass pulling her into it, and the fluorescent tube buzzed and flickered overhead and somewhere deep in the stacks the building settled and ticked, and then she pulled back, breathing hard, her blouse still rucked up over her bra, and looked down at me with her hair half out of the clip and her face flushed dark all the way down her throat.

"Table," she said. "Now!"

There's a way she has of giving orders that makes them sound like the only sensible thing in the world, and I don't fight it, I never have. I stood up, which meant she had to slide off my lap, and she stepped back and I pulled the stool out of the way with my foot and turned to the worktable, which had her acid-free boxes and a tray of bone folders and one big box of old maps sitting right in the middle where I needed to be, and I picked up the map box, careful with it because I know what her work is worth to her even when she's not thinking about it, and set it on the shelf behind me, and swept the bone folders to one end with my forearm, and she was already hopping up onto the cleared space while I did it, sitting on the edge of the metal table with her legs hanging off, pushing the papers out of her own way.

She'd kicked her shoes off somewhere in the last few minutes, I don't remember when, and she hooked her thumbs in her panties and lifted her hips and slid them down and off, and I took them from her and stuffed them in my jacket pocket without thinking about it, and she laughed at that, short and breathless, and said, "Souvenir hunter," and I said, "Six months, remember," and she said, "Get down there before I change my mind about waiting."

I didn't need telling twice. I got down on my knees on the cold concrete, which my knees complained about, because I'm thirty-eight and I kneel on concrete for no one, except that