Chapter One

Darla

The last everloving fucking thing I expected to see as I drove down I-76 toward my little hometown of Peters, Ohio was a buck-naked man wearing a spiked collar and a guitar.

I mean, only wearing a collar and a guitar. The man was barefoot, for goodness sake. On the highway. In May, in Oh-fucking-hi-o, where winter isn’t a season but a state of mind.

How could I not stop and offer him a ride? Seriously? Where was he hiding a weapon? OK, OK, maybe up there, but think about it for a minute – he’d have to twist quite a bit to access anything he hid up his puckered – well, there!

And he wasn’t a bit hard on the eyes, either. Kind of a Brad Pitt circa 1991 look, before he married Miss Toothpick and then left her for that wan Elvira and her weak Michelle Duggar imitation.

Anyhow…back to the naked hitchhiker. My 1986 Toyota Tercel wasn’t anything special but it, um, had a floor. And a windshield. And a place for Mr. Naked to rest his weary nuts. The vinyl might be cracked and faded and it wasn’t no Giving Tree from that Shel Silverstein book, but at least the man could give his balls a rest. Those muscles looked like they could sure use some eyes hungrily ogling them, too, for they screamed for loving attention. If I couldn’t touch, I could at least be the one to stare, right? I’m a giver like that.

Always thinking about others.

So when he got over his surprise that some chick with frizzy hair and fuzzy dice hanging from her old, faded rear view mirror had actually pulled over, he dipped his head down to the open window and flashed me a grin. We were out in the middle of no-fucking-where and there was one streetlight that glowed up the background, but even that wasn’t enough to outshine his smile. All straight teeth, nice gums, and full lips melting into a charm-you-out-of-your-pants look that made me almost drop trou and fuck him right there.

I about melted into my own seat. That wasn’t from the heater, either. My juices seemed to go from the Sahara to Niagara Falls. When he climbed in and – literally – flashed his ass and nibbly bits at me, I nearly came on the spot.

Something about him was familiar, but I knew he wasn’t from around here. Tucking away that little tease of contemplation, I studied him a bit more, a sense of specialness flowing over the moment. Extracting it and dissecting it would yield no deeper truths, though – a part of me connected with him for whatever déjà vu-like reason.

Or maybe I was just on overdrive to convince myself to pick up a nude male. Whatever.

“Hi there, Ma’am.” Shaggy, surfer blond, wavy hair four months overgrown from the cut that had screamed “preppy boy,” but now exuded that deep sense of complete abandon, of hedonism in bed. A flash of pink in his mouth displayed a tongue that (I imagined) truly loved women and wasn’t afraid to show it. Glittery blue eyes that were focused but fleeting, like Bradley Cooper’s but muted. He was high as a motherfucking kite, and that was OK, because he was pretty enough to look at just as is. He didn’t need to be a stellar conversationalist.

“I am no one’s Ma’am. That’s my grandma. Hell, my mom doesn’t even go by Ma’am, so shut down that talk right there.” No one – no woman – before the age of thirty-five wants to be called ma’am. Fastest way to shut a woman’s vagina off, like a table saw brake. Come too close with that word and crack! Power off.

“OK, then, Chippy Pete!” He adjusted his hat (where’d that come from? I didn’t see no hat at first, and he wasn’t exactly hanging on to a lot of pockets here, nude and all) and kept it on. This wasn’t no churchgoing man. Then again, the naked ones largely aren’t. The hat was cheap straw, formed like a cowboy hat, and the look – well, his fashion sense screamed Chippendales stripper on a Salvation Army budget.

“Just Pete to you.” Chippy Pete? Seriously? He could have called me Honey or Sugar or Toots or Melons or Bitch and he picked Chippy Pete? “Where you going?”

“Wherever you are.”

I looked in the rear view mirror at myself. In spite of the frizzy hair I wore makeup. A shirt. A bra. Pants. The chances we were going to the same place were slim. “Uh, I’m dressed. You’re not.”

“I am attired in a guitar. And this.” He doffed his hat and started strumming some chord from a 70s song. Kansas? Boston? I couldn’t tell.

“No shirt, no shoes, no sweaty balls on my dashboard.” I was starting to get nervous. What had I gotten myself into? Was he weirder than I thought? Would this be a redo of my freshman Valentine’s dance, where my best friend, Jane, hooked me up with her older brother’s meth dealer and the date ended with a courtesy ride home from the DEA?

“Just on your seat, Ma’am – uh, Pete.”

“That’s right. I am Pete.” May as well embrace it. And the sweaty ball funk that would permeate my seat thereafter. “And you are?” His sandy blond hair was clean. He had that going for him. And eyes that were the color I imagined the ocean to be, if the glow of the dashboard lights were to be believed.

“Call me Sweaty.” He gestured to his sac.

“I’ll call you Sweetheart.”

“Pretty soon you’ll call me whatever name you’re really thinking of.”

“Then your name is Asshole.”

“I been called worse.”

“OK, Ass.”

“Alright then, Ma’am.” So we were at a standoff, and that would have gone on for twenty mile markers out here in the lost lands of north-central Ohio, where the people rolled Pittsburgh Yinzerese and Cleveland into one God-awful accent, had a nasty, enormous mutant raccoon not put a stop to all that.

The impact nearly neutered poor Ass.

Screech! I slammed on the brakes when a flash of something spooked me, my little Tercel going from 73 to nothing in about ten seconds. Poor Ass the Naked Cowboy Rock Star hadn’t completed putting on his seat belt, so the guitar, still slung around his groin, was about the only buffer he had as the car pitched and swerved, the raccoon bigger than one of my toddler cousins and, unfortunately, considerably deader now that I had crushed it with my rusted-out machine of doom.

The cowboy managed to put his hands out and, through the grace of whatever deity you believe in (mine involves noodly appendages – and speaking of those…), when the car came to a rest, spread out at a ninety degree angle the opposite of what nature or the highway commission intended, he wasn’t injured. I’m sure parts of him were sore the next day, but I’m not going to talk about that, because sorting out the “The car hit a raccoon and she slammed on the brakes” soreness from the “I made love to a country girl in a field filled with wildflowers and sunshine” soreness is something I’m not privy to understanding.

So I guess I just sort of spoiled the rest of this story now, huh? You don’t want to hear how I went from nearly killing the rock star to getting caught in the act in a rest area in one of those wild fields where Ohio put its Soviet-era brick shit houses, right? The ones that look like Huber Heights in miniature?

Sure you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t still be reading this. You’d flip over to some other story on your Kindle, like one of those Cum for the Loch Ness Monster Bass Player stories, or Fifty Shades of Billionaire Hoo-haw. My story doesn’t have a helicopter that whisks people off to Manhattan or a Red Room of Pain or a Bigfoot who marries a human and settles down and has critters, but it does have a naked rock star (sorta) groaning in the front seat of my mercifully unharmed Toyota Tercel, his ass off the seat and one leg splayed up, showing me his fine, puckered winking starfish and a piece of manhood that was so aesthetically pleasing it might as well have been carved out of fine Italian marble and placed on a pedestal, dipped in Swiss chocolate and served with a side of Gruyere and caviar.

It really looked that good.

And I’m no rabid knob gobbler. There are a good twenty…uh, eight – I meant eight – men in north-central Ohio who will confirm that.

“Ass? You OK?” I smoothed my hair back from my forehead and felt a bump above the ridge of my left eye socket. Shit. I had gotten hurt! My brain felt fine, so whatever had happened must have been light enough to leave a bump but not so bad as to make me feel serious pain. I looked in the rear view mirror. Same bloodshot green eyes. My nose wasn’t broken – pert and “a little piggy,” as my mom often said, though grandma told me it just meant I had that out-of-place “cheerleader cute” that would make me popular but do me no favors past the age of twenty-five. I was twenty-two right now, so this wasn’t an issue just yet.

“My name’s Trevor,” Ass moaned, slowly extricating himself and making it about halfway. I realized I needed to reach down between his legs and offer him a hand to grasp, but the logistics weren’t as easy as that might sound, for the minefield of his perfect erection made the odds that I would just encircle it with my now-itching palm about 7 to 4. If I was Aunt Marlene at the greyhound races, I wouldn’t bet on me not touching him.

“OK, Trevor,” I answered. For once, I was a bit speechless, though my nether regions started to say all sorts of sweet nothings right about now, filling in the void where my words would normally go. Seriously, Darla Jo Jennings? Mom’s voice filled my dark, nasty heart. You’re thinking about your loins at a time like this?

Not exactly. More that my loins were thinking about, well, his. It was hard not to, because he was hard – and erect and pretty, like a talisman you touch to get a superstitious boost of luck.

Which we needed real bad, right about now, as the horn from a semi started wheezing like mad, warning us to get the fuck out of the middle of the Interstate.

Chance favors the prepared, someone once said. I did not, however, think that touching his glorious dick was really going to help more than turning the key in the ignition, firing up the engine, and driving the damn car from its perpendicular status over to the side of the road. Poor Trevor’s legs bounced like a drowning Daddy Longlegs stuck in a sink drain, his shards of destroyed guitar now offering zero covering. What had seemed a bit kitschy was now just match sticks and I found myself wet, hot, wanting to ride him and realizing that my mom was right. One poor decision does lead to another.

“It’s like you open your brain and shit pours out and you pick the worst crap to do, Darla! I don’t know what you’re thinking sometimes,” she had lectured a thousand times while chain smoking Virginia Slims and sucking down Robitussin and vodka. “One bad decision is like building a long line of dominoes and then just sneezing and not turning your head.” The metaphor made less sense after Mom had three or four drinks in her, but she made a good point. It was generally the same comment rephrased a million different ways: I suck.

One poor decision does beget another. So once you’ve made your first doozy, you have a choice, but you really have less of a choice than you had before your first screw up, right?

So why not fuck him?

Trevor

This was not Sudborough, Massachusetts. Not even close. That was all I knew when the splinters of my smashed guitar snapped me partway out of the pleasant haze I’d been in. I gently turned my thoughts in a careful circle, trying to place myself in time and space.