The highway rest-stop looked like a polar refugee-camp. The plows had their hands full with I-95 and hadn’t been through here in several hours. There had to be fifty or more cars left haphazardly in the parking area, some partially blocking the road, many completely blanketed in snow. On the other side, the truck-parking area was also a snarl of trucks, most idling.
We were on our way down to Florida for some January r-and-r and, being northerners, we had studded snow tires and four-wheel drive. So I wasn’t especially worried that we would get stuck. But one look at the Virginia Welcome Center made me shudder a little. The whole reason we decided to drive, instead of fly, was that the latest surge in COVID had caused hundreds of flights to be canceled in the last two weeks. We thought we were safer–and more likely to spend our vacation on the beach than stranded in a crowded airport–if we drove. But this storm had picked up speed and strength this morning and slammed into Virginia and Maryland as a ferocious blizzard. We had gone from bright sunshine on the New Jersey Turnpike, to gloomy flurries North of Baltimore, to some sort of ‘snowmagedden’ in D.C. There were cars in the ditches every mile or so and we even went around one truck that had jack-knifed and blocked one lane of the highway. We were traveling at a top-speed of thirty mph. On the radio, they said I-95 was a mess all the way to Richmond, at least. Now the rest-stop was mobbed with desperate travelers.
“Should we risk it?” I asked Julia as we crept through the lot. “That place must be lousy with COVID.”
I could see she wasn’t happy with the crowd either. But she had fewer options than me. “Yes. We better stop.” She said. “At the rate we’re going on the highway, it might be three hours before we come to another place where I can pee.”
I pulled into what might have been a parking spot and we masked up. The lobby was every bit as packed as it looked from outside. People were crowded around outlets so they could charge their phones. Every seat was taken and some people were huddled on the floor. Everyone was on their phone.
The line to the women’s restroom snaked into the lobby and I suggested Julia just take her chances in the men’s room. One look at some of the characters emerging from there, though, and she said she would wait it out. When I saw the state of the men’s room, it was clear she had chosen wisely. The floors were filthy from all the slush that had been tracked in mingled with bits of toilet paper and paper towels. There was a line at each urinal of at least two guys and several were pacing the stalls waiting for an opening. It smelled exactly as you think it would.
When I had finished and washed my hands (they were out of paper towels by then), I got out of there and went back to the lobby. Julia was still in line. In fact, I’m not sure she had moved five feet since I last saw her. I tried to give her a sympathetic smile, despite being masked.
Crowded as it was, I probably should have gone out and waited in the car. But I hated to leave her inside, so I moved to the least dense area I could find and leaned against a door marked ‘Maintenance.’ Another guy stood nearby, talking on his phone. He was younger than me–probably in his mid-thirties, and he shivered a little as he talked. Under his overcoat, I could see he was wearing a suit. But his dark hair was dripping with snow-melt and snow still clung to the top of his loafers and in the hem of his pants. He was soaked from the knees down.
I nodded and went back to my phone. I was trying to find a hotel in Richmond. We had hoped to get all the way to North Carolina for this leg of the trip, but with ninety miles of ‘snowmagedden’ still to get through, North Carolina seemed like a longshot. I wasn’t having much luck. Even the Super 8s and Motel 6s were booked in the Richmond metro area.
I looked over to the queue for the ladies room and saw that Julia had moved ahead five more feet. At this rate, she would be only another twenty minutes. Only twenty minutes.
‘Having fun?’ I texted her.
‘So much fun. |-(’
‘trying to find hotel in Richmond no luck yet.”
‘Shit…look further south?’
‘Trying…’
“Excuse me,” I looked up and the man had stepped a little closer. “You dropped your glove.”
I knelt and retrieved it. Looking him up and down again, he appeared truly miserable. “Thanks. Looks like you had a rough time getting here.”
He nodded and looked around in disbelief. “I passed by here and almost pulled in, then thought it was safer to stay on the road. Just a half mile past here I spun into the ditch. Waited in the car for an hour, then decided to get out and walk back here.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Yep, it was dumb. I thought for sure if I didn’t get creamed by a truck, I would be the cause of someone else’s wreck. But I just couldn’t stand the thought of being buried in my car out there.”
“Bad as this is, it’s better than that.”
My phone vibrated. ‘Who are you talking to?’
I leaned around him to make eye contact with Julia. ‘none of yr beeswax. guy trying to sell me “good COVID.” go pee so we can get out of here ;-)’
“Sorry, that’s my wife. She’s stuck in line for the bathroom.”
He turned and looked. Julia gave a short wave. He turned back and smiled (I think…mask). “You guys traveling out or coming home?”
I told him we were coming from upstate New York, headed to Florida to get a break from winter. He said he was going to his brother-in-law’s funeral in Greensboro tomorrow. We chatted for another few minutes.
My phone jittered. ‘he’s cute’
‘Haha’
I looked out the window where the snow was actually coming down even harder. “It doesn’t look good for you,” I said. “You got an ETA on your tow truck?”
“AAA says it will be here anytime in the next…” He looked at his phone. “Shit, they just changed it to the next four hours.”
“Do you believe that?” I could tell he didn’t really register my question. Like a lot of people in desperate situations, he had been clinging to the belief that it couldn’t get much worse. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sean,” he said, distracted. He looked so cold I suspected his teeth would start to chatter soon.
“Sean, we passed 50 cars, easy, in the ditch since D.C. and there’s more every minute. The tow trucks are going to prioritize cash over their reimbursements from AAA tonight. If you want to get out of that ditch, you need a bunch of cash and you need to call a tow service directly.”
We both turned our heads to the little ATM machine by the bank of windows. It was mobbed.
My phone buzzed. ‘seriously tho nice butt and shoulders’
“You vaxxed?” He nodded and looked at the crowd around the ATM. “Well, I’m Reggie. My wife is Julia. If she ever gets done peeing, we’re taking our chances and getting out of here.” I said. “We’re not going through Greensboro but we can drop you somewhere closer. You want a lift?”
( . )( . )
When I texted Julia (she had finally made it into the bathroom, but had not gotten a stall, yet) she thought I was joking.
‘I’m serious. He has a funeral tomorrow. We’ll drop him somewhere south of Richmond.’
There was a long pause. Then, ‘axe murder much???’
“She wants to know if you’re an axe murderer.”
He laughed, “No, I’ve never harmed an axe but I did say mean things to a shovel, once.”
‘If you think he’s a creep when you get out here, say “woohoo” and I’ll call it off.’
“I’m an attorney,” he said. “Just got my first job.”
I spoke slowly and pretended to type, “Never mind. Lawyer. Will wait for axe murderer.”
( . )( . )
He and Julia hit it off pretty well when she finally got back to us. Sean said if we could drop him off at Rocky Mount or someplace nearby, he could get a ride with family from there. He stood trembling in the snow while we moved our stuff out of the back seat. I was at the back gate, putting our overnight bag in while Julia was gathering up a few odds and ends to clear the seat. I stuck my head around the corner. “Hey Sean, you want to stow your laptop bag here, or…”
Sean looked up embarrassed. He had clearly been checking out Julia’s ass as she gathered the last of our stuff out of the backseat. He blushed and looked away, hanging on to his bag and stammered something about the wind and the cold. I wasn’t angry. Julia was a bit of a flirt and even as I saw him looking, I had noticed that she was doing more ass-wiggling than was strictly necessary for her task.
Car rearranged, Sean got into the backseat and Julia and I buckled up in front and we set out again. Even in the half hour we had stopped, conditions had worsened. A plow had at least passed through the right lane in the last few minutes, but the snow (the heavy, wet stuff that sticks to the road and gives heart attacks to middle-aged guys with shovels) had already covered the roadway.
We had already agreed, if it seemed safe to do so, to stop at Sean’s car so he could get his suitcase. All of us were watching for it, a gray Volkswagen head-down in the ditch, not far from the rest area. But after two miles, we had not seen it. It was very possible that, between the storm and the snowplow, his car was simply buried.
“Do you want me to turn around at the next exit so we can retrace and take another crack at it?”
I was relieved when he declined. “I don’t want to make anything more dangerous for any of us,” he said. “I can wear this to the funeral and I’m sure my family can lend me anything else I need.” Still, you could see that he was disconcerted that he hadn’t even been able to see his car in the storm.
It was slow going. About thirty minutes after we left the rest stop, we spotted an exit with an open truck stop. Predictably, the line for gas was long, and this place, too, was full of stranded travelers. But we were able to top off our tank and Sean and Lillith went inside to restock snacks and drinks. Just in case we joined the hundreds of travelers in the ditch, we wanted to have food enough for several hours.
“And I want to get another blanket,” Julia said to me as she left me at the pump. “He’s soaked and must be freezing and we only have one fleece in the car…and it’s mine.” She laughed.
I finished long before they did, so I pulled the car up to the storefront to let the next guy fuel up and waited. Eventually, they came out with two bags each. As I was pulling out to get on the highway again, Sean and Julia revealed the supplies they had requisitioned: in his bags were crackers and cheese, some dubious fruit, two liters of water, a loaf of bread, a small jar of peanut butter, and assorted candy. In Julia’s: two bottles of wine, three paper cups she had boosted from the soda machine, and three pre-packaged sandwiches. Plus she had filled our thermos with coffee. “Truckstop wine and mystery-meat-sandwiches,” she said, rolling her eyes. “If we get stranded, at least we’ll be stranded in luxury!”
Eventually, we caught up to the line of cars following a plow. The good news was that I could loosen my grip on the wheel: even at the pace the snow was falling, we could see the pavement and the sprays of sand. The bad news, of course, was that we were going even slower.
Julia and Sean were talking like old friends – despite the fifteen-year age gap, they had similar tastes in music and television, and they liked each others’ sense of humor. She was sitting with her legs curled under in the seat so she could more easily face him as they talked, her fleece blanket pulled up to her chin. Eventually, Julia coaxed his backstory out: the circumstances of his brother-in-law’s funeral, his own struggle during the pandemic. He had passed the BAR, got a job offer, and gotten engaged all in the span of a month…February, 2020. When the shit hit the fan, the firm that had offered him the job temporarily (then permanently) rescinded the offer and by that summer his fiancee had broken off the engagement. He had finally found another firm, a month ago, but he didn’t love the work.
“Sliding into that ditch on the way to a funeral,and then not even being able to find the car?” he said. “That just feels like a metaphor for the last two years. I need a change of luck.”
Julia reached over the seat and touched his knee in a gesture of sympathy. “My god, you’re still soaked! You must be freezing! Oh my god, I meant to buy another blanket at the truckstop!” Over his protests, she gathered up the fleece blanket she was under and pushed it over the seat to him, insisting that he needed it more than her. She reached down behind the little console that separated the front seats and fiddled with the vent back there. “I don’t think there’s any heat coming from the back vent,” she told me. The two of them fussed with it and confirmed, no matter how high we cranked the heat, or what configuration of vents we used, nothing was coming out of the back.
“Look, you’re under a blanket.” Julia was using her mom voice. “Take off your shoes and socks and pants and fold them up. The heat is blasting up here. I can put them on the floorboard and try to dry them out.”
Sean was having none of it. He clearly was afraid of wearing out his welcome. Julia poked me in the arm. “Tell him.”
I looked at him in the rearview mirror. “You said you needed a change of luck, Sean. We rescued you from the rest stop in a blizzard and now a pretty woman is asking you to take off your pants. What do you want? a lottery ticket, too?”
( . )( . )
We continued to go at a snail’s pace behind the plow. Twice, the entire line of cars halted for at least twenty minutes to (as we saw when the line moved again) push stranded cars off the highway. At this rate, I calculated, it would take us two hours longer than I had thought to clear the storm and get out of Virginia.
Julia had opened a bottle of wine, by now, and she and Sean were drinking from paper cups while the three of us chatted. Sean was telling us about the appendectomy he had had in college. “Oh! Reggie had appendicitis on our anniversary last year! He had to have an appendectomy and recover in the hotel before we could fly home.”
My hands gripped the wheel a little tighter and I shot her a look as if to say, Careful, honey. There’s swinging in this story. She wasn’t even looking at me.
“That must’ve sucked, man,” he said. “For both of you.”
“It wasn’t so bad…” I said. Trying to think of how to change the topic.
“It did and it didn’t,” Julia said, clearly not taking the hint. I remembered she was on her third cup of wine. “Turned out the hotel we always stay at was full of swingers that weekend. They had bought out almost every room. Reggie knew they had planned a ‘hotel takeover’ or whatever.” She jabbed me playfully with her finger. “And he thought he could trick me into joining in.”
I could see the look of astonishment on Sean’s face. All of us were quiet for a beat or two as Julia finally realized she had said more than she should have.
“They were actually very nice people,” she said, trying to back out of the door she had just opened. “Most of them were our age or older so…” She clearly didn’t know where she was going with that and looked at me for help.
I cocked my eyebrow at her. You talked yourself into this mess–let’s see what you got, my face said.
There were another few heartbeats of silence in the car.
“The flight home was pretty uncomfortable,” she said, lamely.
“I’ll bet it was,” Sean said. I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He seemed lost for words.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought. “That was our first time around swingers, I said. “I was in no shape to join in, so I mostly watched.” I left it there. Julia was looking straight ahead at the road and I could see her spine stiffen.
After a few seconds, Sean’s voice floated from the back seat. “You mostly watched?”
Julia downed her cup of wine and poured the dregs of the bottle into her cup.
I grinned at her. “You want to fill in some of the details, honey?”
She looked at me for a second and cocked her head to one side. Then a little smile turned the corners of her mouth. She pulled her feet up in the seat and held her cup over the back of the seat.
“Sean, do you want to open another bottle of truckstop wine?”
I winked at him in the rearview mirror. “Sounds like I better do that,” he said.
( . )( . )
Julia told him the whole story. She wasn’t super detailed, but she talked about being attracted to one of the couples who had been especially attentive to my condition, how she found herself very curious to see what everyone was up to, and then found herself in the middle of all of it while I was holed up in our room, recovering. I won’t bore with you the story, you’ve already heard it, but Sean was mesmerized.
“I had just been with several people,” she said. “And the poor schemer here had to go to bed with blue balls so I snuck Jenny back into the room so he could have his first blowjob from two women.”
Sean was utterly speechless. The only sound in the car was the slush under the wheels and the windshield wipers keeping time. As Julia was finishing her story, it was evident we were coming out of the storm swath. There was much less snow beside the road and the line of cars was slowly picking up speed.
Julia took a sip of wine and leered over the back seat. “Is that another bottle of wine under the blanket?” she asked, holding out her cup and shaking it a little. “Are you holding out on me, Sean?”
She was clearly ripped.
“Looks like the weather is clearing,” I said.
Julia was still looking over the seat at Sean and his eyes were locked on hers. She switched her wine cup to her right hand and reached back with her left. The road was still not safe enough for me to turn my head, but I snuck a glance anyway. Sean was sliding forward in the seat while Julia was running her finger up his thigh toward the tent.
Julia spoke without turning her head to me. “Darling,” she asked. “Would you mind very much if I asked to see Sean’s cock?”
“Not at all, honey.” I looked at Sean in the mirror. “My wife would like to know if she can see your dick?”
Sean pushed the blanket down. The tail-lights flashed in front of me and I had to apply the brakes so I couldn’t look.
“Oh my,” Julia said. She raised up a little so she could stretch her arm farther.
Up ahead, I could see the snowplow we had been following turn into the little turn-around lane to head back North. There was almost no snow now on the roadside. A blue sign on the right said REST AREA, 2 MILES.
“Darling?” Julia queried again.
“Yes honey?”
“I would like to suck Sean’s cock. I would really like to suck his cock.”
“You hear that, Sean?” I looked into the mirror again. “I think you have a chance to change your luck for the better.”
