“You little hussy,” she laughs.
She uses the crank on the inside of her door to bring her window down, letting the cool air outside fly in and whip at her hair. Her hand sticks out of the window, bobbing up and down while the air passes it.
We fly down the open road, the only people on it, for another few miles. My old high school passes by, the grocery store I worked at for a week before I got fired for stealing beer and drinking it on the clock, the park I had my first realbirthday party at. I only lived in this town for six years, but it feels like my whole damn life passes by us.
I hook a sharp left onto a trail off the road, worn down with car tires over the years, and follow it for another ten minutes, and bring us to a stop at the center of a clearing.
“So this is Make-out Point, huh?” Sophia asks, unbuckling her seatbelt.
“We called it The Patch,” I laugh.
“Nowthere’sa name that makes you tingly all over.”
“Stay here,” I tell her with a pat to her leg.
I climb out of the truck and head toward the back, popping the tailgate open. Climbing up into the bed, I unroll the bundle of blankets waiting for me and lay them out in the truck bed, topping them off with a couple of pillows near the cab.
This is so fucking stupid.
This is some Colt Fowler shit.
I don’t know what possessed me to even think of this shit.
Flipping the lid of the cooler open, I hop back out of the bed toward Sophia’s window. I reach in past her and press the third button on the radio presets – the only one thatisn’tBill’s talk radio – and crank up the volume.
“Alright,” I tell her, “come on out.”
I open the door for her and she climbs out, moving toward the back of the truck. Honestly, I half expect her to laugh at me. I would laugh at me.
“Shut up,” she says with a slap to my chest, “this is so cute! Wait – is this what you did with all of the other girls you brought here?”
“Nah,” I chuckle. “I just felt them up in the front seat.”
“Then it’s cute.”
Hoisting her up by the ass, I help her climb into the truck bed and follow her up while she grabs a beer from the cooler. She twists off the cap and settles down into theblankets, bringing her knees up while I settle next to her with a beer of my own.
“The best part about this place is that it’s far enough from the city that nothing fucks with the sky at night,” I tell her, pulling her into my lap as the sky goes dark. “Crystal clear up there.”
Her body relaxes against mine while she looks up at the sky, watching the stars start to peek out above us.
It’s nice, sharing this place with her. Sure, I brought my fair share of girls here while I was in high school, but it was more than that. This place means something to me. The first time I came out here was a month after Bill and Martina brought me home; they didn’t want a grown kid, they were planning for someone five and under. Someone who hadn’t been damaged too bad just yet. They definitely didn’t want a kid who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – talk. But by those first weeks, after the first four tries at getting me into therapy, I could tell they actually gave a shit about me, and that scared me senseless. I tossed the Walkman they gave me into my backpack with some extra batteries, threw on my headphones, and I fuckin’ bolted.
It took Bill a couple of hours to find me out here, and I thought for sure, he was gonna have a fit about it, but he didn’t. Instead, he’d picked up a baseball bat from the bed of that old truck and took me over to a tree.‘Ya ain’t gotta talk, boy,’he told me,‘but ya do gotta communicate with us.’I spent two hours whacking the bat against the tree trunks before we finally went back to the house, and I came back any time I needed to blow off some steam after that. Eventually, they knew when I told them I was coming to The Patch, I was either beating on the trees or bringing a girl out here, and they knew they weren’t gonna hear about it either way.
“Oh my god!” Sophia squeals. “Look!”
I follow the line of her finger toward a few blinking bulbs of light floating around overhead. “What, you’ve never seen lightning bugs before?” I chuckle.
“Not like that!” Her hand comes back to cup my face, and I set my beer down before wrapping my arms around her. “It’s beautiful out here. I’m really glad you brought me.”
“Me too,” I tell her, moving my hand to the tack of her jeans.
I slip the tack through the button hole and slide my hand into her panties, earning a satisfied sigh from her as I rest my hand on her pussy. My fingers trace lazy circles over her clit, bringing my other hand up to wrap around her throat, forcing her head back until it rests against my shoulder.
“I need you to do somethin’ for me, Sugar,” I tell her.
“Hmmm?”
