93. Day Ten Riding with a Woman
Day Ten: Riding with a Woman
The air smelled different in California. A sweetness she couldn’t name, traces of car exhaust, sea salt, wet sand.
Jase.
Around her, inside her, everywhere, Jase.
Lindsey watched the contented rise and fall of his back as he slept.
He’d spent a lot of the trip asleep, as if he’d driven those miles already and didn’t need to see them again.
And Lindsey had spent a lot of those miles watching him, so she knew he was usually furrowed.
Brows tense, arms locked across his chest. Today his face was smushed into his pillow, and his limbs were fanned out around him, taking up more than his share of the lumpy queen mattress.
The bike, the motel…this was his world. This was Jase at home.
Careful not to wake him, she made a pot of coffee and took a cup outside the door they forgot to lock last night.
The Road King, by far the shiniest vehicle in the lot, was parked sideways in front of their room.
A country song that was overplayed at the bar where she wouldn’t be returning to work tomorrow drifted from down the line of closed doors and open windows.
It was exactly the sort of unassuming place befitting a lone man on the road.
Last day. Knowing and loss chewed at her insides. Or maybe it was the expired creamer in her coffee curdling in her guts. She wanted to bargain with Jason for another box of maps. Stranding them in California felt so unfinished. What if he’d passed away before he could write the way home?
Unless he meant to end it here since home looked different to each of them.
“Morning.”
She smiled a whole-body smile at the scratchy sound of Jase’s voice and the relaxed way he set his hands on her waist from behind. Her head fell back against his shoulder.
“Morning.”
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
“Appreciating the view.” She pointed through a sliver between buildings. “I think I found the ocean.”
“See? What’d I tell you?”
“That view is better than this one.” She nodded over the porch railing at the collection of empty bottles underneath a green Plymouth parked a few doors down. “Coffee?”
Jase took the mug from her and said, “You didn’t make this in the room, did you?”
“Yeah, why? There’s more if you want your own cup.”
Jase chucked what was left over the railing, soaking the stray cigarette butts in the grass. “Never use motel room coffee pots.”
“Why not?”
“Women use them to wash their underwear,” he said.
“No. You’re kidding.”
The furrowed brow made its appearance and he muttered, “We’ve really got to work on your self-preservation, Lindsey.”
“Oh my God.”
She bolted around him and into the room, past the bed, to the bathroom, and began furiously brushing her teeth.
“Do I need to go to the hospital?” she asked with a mouthful of toothpaste.
“Ask your brother,” Jase called back. “He’s the doctor, right?”
She could just imagine that conversation. Hey Luke, can a person get an STD from a coffee maker? Why? No reason.
After a night of wholly unprotected sex with an openly promiscuous man, what was a little thrush, anyway?
She cupped water from the tap in her hands, swished it around her mouth, and spit.
There wasn’t enough toothpaste or hot water from a dirty faucet in the world to convince her the rancid taste on her tongue was expired creamer and nothing else.
Jase had left a small bottle of bright green mouthwash on the counter, and she used that up too.
“You okay in there?” Jase asked.
He’d never kiss her again. Not that she could blame him.
“No,” she hollered. The woman in the mirror, who had woken up naked and sexily tousled, had a wet splotch across the front of her tank top and looked sick and terrified. “Wait, you’re not messing with me, are you?”
“I’m not messing. But, hey, you know what else is good at cleaning out your mouth?”
“I already used all your mouthwash.”
Lindsey turned and found him in the open doorway of the motel room with his jeans unzipped and pulled low on his hips. He was making a blowjob joke, she realized, but shirtless Jase, Jase with his pants undone and his bulge aimed in her direction was sexier than any ocean view.
When he grinned as if he’d caught her drooling at him, not that her chin was wet from excessive toothbrushing, she chucked the empty mouthwash bottle at him. It bounced off his left pec.
“Ouch,” he feigned injury.
“You think your little swimmers will kill whatever else is swimming around my mouth?”
“First of all, they’re not little,” Jase said. Lindsey rolled her eyes. “Second, there’s nothing actually in your mouth.”
“But you said—”
“Look around. Do you think anyone who’s stayed here actually cares about clean underwear?”
She had been purposely trying not to look too closely at anything.
The room, though not particularly clean, was more old than dirty.
Daylight illuminated the long-imbedded stains in the brown carpet, the so-called color TV still had rabbit ears, the bedspread—currently in a pile on the floor—was a color and flower pattern that had probably been popular in the seventies when the motel was built, and the window screen was torn wide enough for Lindsey to climb through.
Okay, he had a point. The only people she could imagine staying in a place like this were men like Jase who were more likely to wash their clothes in the sink than the coffee maker.
Wait, did Jase wash his clothes in the sink? He used the smallest duffel bag she’d ever seen. He had to wash them somewhere.
“Sundress?” he interrupted her thoughts. “You’re fine.”
“You live an interesting life, Jase.”
She let her hand trail along his stomach as she stepped around him and his bulge to the porch.
“Where are you going?”
“Our room smells like coffee and sex and now I can’t stop thinking they’re related.”
He set his hands on the railing on either side of her, boxing her in from behind.
“Pretty sure the sex was us,” he said, pressing his lips to her shoulder.
Three times.
Three very, very intense times.
Well, two very, very intense times, and a third that finally put her to sleep.
The line of chaste kisses Jase was plotting up her neck was causing a very un-chaste response in her body, priming her for a fourth.
I can’t believe we haven’t been doing this every day since Austin. I can’t believe how you’ve ruined me for all future men. I can’t believe we’ll never do this again.
“I can’t believe it’s over today,” she said aloud.
She didn’t expect them to ride off into the sunset together, even after last night. What was the best sex she’d ever had was probably a typical Saturday night for Jase. She just wanted…
More.
As if agreeing, his erection nudged her through her pajama shorts and the pants he hadn’t bothered buttoning.
“It’s too bad,” she said.
“What is?” he asked against her throat.
“This whole trip and I didn’t get to swim in the ocean.”
“You walked in it last night.”
“For a few minutes in the dark waiting for Graham to show up. It’s not the same. We’re so close, Jase. Do you think we have time? Graham won’t know the difference if we tell him we slept in.”
Unlike Lindsey who wasn’t ready to return home where the life she left behind no longer existed, once they finished the maps today, Jase was a free man with a new bike to ride. Alone.
When he was quiet for too long, she said, “You know what? Bad idea. Never mind—”
Jase cleared his throat. “How would you feel about sticking it to Helen for your black eye?” he asked.
She twisted in his arms to show him the faded yellow mark. “This is hardly a black eye.”
“Is that a no?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“What if…” Jase licked his lips. “What if we blew off the meeting today?”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s a nice ride up the coast, especially if you’ve never seen it.
What do you say we take our time on the bike?
We’ll find a beach where you can swim, and I’ll take you to some places I know.
” His hands slid down her back, bringing their hips together.
“Just the two of us. We’ll finish the maps tomorrow. ”
“You’d—” she stuttered at the offer she never expected. “You’d do that?”
“Spend a day without my brother on a bike with you? Are you kidding me?” he said. “But I have one condition. No running off.”
“If you promise to behave yourself.”
“No bullshit rules about not touching you, either.”
“That sounds like two conditions,” she teased. “But I agree.”
“Good.” He slipped his hands beneath her waistband and squeezed her bare cheeks. “Because there’s still a lot of things I want to do to you.”
Jase leaned in to kiss her. Maybe he really wasn’t worried about underwear in the coffee pot. Their lips had almost touched when she said, “I have my own condition.”
“Yes, I’ll put it anywhere,” Jase said.
Whoa. The roller coaster dip in her stomach at the prospect of anywhere was something she was going to have to explore later.
“That’s not—” she tried saying.
“Anything you want, Sundress,” he said.
“Tonight, I want to stay in a hotel on the beach. With air-conditioning.”
“The coffee pot won’t be any safer.”
“I want to go somewhere you haven’t done maintenance at. Somewhere you’ve never been.”
Somewhere you’ve never been with anyone else.
“Sure thing,” Jase said. “I can probably sell a kidney between here and Santa Cruz to make it happen.”
“If anyone knows a guy who knows a guy who can get it done, it’s you.”