3 - Shared on the Scenic Route
MFM / Hotwife
“It feels like it goes on forever out here, huh?” Charlie glanced sideways at his wife, Lori, who had her feet up on the dashboard and her focus out the window. “I love how everything stretches on, and you can see for miles, but I don’t think I could ever live anywhere so flat.”
Lori shrugged. “I’m not particularly interested in mountains, but anything would be better than all this farmland.”
Charlie smiled in a way that made her think he was about to reach over and grab her breasts, saying something about her ample mountains, or some other juvenile shit like that.
Instead, he kept both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.
She knew he was thinking it, but maybe he had taken her suggestion into consideration.
The other day, she had told him to stop being so immature, to stop acting like a teenager who couldn’t control himself.
They were already doing everything he wanted to do—taking a road trip through the heartland, spending ten days crammed into a car with Charlie repeating, “it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters. ”
Lori didn’t care about the journey. What she wanted was to be somewhere, anywhere.
In one place. She was the first person to admit she was a homebody, or at the least someone who didn’t understand the appeal of trying to stay on the road until the wee hours of the morning then hoping there was an open room available at the many seedy motels they passed on I-80.
Once she was able to convince Charlie to stop for dinner, she would start in on the crazy idea of them getting off the interstate and finding a nice place to stay, a place with a pool and room service and maybe a jacuzzi tub that was deep enough for her to submerge herself up to her eyes like a hippopotamus sinking into mud.
But Charlie always had the same answer, a variation on a theme tweaked to fit the current day’s trek. “I was hoping to get a few more hours under our belts before we stopped for the night,” or her favorite one, “We can’t stop yet. It’s hardly even dark.”
The only upside was that Lori didn’t have to drive.
She wasn’t a lover of driving the way Charlie was.
It wasn’t that it made her nervous or that she was uncomfortable piloting a vehicle as powerful as their affordable, Japanese engineered sedan; she just saw driving as a chore rather than a diversion.
She would have had the same reaction if Charlie told her they were going to spend their vacation doing laundry.
So, Charlie drove, and she napped and read and stared out the window, increasingly angry that Charlie hadn’t had the decency to plan a road trip through winding mountains, across the scenic rippling coastline, into swamps and forests that sat in the shadows of metropolises.
He had to pick the straight line of I-80, a slash of black tar that ran from one boring spot to another with the promise of landing in California.
Not that they were even going as far as that.
Not that they were going to see anything other than cornfields and spires of mountains in the distance.
She still wouldn’t have cared about the journey over the destination, but at least the journey would have some visual panache to it.
She was beginning to suspect that Charlie liked the hypnotic quality of the long stretches of open road.
They sped forever without having to think of turning, slowing down, making any decisions.
It was open and clear for as far as they both could see.
If nothing else, that was the part of this that Lori understood.
She didn’t want to have to make decisions, either.
That was why she wanted to be in one spot, with everything she would possibly need right within her reach.
Charlie sometimes called her a hedonist, which was a label that never fit her well.
Not in her opinion, at least. She was satiated too fast to be a hedonist. Wanting everything at her fingertips didn’t necessarily mean she wanted all of it all the time.
“I wish you had picked a place that had more to look at than corn,” Lori complained. She wriggled in her seat, the pins and needles sensation of numbness starting to spread up her back and down her legs. “Maybe a coastal drive. Somewhere pretty.”
Charlie smirked for the millionth time that day. “Look who cares about the journey now.”
Lori contained herself from rolling her eyes.
It was a known fact between them that they could both be immature in their own ways.
For Lori, it was her tendency to get sulky and snotty, like a teenager who was recently told no.
When Charlie acted like he was the adult one in the relationship, Lori had a bad habit of proving him right.
“I still don’t care about the journey,” she said, crossing and uncrossing her legs in a desperate bid to get comfortable. “I’d prefer something interesting to look at, is all.”
She regretted that she had talked Charlie out of camping in the desert or white water rafting through the rambunctious rapids of Tennessee.
At the time, a road trip through the heartland with the promise of ending in California sounded like it required the least amount of effort on her part.
Now she wished she was terrified of drowning, dying of heat stroke, any other mishap that could possibly end this all in one fell stroke.
Boredom never bothered her quite the way it did when the only thing she could do was sit in one spot and stare.
“How about this for a compromise?” Charlie asked without taking his eyes off the road. “We’ll find a nice place to stay tonight. Have a full fancy dinner and take our time tomorrow morning.”
“God, tell me you mean it.”
“I do. That’s the whole point of a road trip: no schedule and no plans.”
Charlie spoke often of the childhood road trips that he had taken with his family, so Lori knew full well that that had not been the case.
Back then, they had to cover a certain amount of miles in a day, and they had a list of sites they were going to see.
She thanked her lucky stars that, whatever flaws Charlie did have, being insufferable about timing on a road trip was not one of them.
He got off of I-80, the signs along the interstate beginning to show a town name accompanied by all the little symbols that Lori had begun to look to like the north star.
A place to sleep, a place to eat, a toilet to use that didn’t have a key attached to a hunk of wood as the way to get into it.
She only hoped that Charlie’s idea of somewhere nice would match up with her own, though she was prepared to pitch a fit if it wasn’t.
She had no illusions of being any more mature than her husband by that point.
“I want to take a long hot shower, and then maybe a long hot bath, and then sleep until I’m dead,” Lori muttered as they coasted along the surface road just off the interstate and turned onto the street that would lead them into town.
“Well, you certainly get points for the melodrama.”
It wasn’t quite dark yet, the late twilight of peak summer turning the days deep and endless.
Lori usually loved how long it stayed light during the season, but the last few days were testing her.
At least, if it was getting dark by six in the evening, she could convince Charlie that it was too late to still be on the road, and she might be able to get more time in bed.
She was getting cramped and tired of sleeping in the car as Charlie sped through the blackness and raved about this being the perfect hour for driving.
They had been seeing sunsets from the interstate since this trip had started.
Seeing one blooming over a small town in a kaleidoscope of back-lit clouds brightened Lori’s sour mood.
“This entire place looks so pretty,” she said softly as they slowed down to enter the town limits. “It’s glowing.”
“See? That’s the beauty of a road trip—you never know where you’re going to end up.”
One of the largest buildings on the main street of the town was a big brick construction with an old-fashioned sign reading “Lanford Hotel.” The sign looked to Lori like something that had been put up a million years back when the place had been brand new and considered exceptionally fancy.
Clearly, it’s halcyon days were behind it, and the sign had fallen into a bit of disrepair.
There were large gaps on most of the letters where the panels had dropped off and never been fixed.
Still, Lori could see linen curtains in the windows and the well-lit lobby furnished in dark wood and leather.
“Now this is my speed,” she said as they parked in the mostly empty parking lot alongside the building and started toward the lobby.
“Yeah, plus it’s got way more character than a Motel 6.”
Lori rolled her eyes and hoped she was facing enough away from her husband that he didn’t see her do it.
The only thing that could yank Charlie off his ferocious driving schedule was the promise of character.
And local color. He was fast to use silly old idioms when they were in small towns.
Lori told him it made him seem like a weirdo, but he thought it was charming. In the end, they agreed to disagree.
The lobby was even more impressive in person.
Lori was struck by its tasteful decorating and classic design.
Whenever and whomever had built this place had a perfectly executed vision in mind, a trait Lori admired.
Even better than the wonderful look of it was the sleepy-eyed pretty boy working behind the counter.
He was reading when they walked in, his head snapping up at the sound of the bell hanging over the door.
“Welcome to the Lanford Hotel,” he said, his customer service smile slapped into place the moment he was on duty. “My name’s Mike. What can I do for you folks?”