As those who know me are all too aware, when I write, I tend to write a lot. I have yet to wrangle a novel in at under a hundred thousand words, and two out of three are twice that. But once upon a time I proved to myself I could write something small, and thought I’d share this modest handful of a story with the gang, here. -VARAN

HITCHER

“Can you smell it?”

That wasn’t her. That was him imagining. Sometimes he wasn’t sure which it was, something real his senses told him about, or something that got made up in his brain.

She hadn’t asked him, “Can you smell it?” But the smell was real. Her cunt. Her want. The car was filled with it. That’s why he didn’t roll down his window, even though he was too warm.

Sweat-sheened, her bare thighs were parted so a V of red vinyl seat showed between, up to the high hem of her thin black skirt. He looked away, back down to the first thing he’d noticed when he’d climbed out of the cloud of dust stirred up by her wheels and into her car—the panties on the floor by his feet. Orange-red like the car seats and twisted up like she’d just rolled them down her thighs and past her knees and calves and tossed them there. That cunt he smelled was bare under that thin black skirt, between those damp, parted thighs.

When he looked up her eyes were down on his crotch. When he looked down he could see the shape of his hard cock angling up under the denim plain as he could smell her sex. When he looked up again her eyes were on the road, and only one hand was on the steering wheel. The other hand was between those open thighs, disfiguring the orange-red triangle.

There was a sound, soft and wet, coming from where her hand was slowly, slightly moving.

“Can you smell it?”

Stronger now, the musk atmosphere of the car.

“Do what I’m doing.”

It was like the sole of a boot pressing down on his throat, the want and the fear he felt as he stretched his hand down between those spread thighs.

“No. Do it to yourself.”

He wanted to reach under that thin black skirt and find her soft warm flesh, the damp silk of her inner thighs, the sticky heat and wet hold of her cunt. But he undid his fly and wrapped his fist around his hard cock and watched her hand flexing between her thighs and watched her watching his hand slide up and down. Her eyes would flick ahead to the road, then back down to his hand, moving faster now.

Now his smell was in the warm, close air of the car, too, mingling with the smell of her cunt. Almost like the smell of fucking. When he’d fucked Alicia, it had smelled almost like that. And her soft, wet noises and the smack of his hand every downstroke and her moans and his exhales loud through his nose were almost like the sounds of him and Alicia, too. Him and Alicia, their bodies, their smells, their noises all pressed up and stirred together. Him and Alicia fucking. God. Oh Fuck. God.

He’d hitched half way but maybe Alicia wasn’t even there any more. She’d stopped coming on visiting days more than a year back, and for almost seven months he hadn’t had a letter. Maybe Alicia’d given up on him.

He tried to straighten up against the sudden swerve of the car, and then they were at the side of the road and she was crying and he thought then, with that jack boot on the throat feeling that he’d fucked it all up, that his brain had tricked him again. Soon there’d be a siren and angry voices and cold metal biting at his wrists.

“I miss him,” she whispered, staring out the windshield, her cheeks all wet. “I miss him.”

That was her. She’d said that. He touched the back of her neck and she leaned into him and let him hold her while she cried.