Idling

"You can lie to everyone else in the cab. You can't lie to yourself when you're the only one in it."

The rain found its rhythm on the roof and held it — a dense, ceaseless percussion that filled the cab and swallowed everything beyond the glass. The windows fogged in under a minute. The world outside shrank to nothing and the world inside shrank to the seat, the wheel, the smell of wet wool and eucalyptus and something underneath both — sweat, cold skin, the sour earthiness of hard work and soaked clothes.

The heater was dead with the engine and the warmth was already bleeding out through the floor and the doors and the glass. My clothes clung. Jeans heavy and dark against my thighs, shirt plastered to my chest, the fabric riding the shape of my stomach and ribs with every breath. The cold was sharp where the wet cotton pulled away from skin and sharper where it pressed back. I could feel my own body underneath the layers in a way I normally didn't — every surface, every point of contact between fabric and flesh, heightened by the cold and the damp until I was aware of myself the way you're aware of a bruise. Present. Insistent. Impossible to ignore.

The thermos was on the passenger seat where I'd put it for the drive. I reached across and unscrewed the cap. Steam rose in a thin column and the smell of Keith Proctor's over-steeped, over-sugared tea shouldered everything else in the cab aside. I poured, drank. The heat traced a line from my throat to my sternum and spread outward, meeting the cold in my limbs and losing. But it helped. Enough.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I fished it out with wet fingers, the screen smeared with moisture before I'd even unlocked it. Corey.

Sutton called. Rescheduled to Thursday. Don't bother coming back, I'm closing up. Weathers fucked. Stopping at the servo on the way home. Pepper steak.

Weather's, I thought, automatically. Then: good.

Meant the rest of this afternoon was mine. No third delivery. No reload. No reason to be anywhere. Just the truck, the rain, and a stretch of empty road that nobody else was using.

I put the phone on the dash. Took another mouthful of tea. The rain kept up its hammering — relentless, impersonal, a wall of white noise that sealed the cab tighter than any door could. Through the fogged windscreen I could see the vague shapes of the stringybarks bending in the wind, their trunks dark and slick, their branches thrashing. Nothing else. No other vehicles. No houses. No people. Just me and the storm and the lay-by and the particular privacy that comes from being the only human being inside a kilometre of weather that nobody wants to be in.

The half-joint was in my shirt pocket. I'd felt it against my chest all morning — a slight pressure, a weight that didn't belong there. I reached in and pulled it out. It was dry. Adrian had pinched the burned end cleanly and the remaining paper was intact, slightly compressed from sitting against my body, warm from my skin.

I looked at it for a moment. Held it between my thumb and forefinger the way Adrian had held his — loose, casual, the grip of habit rather than ceremony. I hadn't smoked in months. Longer. Karen didn't mind it occasionally but she minded the smell in the truck, and Thomas was at the age where he noticed things and asked questions that were harder to deflect than they used to be.

But Thomas wasn't here. Karen wasn't here. Nobody was here.

I found the lighter in the centre console — a cheap plastic Bic that had been rolling around in there since last winter, rattling against loose change and old receipts. It took three flicks to catch. The flame jumped and steadied and I brought it to the end of the joint and drew.

The smoke was smooth. Warmer than I'd expected, softer than tobacco, filling my lungs with a sweetness that sat somewhere between herbal and earthy. I held it. Felt the expansion in my chest, the pressure against ribs that were still damp and cold beneath the clinging shirt. Then I let it out in a slow stream that curled against the fogged windscreen and dispersed into the grey air of the cab.

The second drag went deeper. I felt it behind my eyes first — a loosening, a softening of the edges — and then in my shoulders, where the tension I'd been carrying all morning began to unclamp itself one muscle at a time. My jaw unclenched. I hadn't noticed it was clenched. My hands settled into my lap, heavy and warm, the calluses on my palms rough against the wet denim of my thighs.

The third drag and the rain changed. Not in reality — it was still hammering, still relentless — but in my perception of it. The sound deepened, became textured, each drop carrying its own frequency. The roof of the cab became an instrument. I could hear the variations — the heavy strikes on the flat panels, the lighter patter on the curved edges near the windscreen, the occasional sharp crack of a drop hitting the wing mirror. It was beautiful. I'd never thought that about rain before. Beautiful probably wasn't the right word. But it was the one I had.

I sat with it. Let the weed do what it was doing. My body was warming now — not from outside, the cab was still cold, but from inside. The blood moving differently. The skin prickling under the wet clothes, but not from cold anymore. From something else. From awareness. Every point where the damp fabric pressed against me had become a point of contact I could feel distinctly — chest, stomach, thighs, the inside of my forearms where I'd rolled my sleeves before loading and the wet cotton had soaked through anyway.

And then Gladys was there.

Not a thought. Not a decision to think about her. She just arrived, the way the rain had arrived — without warning, without permission, already fully present before I could do anything about it. The feel of her cheek under my palm. Cool skin, fine-boned, that faint tremor running through her jaw. The way she'd had to crane her neck to look up at me, and the expression on her face — raw, unfinished, something she hadn't meant to show anyone. Her breath against my mouth in that last half-second before I'd closed the gap. Warm. Unsteady. Catching.

And the taste of her. Wine and cold air and adrenaline, and underneath all of it something that was just skin, just mouth, just her — a taste I had no right knowing and couldn't unknow now.

My cock stirred against my thigh. Slow, heavy, the kind of arousal that doesn't arrive as a spike but as a tide — rising from somewhere deep in the pelvis, filling outward, thickening. The wet denim pressed against it and the pressure was its own provocation. I shifted in the seat and felt the fabric drag across the head and my breath caught — a short, involuntary sound that was swallowed by the rain.

I should have stopped it there. Put it away. Filed it. Driven home and had a shower and never mentioned any of it to anyone, which was what a decent man would do, which was what I'd been for years and would presumably go back to being once this day decided to end.

Instead I took another drag. Held the smoke in my lungs. Let it out. And reached down.

The belt buckle was cold and stiff with damp, and my fingers fumbled it — clumsy, thick, the weed making everything both slower and more vivid. I got it open. The button. The zip. The wet denim peeled apart and the cold air hit the strip of exposed skin above my waistband and I sucked a breath through my teeth. My hand slid beneath the elastic.

I was hard. Fully, solidly hard, the shaft hot against my cold palm, the contrast sharp enough to make my hips lift off the seat. I wrapped my fingers around myself and gripped — firm, familiar, the same way I gripped everything. Like I knew what I was holding. Like I'd done it a thousand times. Because I had.

The first stroke was slow. Testing. Feeling the drag of dry skin on damp and the particular tightness of being this aroused after a morning of being wound up and shut down and wound up again.

Gladys.

Not the version I'd been trying not to think about. The real one. The one whose body had gone still when I'd stepped close, whose breath had hitched, whose lips had been cooler than I'd expected and softer than they'd looked. I replayed it the way the weed let me — slowly, with the edges blurred and the centre sharp. My hand on her cheek. Her eyes. The tremble. My mouth finding hers. The way she'd leaned in for one second — one actual second of her weight shifting toward me — before she'd pulled back.

My hand moved, but it wasn't working. The memory kept stalling where reality had — at the withdrawal, the step back, the cold air flooding the gap she'd left. I stroked myself slowly, trying to hold the image, but it kept arriving at the same dead end. Her pulling away. The throat-clearing. The spit in the weeds. The moment folding up and dying.

I took another drag. Held it deep. Let the smoke sit in my lungs until the edges of everything softened another degree. The rain drummed. The cab fogged. And somewhere between the exhale and the next breath, the memory loosened its grip on what had actually happened and let me past the wall.

She didn't pull back.

Her mouth opened against mine. I felt it — the weed made it vivid, tactile, more real than memory had any right to be. Her lips parting, her tongue finding mine, the taste of wine deepening as the kiss deepened. Her hands came up to my chest. Not hesitant anymore. Gripping. Fingers closing on the front of my jacket and pulling, pulling me in, the same coiled energy that had been driving her around the car all morning now focused and deliberate and aimed directly at me.

My hand found its rhythm. Slow. Steady. Building.

Her body pressed against mine. I could feel the length of her through the layers — the heat of her through wet fabric, her breasts flattened against my chest, her hips finding mine. My free hand wasn't in the cab anymore, it was on the small of her back, pulling her closer, feeling the arch of her spine under my palm, the ridge of her vertebrae through the thin cotton of her shirt. She made a sound — low, somewhere between a breath and a groan — and it vibrated through her ribs and into mine.

The jacket came off. Hers first, then mine. Peeled away like something that had been in the way too long. Her shirt was damp and clinging — the same way mine was clinging now, in the cab, the wet cotton dragging across my stomach as my breathing deepened — and I watched myself pull it over her head, watched her arms rise, watched the fabric catch on her chin before she shook free. Bare shoulders. The line of her collarbone. Skin that was pale from winter and flushed at the throat from the blood rising underneath.

My hand moved faster. My breath was short now, fogging the glass in rapid bursts.

Her bra was plain. White. The kind of ordinary detail that the weed held onto and made specific, made important, made the whole thing feel less like fantasy and more like something that was actually happening in a dimension I'd stepped into through the smoke. I reached behind her and unclasped it — fumbling, the way you always fumble, the way you fumbled when you were seventeen and the way you fumble at forty-five because some things the hands never learn to do smoothly — and it fell away and her breasts were bare against my chest, warm, the nipples hard from the cold and pressing into my skin.

My jeans were open and her hand was inside them. Her fingers wrapped around me with a confidence the real Gladys hadn't shown about anything all morning, and the contrast — the nervous, brittle woman at the car and this version whose grip was sure and firm and knew exactly what she was doing — sent a jolt through my hips that made the seat creak.

Clothes came off in pieces. Layers peeled and pulled and kicked free. The fantasy had its own momentum now and I wasn't steering it, just riding it. Her skin against my skin. The full length of her body against mine, nothing between us, the cold air on exposed flesh and the heat where we pressed together. Her thigh over my hip. My hand sliding down the curve of her waist, over her hip bone, between her legs where she was warm and wet and her breath caught sharp against my neck.

I pulled her onto me. Felt her thighs grip my sides. Her weight settling. Her hand reaching between us, guiding, the tip of me pressing against her, the heat of it —

She sank down. Slowly. Her mouth open against mine, breathing into me, her body taking me in inch by inch. The tight, slick heat of her closing around me was —

My whole body locked. Abdomen, thighs, jaw clenched shut. I came so hard my vision whited out, the orgasm ripping through me in waves that started deep in my groin and radiated outward until I felt it in my scalp, my fingertips, the soles of my feet. My hand kept moving through it — slowing, easing, drawing it out as the spasms pulsed and faded and pulsed again — until the last of it passed and my grip loosened and I sat there, chest heaving, pulse thudding in my ears, the rain still hammering the roof.

I opened my eyes. The cab was fogged solid. The joint had burned down to a stub between my left-hand fingers, a thin trail of smoke curling upward from the ember. My right hand was still wrapped around myself — loosely now, the grip slack, my cock softening against my palm in slow, heavy pulses. I didn't move. Didn't want to. The aftermath sat on me like a warm weight and I let it press me into the seat, let my breathing come down in its own time, let the rain fill the silence where thought would normally be.

My hand was wet. I raised it without thinking — habit, instinct, whatever it was — and brought my fingers to my mouth. The taste was salt and musk and something faintly mineral, warm on my tongue. I licked my palm clean the way I always did when there was nothing else to hand, the way I'd done since I was fifteen and learned that some things were simpler than reaching for a tissue. It wasn't ceremony. It was just what I did. What I'd always done. My own taste, familiar as sweat, unremarkable as skin.

I held myself until I was fully soft, the last of the warmth fading, the weight of it settling into something ordinary and spent against my thigh. Then I tucked myself back in. The zip was cold. The belt buckle was colder. I did everything up without thinking — belt, button, zip. Hands moving on autopilot. Restoring order the same way I'd restore a woodpile after a collapse. Mechanical. Thorough. Don't look at the mess, just fix it.

There was still mess. On my stomach, on the hem of my shirt which had ridden up at some point. The rain had already soaked the shirt through, so the additional dampness was almost academic. I pulled the fabric down and let the wet cotton settle against my skin. It'd all come out in the wash. Everything always did.

The joint stub went out the window crack. The smoke lingered in the cab, sweet and heavy, mixing with the fog and the smell of wet wool and sex. I cracked the window another inch. The rain spat through the gap and hit my face — cold, sharp, welcome. I let it.

Keith Proctor's thermos was still wedged between my thigh and the handbrake. I poured the last of the tea and drank it. It had gone lukewarm. The old man's sweet tooth, delivered into a cab that now smelled like a teenager's bedroom and a forest floor and a mistake I was going to carry in my body for longer than the weed would last.

I sat with it. Not thinking. Not regretting. Just sitting in the fog and the noise and the aftermath, letting the rain do what it did, which was fall without caring who was underneath it or what they'd done.