he asked the way people ask if you want a bag. i was in the back seat of a grey corolla at 1am, phone in my lap, the route still pinging, and the driver caught my eye in the mirror and said, “you a real girl or what?” not mean. curious. like he was checking the price of something.
i said no. i’ve said no to that question so many times it stopped being an answer and turned into a style. he took it like a formality, checked the road, and kept the mirror anyway.
i want to be honest about the outfit, because the outfit is part of the story. i had not been coming from anywhere and i was not going anywhere. i’d spent an hour on myself before i ever ordered a car: skirt, the black stockings, the lace bodysuit i bought in september and had been finding reasons to wear ever since, lipstick set with the good brush. i do that sometimes. i dress, and then i get in a car, and the car goes wherever, and for the whole ride i’m the girl the driver can’t stop glancing at in the mirror. it’s the cheapest luxury there is. i’ve had ten-dollar rides do more for me than men i went on three dates with.
the pickup took nine minutes. darrell on the app, 4.9 stars, a grey corolla with one of those cardboard pine trees hanging off the mirror doing its best. country radio down low. when i got in he asked if i wanted the heat up before he even asked where i was going, and when i said i was fine he turned it up anyway, on my side only, which is a thing i noticed and then kept noticing.
we did the small talk, because that’s the fare. weather, the construction on 9th, a detour he apologized for like he’d personally moved the cones. then the radio went down two notches when i crossed my legs, and he said, “sorry, big stretch of nothing out here, i keep it low in case the phone rings. it’s my kid’s ringtone.” i said oh, and asked how old, and he said old enough to be embarrassed by the tree, and i laughed, and he looked at me in the mirror while i laughed. that was the first one. the look. the one where a man checks the road and comes back anyway, like you’re the road.
the bodysuit is the thing i should tell you about. i bought it in september and it had never left my bedroom. this was its first everything — first streetlights, first cold vinyl, first man besides me to watch the lace do its work down the center of my chest. i put the lipstick on with the good brush, the one i use when i want it to survive something. i didn’t know yet what it was going to have to survive.
he clocked all of it in the mirror in about two blocks. i watched him do it. the skirt over my knees, the stockings, the mouth. his eyes went back to the road and then came back anyway.
“fuck it,” he said, mostly to himself, and reached back and aimed the vent at me. his knuckles brushed my knee doing it — one second of knuckle on stocking, nothing you could point at in daylight — and we both watched the road pretend not to see it.
he didn’t say anything for a block. then: “good,” he said, and pulled over, and i was already unbuckling my seatbelt.
the shoulder was gravel and the hazards were ticking and there were trucks doing eighty about four feet from my door, which i was aware of and did not care about. he put it in park and turned in his seat with one arm over the headrest and looked at me properly for the first time. forties, maybe. broad through the shoulders, hands that had been on a wheel for a long time. his hands were big and dark, the knuckles a little scarred, and when he reached over to take my jaw his palm covered most of it.
“my pretty little thing,” he said, like he was reading it off a label. then, thumb dragging my lip down an inch: “who dresses you like this, huh? who taught you to put all this on for strangers.”
“the mirror.”
“the mirror.” he laughed — one low note, not unkind. “well. the mirror did a good job tonight.” he looked at me another second, then something crossed his face, a small honest thing, and he said, “i got a sister who used to do her makeup in the toaster reflection, back home. no — not like that. never mind. i’m not gonna be weird about it.” and for one second he was just a man in a car apologizing for being a person, and then his thumb was back on my mouth and the man was gone again.
the contrast was the point and he knew it. he turned my face toward the dome light and kept it there, thumb along my cheekbone, and i could see the two of us in the rearview: me pale and lit orange by the sodium lamps, his hand a whole shade darker and the pressure in it completely certain.
“you’re perfect,” he said. “i only fuck girls like you.”
“i’m not a girl.”
“i know that.” flat. “that’s the whole point of girls like you. real girl pulls over for a stranger on the shoulder, that’s a whole crime scene of phone calls and consequences. you?” his thumb pressed the center of my lower lip, easy, like he was checking a seam. “this doesn’t count. and you don’t expect it to. which makes you the best thing that’s happened to me all week.”
i have never been told i don’t count in a way that made me feel chosen before. i’m still turning it over. i sat there with his thumb on my mouth, and he wasn’t lying, and the not-counting didn’t sting at all — it was more like being given a pass, like the whole ledger of what i was supposed to be just closed its eyes for a while, and i got to exist anyway, in lace, under his hand. i’ve been shaped like a girl’s secret my whole life. this was the first time a man said it like a compliment.
“front seat,” he said. not please. not sorry. i got out into the cold, one hand holding my skirt, and climbed around the hood and into the front, and he’d already pushed the seat back and reclined it a notch, and the dome light went off the second the door shut, like the car knew.
i got one knee up on the seat to get lower, cold vinyl under the stocking, and he noticed and didn’t say anything about it, which was its own answer. i unzipped his jeans. he lifted his hips off the seat to help. he was already hard, thick and heavy in my hand, and i was careful with the first touch because i wanted him to remember it. i ran my palm down the length of him twice, slow, letting him feel that i knew what i was doing and had known before i got in the car, then put my mouth on the head, tongue flat against the underside, and his breath went out of him in one long rush.
“good girl.” his hand came into my hair, not pulling yet, just settling there.
the word didn’t contradict anything in him, and that’s the thing about men like this: the girl in the sentence is me, whatever the paperwork says. i didn’t argue with him. arguing would have needed words and my mouth was going somewhere else.
i went down slow. a few inches and back, a few more, getting used to the stretch of him before i tried for anything deeper. by the third pass i had him to the back of my tongue and his grip had tightened. by the fifth i took him all the way — my nose in the hair at his base, my throat full, eyes already going wet — and held there a beat longer than was comfortable before i pulled off fast, gagged once, caught my breath with spit running down my chin onto the lace, and went back down before i’d even finished coughing. the rhythm was his now. down, hold, off, breathe, down again. he never once had to tell me twice. by the fourth round trip my jaw ached in a way that told me tomorrow was already booked and i had no intention of canceling.
the hazard light kept ticking. a truck horn went past, long and angry, and neither of us looked. the windows fogged along the bottom and he reached over and cracked his door an inch for the noise, and i heard the whole highway out there, four hundred cars a minute, and i stayed right where i was with his cock in my mouth. there’s a specific thing that happens in my chest when a man is that unbothered: it’s like someone finally stopped guarding my secret and just put it on the shelf where it belonged.
halfway through, headlights came up behind us slow and high — cruiser height — and my whole body went cold, and darrell put one hand flat on the back of my head. not pushing. just resting. like calm down and eat your dinner. the light swept the cab, caught the two of us clean, and moved on up the on-ramp. he never once looked up, and i did the math on that later: he didn’t look because there was nothing about this he was ashamed of. he’d checked the price of me and paid it, and whatever the highway thought about it was the highway’s problem.
his hips started moving under me, small thrusts up into my mouth that he wasn’t fully in control of, and his hand tightened in my hair. i flattened my tongue and worked the head on every pass back up, cheeks hollowed, the wet sound filling the car louder than the hazard tick, and he pushed up again the second he heard it.
“listen to that,” he said, low and rough. “that’s my sound now. you take it so pretty.”
“say whose mouth this is,” he said a minute later, to the windshield, casual, like ordering at a window.
“yours.”
“say it like you’re not from around here.”
“my mouth is yours, sir.” i don’t know where the sir came from. it came from the lace. it came from the not-counting.
“there she is.”
he held me down with both hands then, no more easy rhythm — real intent, using my throat the way you use a tool you’ve decided not to be careful with, and i kept my hands flat on his thighs and let him, tears at the outside corners of my eyes, spit down my chin, spit on the lace, the whole lipstick gone maybe two minutes in. he pushed deep and held once, twice, three times, and the third time he ground up into it and i made a sound that wasn’t dignified and he said “there you go” like a man watching a machine finally clear a jam.
“you’re not gonna believe this,” i said, when he let me up for air, voice already wrecked, “but this is the best date i’ve been on all year.”
“i believe it,” he said, and pushed me back down.
he came in three hard pulses, both fists in my hair, holding me down through all of it. i stayed and took it, because pulling off right then would have felt like losing something, and he hadn’t said otherwise. when he finally let go i was still swallowing, throat working through the last of it, eyes wet, chin and collar soaked through, and he looked down at me for a second like he was filing something of his own.
“you’re better than anything i was expecting,” he said. flat. a fact, the way most of what he said was a fact.
i sat up, cleaned my face with the back of my hand, licked the last of him off my lip, and looked at myself in the visor mirror: lipstick gone, mouth swollen, one strap of the bodysuit riding my neck where i hadn’t meant it to. he watched me fix it. he didn’t rush me.
then he reached for the wheel while i was still finding my lip balm, because the phone dock had chimed — his next ride, three minutes out — which is a whole review in itself. five stars is going to look different to him after tonight, i thought. i hoped so, anyway. i hope every time.
the app said four minutes to my destination, then charged me $14.20. i got out at the corner and walked the last block home in the cold with my jaw aching and the taste of him still in my mouth, hazard lights ticking in my head all the way up the stairs, stockings shot, skirt wrinkled. i took the stairs because the elevator has a mirror and i wasn’t ready to be looked at by anything else tonight. the pine tree smell stayed in my hair until i washed it. i waited four days.
he gave me five stars. i tipped.
