The Summer We Kept Ch.04: Sue

Part Four: Sue (19)

Back in the summer of 2009 I was nineteen, and that night starts on the gravel, with a reefer unit running somewhere behind me, and with three men standing in the dark waiting to see which way I would take it.

My name is Sue. This is my side of it.

I am going to tell this one from where I am now and not from inside it. I have been back over it more than I have been back over anything, and I am not the girl who walked across that gravel.

I had said it out loud to all three of them. I had picked one. I picked the big one, the quiet one, the one I had looked at across that table for a year, and he put his can down on the step of his truck and said follow me, and I went. I have heard people talk about a girl who did a thing like that like she was out of her mind or under something. I was not out of my mind. I was nervous enough that my ears were hot and my hands were not steady, and I was excited in a way that I had never been excited in my life, and both of those things were true at once, and they were true all night.

I was not drunk and I was not ashamed and I was not being made to do anything. I walked down that gravel because I wanted to, and I stood in that lot with a beer in my hand because I wanted to be there, and the part of me that was a girl who got told when to be home stayed standing out by the road the whole time watching me do it.

There was a reason for it and I have never had to dig around for one. I was nineteen and I had a house I did not want to walk back into and a counter I stood behind and a whole life that other people had already laid out flat for me. Nobody in that house ever wanted one thing off me but quiet, and there was not a boy in that town who had looked at me past the part of me he could get. Then I came out of a diner one night and there were three men in a lot who could not keep their eyes off me, and it was the first time in my life that being looked at did not feel like being added up. I did not walk down that gravel because I was drunk. I did not walk down it because I was wild and I did not walk down it to run from one thing. I walked down it because I wanted to be wanted by men who had no reason on this earth to want me, and because for one night of my life I was the one who got to say which of them it was.

I have thought about the order of that night more than anything else in it. If I had gone to the blue one first, or the grey one first, I think the whole thing comes out different. I picked the hard one first. I did not know that then. I picked him for his arms and for a tattoo I had never read and because he was the one I thought about on my own time with the radio off, and it turned out that the man was the easiest person in that whole parking lot and the easiest one to be kind to, and he was the one who had the least idea what to do with any of it.

That is the part nobody ever asks me. They ask about the other two. Nobody asks about the flatbed.

I did not take a clock in there with me. I want that said at the front, because men have counted that night back at me since, the trucks and the hours, like they had a watch on them, and I have never once been able to tell anybody how long I was in that first truck, because the only clock I had in there was his body and the sound of that reefer out behind us and the fact that the sky was still black when I came down his steps. I am not going to put a number on the first one up here. It goes at the end of him, where it belongs.

And there was nothing in my car and nothing in my head about any of it. It is the part people do not believe, and it is the whole of who I was that year. I was nineteen and I had nothing on under that dress. Nobody hands a girl like that a plan. I did not carry one single thing with me that night to keep myself out of trouble, and there was not one minute of it, in any of those trucks, where I stopped and thought about what could happen to me. I know how that sounds. I am not dressing it up. I was lucky, and that is the whole answer. And that is the night it stopped being like that for me. After that night I was careful with my own life every day of it, the way you are careful with something you know you almost dropped. Nobody sat me down. I did it myself, because I had gotten away with something and I knew it, and knowing it is what did it.

The walk to the flatbed was short and I did not count a step of it. The dome light was not on. The day cab was dark from the outside, dark behind the glass, and I had looked at that truck a hundred nights from the diner and never once thought about what a person does in a cab that has no bunk in it. He opened the door and stood back and let me go up first. I know what he was looking at. I took my time on those steps anyway, with one hand on the grab handle and the dress coming up with my legs, and he stood down there on the gravel at the bottom of his own steps and looked up, and I heard him breathe, and that was the first thing he ever gave me in that whole year, a breath.

Then I was up, and the dome light came alive over my head when the door hit the frame, and I saw the inside of Rob's truck for the first time in my life.

I want to describe it, because everybody thinks a rig is a cave. It was not a cave. It was something like a big man's closet with a windshield on it. Two seats, driver and passenger, grey cloth worn flat and shiny at the edges, and the driver's seat had a blanket folded on it and a jacket rolled up against the door like a pillow, and a thermos sitting in the door pocket next to a paper cup that was full of coins. On the floor by the pedals there was a pair of work gloves and a rag and a coffee lid. The wheel was so big that it did not look like something you steer. It looked like something you hang on to. There were papers clipped over the dash on the passenger side in a stack, and the air brake knobs, and a little fan bolted on, and a smell that I already knew because I had smelled it on him in the diner, cold vinyl and cedar and diesel, only in there it was strong enough to be a person.

And then there were the toys.

On the dash, in the middle, in front of the windshield, there were two plastic figures. One was a cowboy with a pull string hanging off his back and a hat and a boot, and one was a spaceman in a clear plastic helmet. Somebody had put them there and nobody had taken them down, and they had been sitting in that window long enough to go grey at the edges the way plastic does, and there was dust around their feet. I looked at those two toys for a long time before I looked at the man who owned them. What I thought was this. There is a person inside this man that I have never met, and I have been carrying his coffee for a year.

He shut the door and stayed on his feet with his hand still on it, next to the passenger seat, half bent under the roof, because there is no other way for a man that size to be up in a day cab, and he did not sit down and he did not say anything. The cab was small and getting smaller. The dome light was still on and it made the windshield a mirror with a black square of lot in it, two headlights off in the dark across the road, the fence, and then nothing.

Then he said it. It came out of him like a thing he had been carrying up those steps.

"You are not wearing panties."

That is what he said, and he said it the way a man says a thing he has been thinking about for the whole walk. I looked at him. I did not give him the answer I hand a man at a table. I said it low and slow and I turned on that seat so the dress did the rest of the talking.

"Do you like it?"

I watched a grown man with forearms like fence posts go red in the face in the light of his own cab.

He said nothing. He could not find one thing.

That was the moment I understood what I had in that truck. All the way down the gravel I had been telling myself I was going into something. I was not. I was in charge of it. It took me one minute in that cab to find that out, and it was the biggest thing I learned all night, and it was bigger than anything the man had in the front of his jeans.

I sat there looking at him for a while. I want to be honest about this part. I was still nervous and I did not know what to do with my hands, and there was a minute in there where nothing happened and it went on and on and I started to think I had made the worst mistake of my life in the parking lot of a highway diner and that in about ten seconds he was going to open that door and let me out. That is the truth of it. It took forever. I have gone over that minute more than any other minute of that night.

So I did it myself.

I laid my hand flat on the front of his jeans and I felt the whole shape of him under my palm, and I want that on the record too, because he was soft when I found him. Soft and warm through the denim, and I heard him make a noise like a man who had forgotten how to breathe and I kept my hand there and did not move it. He put his head back against the door and shut his eyes and did not take my wrist and did not step away, and his chest was going up and down under his shirt like he had been running, and he let me do whatever I was going to do to him and he did not say one word about any of it.

His arm was right there at the level of my face. The inside of the arm, the part he had kept turned away from me at that table for a year. I lifted it with my own hand and looked at it.

I read it. I finally read it, after a whole year of carrying a pot around a diner and thinking about putting my tongue on it and never having that pole light close enough. It was a bird. A little bird with a forked tail, in blue that had gone soft and grey with the years, on the inside of one arm, up high where the muscle comes in. I knew what that bird was. My grandfather had one, on the forearm, and I had asked him about it when I was a girl and been told it was a swallow and that a man got one for every five thousand miles he went, and that a swallow comes back to where it started, and that if a man drowned at sea the swallow would pick him up and take him home.

I did not ask Rob about his bird. I have had years to wish I had asked him and I did not, and it is one of the two things from that cab I still want to know.

I kissed it instead. I leaned in and put my mouth on the inside of that arm and kissed it, and then I kissed up the inside of his arm, up to the shoulder, along his neck, behind his ear, and I could feel the sweat coming up on him, and I could hear the breath going in and out of the man like he was being worked. I got hold of him by the jaw with my hand and turned his face to me and kissed him full in the mouth. He did not kiss back. For a long time he did not kiss back, and I stayed there, and then something in the man gave up, and he kissed me back, and I tasted the beer we had both been drinking out there in the gravel, and I have never had a beer since that tasted like it.

I did not put my tongue on the bird that night, not then. I got my tongue on it a long time later, in a seat that I am going to remember for the rest of my life, and it nearly put that man on top of me in a way neither of us wanted.

Then I told him what I wanted.

"Take off your clothes."

He started on his belt, and I want you to know what happened then, because it is the part of the night that I laugh about now and that I did not laugh about then. He was going to take off his jeans. That was the whole of it. The belt was a fight and the jeans came off over one boot and stuck, and then he was up on his feet in a cab that has no standing room in it, bent double under the roof with one leg out of them and one boot still laced and his shoulders up against the headliner and a face on him like the truck was on fire, working the other leg out like that without going over, and I sat on the other seat and watched him do it and did not help him and am not sorry. It took a long time. It was the most human thing I had seen a man do all year.

Then I did the rest of it myself, and this is the part nobody guesses about a girl of nineteen in a truck.

He was standing there with his shirt on and his boots on and nothing on his bottom half but a pair of boxers that had gone the color of dishwater and soft as a rag, with the elastic gone out of them and a hole at the top of the leg, and I reached out and got both hands on the front of them and took them down him myself. They came down slow. He was soft in there and there was not much of him to get out of the way of, and I got a good look at the whole of it while I had it in my hands, and I am not going to dress it up. Soft, he was small. Small and pale against the size of the man and perfectly ordinary, and I remember thinking that everything about Rob was bigger than his own dick and how strange that was, and how I had spent a whole year in a diner being afraid of nothing.

And when I had that boxer in my hands I did not let go of it. I brought it up to my face and I smelled it. It smelled like him. It smelled like a man who had worked all day in the heat with his legs together, sweat in the cotton and the man under the sweat, and the cedar soap I had built a whole year out of was not anywhere in it. That was the first time I had the real smell of Rob anywhere near my face, and I had it in there on purpose, in my two hands, and I did not put it down until he made a noise at me.

He reached down and pulled the lever and the seat went back. It did not go far. It went back enough that there was room in front of a folded man on a reclined seat in a day cab, which meant there was room for me to get in front of him, and I got in front of him, and I put my hands on his knees, and I looked at him, and he looked at me. He was sitting there in his shirt and his work boots with his soft cock in his lap, and I had his boxers hanging out of my hand, and I had already seen more of that man than anybody in that diner had seen of him in a year.

"Do not be shy."

That is what I said, and I still hear it. Do not be shy. To a man that size, with a face like that, in a truck he owned, being told by a nineteen year old girl in a dress with nothing under it not to be shy, and him doing exactly what she said.

I got on my knees between his boots on that floor with the work gloves and the coffee lid and I got his cock out and took it in my hand.

He was soft. I put his cock in my mouth soft.

I want to try to explain the thing that happened next, because it is the first time in my life anything like it had happened to me. He got bigger. He got bigger in my mouth, in my hand, in front of my face, and he kept getting bigger, and there came a point where I pulled back to look at it because I did not believe what my own mouth was telling me. I had it in my hand in that cab and I had been telling myself this was a nothing-sized man. He was a car that had been sitting in a cold yard. By the time he was done he was longer than Bill and thicker than Bill, and Bill was a man who had put a streak of my blood down his own cock in a truck the morning before, and I knew what a size was now because Bill had taught me one.

I did not tell him. I did not say one word about what I was looking at, and I did not get my hand around it either. My fingers did not meet on him. That was the first thing about that man that went up in my estimation and it went up while I had him in my mouth, and I did what I always did when something was too big for me, which is to go at it anyway and take my time, because a man that size is a job, and I knew by then what I was doing with him, and I was not going to be the girl who did it badly.

I put my mouth back on his cock and went as far down as I could and he filled my mouth and my throat and I gagged on him and I had to come off it for air. I tried again. I got halfway and there was too much of him in me and I came off it again.

Then I did the thing I did on purpose. I let my teeth drag.

I drew my mouth up the whole length of him with my teeth just touching him the entire way, and that man came up off his own seat under me and made a sound like something being torn out of him, and it was the loudest noise he had given me up to that minute, and I thought I had found the biggest thing that man had in him. I had not. I was nineteen and I did not know yet that a man like that can be quiet for an hour and then make a noise at the end that puts every other sound he made that night in the shade. So I did it again. I went down on him and dragged my teeth back up him slow and got the same sound a second time, and I found the thing in that cab that worked on him and I used it. He did not tell me to stop. Nobody had ever told me yet that a girl was meant to be careful with a man, and if they had I would have ignored them. I was nineteen years old and I had the biggest man in that lot by the cock in the dark of his own truck and I liked it.

My hands were on his belly the whole time I was down there. There was nothing else to do with them, so I had them flat on him, up under his shirt on the hair of his stomach, and I could feel that man breathing and I could feel the muscle in him pull in every time I took his cock in my mouth. There was a minute in there where I forgot what I was doing and just held onto the bottom of his belly with both hands like a girl warming her hands on something. I came off him when I had to. My eyes were running and my jaw was starting to burn at the corners and I put my forehead into that hair and breathed through my nose, and he was so big in front of me that from down there I could not see anything in that cab but him.

Then I looked up at him.

What was on that face is the reason I did not stop. It was not the face he kept in a diner for a year. His head was back against the seat and his mouth was open and he was grunting up at the roof of his own truck, and the cords were standing out in that big neck, and every time I had him in my throat he made a noise like a man lifting something. I found out something about myself in that minute. It turned me on more than anything that had ever happened to me in my life to that point. I know why it did. It is that a man that size is built to be a thing you are afraid of, and I had him making that noise with his hands open on his own seat, and I did that to him. Me. I was the reason for it. Nobody had ever told me that a girl could be the reason for a thing like that in a man.

I did the rest of it down there on that floor. I licked him from the base up the whole length of him and I took his balls in my mouth and held them and breathed on them, and I want the record to have that they moved. Everything down there moved with him, the whole thing of him shifting with everything I did, and there is nothing a girl can put that up against, because there is no other thing in the world like it. And I did not touch myself. I want that said because of the lie I have heard about girls who do that, the one where she does a thing like that to get it over with. I had one hand on his belly and my mouth full of his cock and my knees hurting on a work glove, and there was not one thought left in my head about anything I wanted for myself. I was wet right up the top of my thighs and I had not put a hand on myself once, and if anybody tells you a girl cannot get that from doing that to a man, they have never done it.

I came off him and used my hand on him and I looked up at him and said the one thing I ever said to him about the size of it.

"You're so big."

That is a girl's line and I know it is and I do not care. He did not answer it. He could not. I put my mouth back on his cock.

His hands were the strangest part of that whole stretch. He did not take my head. He did not put a hand on me and push and he did not hold me down on him and he did not pull me off. He had one hand on the armrest of his own seat and the other flat on his own thigh, and a man with a mouth on him that long and a body that size does not leave his hands there by accident. He got one of them up into my hair one time. That is all. He put his fingers in my hair and moved them around like a man feeling for something in the dark, and then he took the hand back and put it on the seat again and left it there, and I have thought about that hand more than I have thought about anything else he did to me.

I want to say what he smelled like and what he tasted like, because it is part of it and nobody puts it in anything. In the diner that man smelled like cedar from the motel soap and I had built a whole idea out of it. The cedar was gone by then. What was under it was a man, sweat and skin and the inside of those jeans and something raw and sour underneath all of it where his legs came together after a day of moving steel, and I had it in my nose with my mouth full, and I stopped being a girl who had an idea about a man and became a girl who had that man in her mouth. The taste was salt first, because that is what a man is, salt, and then under the salt it went bitter, and then under the bitter there was a taste that was the man himself, and I do not have a word for that one and I have never found one. It went up into my head and stayed there.

I could have stayed down there all night. I came off him and went back on him and came off him and went back on him, and at some point I stopped counting anything and the reefer outside was the only thing in that whole lot still moving, and the man above me had gone quiet in a way that was not quiet at all, a low sound sitting in his chest that never stopped, and I knew what that sound was because Bill had made one the morning before in a different truck. So I gave it more. I put both hands flat on his thighs and took his cock as far into my throat as I could take it and stayed there until I had to come up, and I did that until his hand came off the armrest and his whole body went tight under me and he said the only words he said in that entire stretch.

"I'm going toooo..."

He was right about that. I had already known it before he said one word. His body had told me first. He got bigger. That is what a man does at the edge, and I did not have the name for it yet, because I was nineteen and I was learning everything about a man in one hour in a truck, but I felt it happen and I felt it not go back down, and the size of him on my tongue went up and stayed up, and there was a pounding in the underside of him against my tongue that had not been there a minute before. So when he told me he was going I did not have to take his word for it. I had my own answer, and it had been in my mouth before it was in his. He was telling me a thing that I had already been told, and I believed the message off his body more than I believed the message off his tongue, and the two of them said the same thing at the same time, and that is the only reason I had any idea what I was doing in the next second of that night.

It came out of him in pieces. It took him the whole word to get it out and there was no air behind it, and that was all of it, and he did not say my name. Not once. He talked to me down there the way a man talks to a stranger in the dark. I'm going toooo. There was no Sue in it and no girl in it and no nineteen year old, and I have never in my life been wanted the way that man wanted me in the second he said it, and I was not even a person to him in that second, I was just the mouth on him and the hands on his belly and the girl he was about to do it into, and I liked being that. I liked being nothing to that man for one second, more than I have liked being a whole person to men who loved me.

I came off him and sat back on my heels and gave him room to breathe. He had his head back and his eyes shut and one hand gripped on the armrest of his own seat and the other one flat on his own thigh, and his chest was going up and down hard, and I stayed down there on the floor of that truck with a work glove under my knee and let him come all the way back down off the edge while I looked at him.

What I looked at while he came back down was the thing I had just come off. It was standing straight up in front of my face with nothing holding it and it was slick the whole way up, wet from my own mouth and shining under that dome light, and it was moving. He was not moving. He was sitting still with his head back and his chest going, and the thing in front of my face was going up off his belly a little and coming back down on its own, and it did it again while I watched it. It was throbbing where I had left it. I had never in my life seen a man's body do a thing like that without the man doing anything, and it was me who had left him like that, and looking at it made me understand how close I had brought him and how much of him I was holding.

I did not put a hand on it. That was the other part of it. A man like that at the edge is a thing a girl can hold, and I held him there with nothing at all, sitting back on my heels with my hands on my own thighs and my mouth off him, and I let him understand that I could.

I said, "Not yet."

He nodded. He did not say another word to me, and I sat there on his floor and looked up at a man with his cock standing straight up in front of him and his mouth open and no idea in his head what came next, and I took my time about it.

I want to be exact about why I came off him, because it would be easy to write it down like I was only being kind to him. I was not being kind. I heard what was coming up out of him and I knew there was something I wanted more than I wanted the end of that, and it was the whole rest of the man, every part of him out of his clothes and standing in front of me in his own dome light, and I wanted that before anything else happened in that truck.

And I want to put the other half of it down, because it is the half I have never said to anybody. He was one word from the end of his own night and I took my mouth off him and left him standing in his own lap, and there was more power in that than there has been in anything I have done to a man in the twenty years since. I did not do it by accident and I did not do it a minute early. I had him at the exact second that mattered and I stopped, and I want the record to say what that did to me. That man was bigger than anybody in that parking lot and every man in that diner was a little careful around him, and I was nineteen years old, on the floor of his truck, and the one thing that man wanted in the world was in my mouth, and I was the one who decided he would not have it yet. Nobody ever handed me a thing like that. I found it in that cab the way I found everything else that night, by reaching for it, and I have never once let go of it since. That is what I was doing when I came off him. It was not kindness. I was holding the whole of him down with nothing but the thing I was not giving him.

So I told him the rest of it. I said it out loud and I said it plain, boots and socks and all of it, because there was no half of that man I was going to leave on. And the order came out of my mouth in that cab and not the other way around. I was nineteen years old, on the floor of a truck that man owned, and I was the one running that room.

He did not move. I want that part kept exactly as it was. I was up on my knees on his floor with my hands flat on my own thighs and his cock standing straight up in front of my face, and I had just told a man who could lift me with one arm to take the last of his clothes off in his own truck, and he did not move, and I did not say it a second time. I know why I did not say it again. A second time would have been me asking him for a favor. I was not going to ask that man for one thing. So I stayed where I was and let him have all the time he wanted, and there was no clock in that cab and nobody at the glass and nothing in the world but the two of us and the light, and there was not one thing in that truck that was going to come out any way except the way it came out.

Then he started in on it. There is no room in a day cab to stand up and undress in, so he sat down on that seat and went to work on his own bootlaces with his cock standing straight up in front of him and me on the floor watching him do it, and I did not help him, and I am not sorry about that either. He got the first boot off and dropped it on the floor, and then he stopped. His hands stayed on the other one and he went still, and he did not look up at me.

And I saw what it was. It was not the boots and it was not the shirt, and it was not a man of that size going shy of his own body in front of a girl of nineteen. He had been sitting in that cab letting me have whatever I wanted since the minute I came up his steps. He knew what he had just been told. I had ordered him out of the last of his clothes in his own truck and he had taken the whole of it in at once, the way I had taken in what I had when he said the panties thing, and he knew what came after the boots.

"I don't... I don't have a condom."

It came out of him low and flat and it was the same voice he said the panties thing in, a man handing over a sentence he had been carrying, and it was the second time that night that a man had told me something he had been walking around with all day, and this one was worse than the first one.

He had paperwork clipped over the dash and a pair of gloves on the floor and a whole year of coffee in a paper cup full of coins in the door, and there was not one condom anywhere in that truck, and I knew it before he told me, because I had spent that whole time in that cab looking at everything a man keeps in the one room he lives in.

That is a lot of words for that man in one minute, and I understood it while I knelt there on the floor of his truck, and I have had a long time to get it wrong and I have decided I got it right. It was not that he had forgotten. He had driven all day and he had eaten in our diner and he had set his can on the step and told me to follow him, and he had walked out there and opened a door and stood back and let me go up first, and he had been sitting in that seat giving me my way since the minute I came up his steps. He had the walk. He had the steps. He had the door. He had all of it, and he had picked this second to say it, with one boot off and the other one in his hands and me on his floor waiting on him, and I have decided since that he had been trying to say it since the bottom of those steps, and that it took him that whole time to find one sentence he could get out of his mouth.

He did not ask me anything. He did not ask me if I was sure and he did not ask me if I had anything and he did not tell me what could happen, and that man had already spent everything he had to say. He sat there on his own seat half out of his clothes and he waited for me to get up off his floor and hand him his boxers and go, and every part of that face was waiting for it.

I said, "It is all right."

I want to explain what was in that, because it was a lie and I told him. I did not say I was on anything. I was not on anything. I did not know one thing more about it than he did, and I let him believe whatever a man believes when a girl says a thing like that to him. That lie was four words long and there was no truth in it anywhere, and I am not going to make it prettier now than it was. And here is the part I have never said out loud. I had not thought about it. Not one time, in all of it. I walked into that truck with nothing in my head but wanting to, and there was not one line anywhere in me about what I would do if a man told me he had nothing to put on, and I had spent that whole time down on that floor in front of him with his cock in my mouth and there had been no careful girl anywhere in that cab. I have been told my whole life since what a careful girl I was. There was no careful girl in there. It was all wanting and no thinking ahead, and the thinking only came after, when it was done.

He got the other boot off. Then the socks, and then the shirt, and he did all of it sitting on that seat with me on the floor in front of him and not one word out of either of us, and then he got up off it as far as a man can get up in a day cab, half bent under the roof, with nothing on him at all, and he was naked in the light of that dome lamp, and I got my first look at the whole man.

He was big all over. That is the only word for it and it is the right word. Chest and belly and hair across the chest and down the middle in a line, and dirt that he had washed off the parts of himself he could reach, and the tattoo on the arm, and a spot on his shoulder where a work shirt had rubbed him all day.

I looked at the whole of him, and I want that on the record, because I had earned the look and I took it. I had never in my life been allowed to look at a man all the way down and not be caught doing it. The hands on him, the size of them, hanging at his sides with the veins standing in the backs of them from a whole day of holding a wheel. The legs under a man that big, thick at the top and still thick at the ankle, and the boots he had just stepped out of sitting on the floor by his feet. The neck, wide as my thigh. The hair on his chest going grey in the middle of it, a little, and he was not old enough for that to be all of it yet, and I remember the grey in it because it was the first thing I had ever seen on that man that said he was getting older. The belly, which was not fat, not on a man that size, a big man's belly that sat out over where his belt had been and had a line across it where the waistband had pressed him all day. And the whole of him was dirty in the creases he could not reach, the elbows and under the arms and down the line of his neck, washed everywhere a man can get to and nowhere else. I stood in that yellow light and went over all of it and did not hurry, because there was nobody at the glass and no clock in that cab and the man was standing still for me.

Down there it was dark and wiry and thick, a tangle of it, and not cut back or tidied for anybody, because nobody had been down in it to look. He did not groom himself for me and there was no part of him that had been got ready for me. He was cut. And the thing standing up out of all that hair was not the small soft one I had had in my two hands down on that floor. That had been a man sitting in the cold of his own truck. This was the other man, the one I had spent a year not letting myself think about at a table, and it was the biggest thing I had ever had in front of me, and it was still wet from me, slick the whole length of it with my own mouth, and it had not gone down one bit for the time I had left it alone while he undressed. It was shining under that dome light and standing out of the black hair at me and doing its own small moving at the end of him, and I stood there and got my first true look at what I had agreed to. He looked like something built for the work he did.

Then it happened, and I want it understood that it was not a thing I decided in my head and it was not a thing I had been carrying around with me. My knees decided it. I was already standing up before I had one thought about it.

There is nothing to stand up in inside a day cab. I got one hand on the back of his seat and one on the wheel and I came up off that floor half bent over, and the wheel was at my back before I was all the way up and the roof was at the top of my head and the dome lamp was directly over me with everything under it turned yellow. I got one knee up onto the seat outside his leg. He did not move for me and he did not help me. He sat there with his hands on his own knees and looked up at me like a man watching weather come in across a field. I got the other knee up, and then I was over him, kneeling up over a man on a reclined seat in a truck that has no bunk in it with my dress shoved up around my waist and nothing on under it, both feet still down in the footwell and the gear stick against the side of my shin, and the whole of my weight was on my knees on either side of him, and since he was as big as he was there was no sitting up straight over him, not with the roof that low, so I was leaning in over his body the whole time, bent toward his face out of pure geography.

I reached underneath myself and got his cock in my hand and lined him up where I wanted him.

That was when his hand came up and closed on my hip.

His hand was big enough that he had most of my hip in it, and it was not holding me down and it was not pulling me in, it was just there, the way a man puts his hand on a door he is not sure is locked. I stopped. I stayed up off him with his cock in my hand and my knees on either side of him and my weight on nothing at all.

"Wait..."

That was the whole of it. He had spent the other sentence down on that seat with one boot in his hands, and this was the last word that man had in him, and I do not think he knew himself what he was asking me to wait for. I did not ask him. I had one thing left to say to him before the rest of it started.

"Lie back."

I told him, and I put the flat of my hand on the middle of his chest and pushed him back into that seat. He went. His hand was still on my hip and it did not hold on. He was the biggest man in that lot and he went back under my one hand and stayed under me the way I had put him, and he did not say one more word about any of it. That was the whole of that night in one move. The words came out of me and the body went where they said.

Then I came down on him.

I came down slow, and his hand came off my hip as I did it and went back down onto his own seat beside him. I had one hand on the big wheel behind me for the weight and one hand flat on his shoulder for the rest of it, and I got the head of that man up against me and then into me, and I want to be exact about what that was.

I was wet. Understand that first, because I have heard a man say since that a girl who cannot take it easy is a girl who is not ready, and I was so wet that night it was running down the inside of my legs before I ever got on him. That had nothing to do with it. It was the size. He was too big to fuck me. Not a stretch. A thing that could not be done. I had to stop. I sat up there on him with the head of him just in me and my hand on his shoulder and I did not move at all for a while, and then I moved a little, and then I stopped again, and I worked him into me the way a girl works a splinter out, a little at a time, and there was pain in it and I did it anyway. And here is what I want on the record, because of what it says about me. I did not think about stopping. Not for one second. I thought about getting it. So I sat there with almost none of him in me and my mouth open and my thighs shaking, deciding whether I was making the wrong decision in a truck in a parking lot at nineteen years old, and I have the answer to that now and I will put it here. I decided to do it and I have never once regretted one minute of it, and that is not the same thing as saying it was a good decision. It was a reckless thing to do and I did it and I am glad. Both of those are true and they can sit here together on the page.

And while I sat up there with my thighs shaking and my hand on his shoulder and my jaw set, I felt the man under me hold his breath. He did not move and he did not say anything and then he said the smallest thing I have ever heard a man say.

"Hope it fits."

It barely got to me. He said it into the top of my head at the volume of a man talking to himself, and for a second I was not sure I had heard it at all, and then I decided I had. I did not answer it. Neither of us said one word after it. I do not think he knew he had said it out loud, and I have decided since that it was the only prayer that man ever said in his life and I was the whole congregation, and I kept working him in.

Then I got all the way down on him and I started to move.

I started slow, and I did not start slow to be kind. I started slow because I could not do anything else and because I wanted all of it in me before I did anything with it. I got the whole of him and I sat there and felt it, and then I went faster, and then I was grinding down onto him with my whole body and bouncing up off his lap and taking him again, and there is no describing the amount of a man like that from up there. I could feel him in the middle of me and I could feel him in the back of my ribs and there was a place he was pressing that I did not have a name for. The wheel was behind me and I used it, I worked myself back onto it and came down off it again, and I did that over and over until the sweat was running off my chin onto his chest.

I came like that. It came up on me and I went with it and I did not stop when it was over. I did not even slow down. I have not been that woman before or since. I got my hands on his face and I held on to it and I fucked down onto him with everything I had and I was making a noise I have never made in my life, loud, all the way up, and the wheel was going back and forth behind me against the door and the whole truck was rocking on its springs, and up on the dash the two of them went over on their faces, the cowboy and the spaceman both, and I did not see it happen, I found them that way after and I knew what had done it, and I was not a nineteen year old waitress from a town with one stoplight, I was something with a body and a mouth on it that wanted the whole of a big man and would not stop taking him.

I leaned down over him and kissed him. He did not see it coming and his mouth was open under mine and the jaw behind it was still tight from the holding back, and I kissed him, and he took it. He did not do it back at me the way a man does with a woman up on him. He let me have his mouth and he did not take one thing off me for it, and both his hands stayed down where they had been. I had his face in my two hands and the whole of him up inside me and the biggest man in that lot did not put one hand on me.

I had hold of his face for a while and then I let go of it and got my hands on his shoulders and his chest and I fucked him slower again, and it was in that stretch that I got a good slow feel of the man I had wanted for a year. The hair on his chest under both my palms and the sweat standing in it. His shoulders wide enough that I could not get my arms around one of them. My thighs were on the outside of his hips and they were stretched wide as they would go, and every time I came down onto him my ass came up off his lap and hit it again, and the sound of it was loud in that little cab and I could hear how wet I was and how wet he was, both of us sweating into each other until he was slick all down his front where I had been sitting on him and I was slick all up my dress, and the wiry hair of him was under me the whole time, wet with the both of us and rough against the inside of my thighs every time I came down onto him.

What I was doing up on that man was not only the fucking, and I have had the rest of my life to turn it over, and this is what it was. I had come out of a house where a man decided every thing there was to decide, and I had come off a whole year of carrying a pot to a man who never once raised his head, and here I was up on the biggest one of them with my hand on the wheel behind me and the whole of him inside me and I was the one deciding every bit of it, when to take more of him and when to sit still. Not one man in that parking lot was going to hand me a thing I had not asked him for. I was nineteen years old and I had never had an hour of my own life that was mine the way that one was, and that is the reason I came down onto him the way I did. Not because I was hot for it, though I was that too, and I am not going to sit here and pretend I was not.

And I looked at him while I did it. I made myself look at him the whole time.

His face was red. That man's whole face had gone dark red across the cheeks and down into his neck and there was sweat standing on his forehead and his mouth was open and he was barely getting any air at all in there. His hands were still on his own seat. He was making grunts and he was making noises low in his chest and none of them were words and I do not remember one word out of him in that whole ride. And it did something to me to see him like that, to see the biggest man I had ever been near with his face gone red and his mouth open and nothing in his hands, letting me use him, and I came again on him, harder than before, and I felt it come out of me while I was still going down on him and I felt how slick he was getting from me, that his cock was coated in my own juice every stroke and I could hear it.

Then I caught his face in my hand and held it and made him look at me, and I looked at him and I understood something in that minute. He was holding back. There was a big man under me with his jaw locked and his eyes on me and his hips not moving one inch and he was holding all of it in, waiting to be told, waiting on me with my hand on his face and my knees on either side of him, and I did not tell him.

He told me.

"I'm gonna bust."

It came out of him torn.

I knew it before he said it, the same way I had known the other one. I had his cock all the way in me and I felt his body tell me the same thing my mouth had felt in that cab an hour earlier. He got bigger. He got thicker in the middle of me than he had been all night, a swell of him that came up inside me and did not go back down, and I felt it and I knew what it was, and it was in me before it was in his mouth. He had been holding all of it back with his jaw and his hips and everything he had, and I had my hand on his face and I could feel it in his jaw at the same time I could feel it in me, and the whole of that man was saying the one thing and he had not said it yet. So when he told me I was not surprised. I want that emphasized, because it is the second time that night that his own body told me and his words came second. He was about to bust and I knew it in my ribs before the sound got out of him, and I did not need one word out of that man all night. I had left him at the edge once already with my mouth and he was at the edge again inside me, and both times I was the one who knew first and the one who decided what happened next.

I came off him. I want the record to say how, because it was not quick and it was not clean. I had to lift one knee and get my foot down into the footwell and put my hand on the wheel and come up off him with my thighs shaking and my own slick running down the inside of them, and I felt him come out of me and I felt the room where his cock had been go empty, and both of those things at once, and I had to stand in that cab bent over under the roof with my hand on the roof liner to keep myself up. And I did it the same way I had done everything else that night, which is slow, and by myself, with a man sitting under me who could not have moved if his truck had gone up in flames. I had his cock out of me and I looked at him. He was so far along his whole body was tight, and he was panting, and I had his cock in my hand and I could feel it moving under the skin, and I made him wait.

I made him wait while I decided. That is the part he never knew about.

I stood there in that cab over a man who could not breathe, looking at him, and I decided to do the thing I had not decided one time in my life before that minute.

I put my hand on the seat back and I got the dress off over my head and let it drop.

I was naked in front of him. That is the first time that man saw the whole of me, standing up in the middle of his own cab with the dome light over my head and my own wet shining on my legs, and I watched his face, and it is the only time in that entire night that the man in that truck looked at me like something he could lose. Everything before that had been a man being careful. He looked at me and his mouth came open and something went across his face that I did not have a name for at nineteen and have never had since, and it was not the face of a man about to get off, it was the face of a man seeing a thing he was not going to keep.

"Get up."

I told him, and he got up off it and put himself back against the door of his own truck with his hand on it, and I took his seat. It was warm where he had been sitting and wet where he had been sweating, and when my back came down on it the whole thing was slick from him and I felt it all down my spine and my shoulder blades, and it was so warm and so wet that I never wanted to get up off it.

Then there was a big man over me. He got his hands on the seat back on either side of my head and one knee down on the floor, and there we were, a man that size and a girl that size in the one room he lived in with nowhere for either of us to go. He was careful. That is the only word for the way he got into me and it is the right one. He put one hand flat on top of my head and held my head against the seat, the way a man braces something he is afraid of hurting, and my face was covered by his chest and I could not see past him at all, and I could hear his heart beating in the middle of him right up against my ear, and there was nothing in the whole world at that minute but that big chest and the beat in it.

He put it in me slow, and then slower, and then he stopped trying to get the rest of his cock in me, and the man was shaking with the effort of keeping it soft and careful, and I could feel it in my own belly, and I could not see his face because his chest was all that was over me. I did not want careful.

"Harder."

That is what I said, and he did what I said, because he had done what I said since the door shut. It was still careful. He went harder and it was still the most careful thing that had ever been done to me, and I got a hand up onto his back and I pulled at him.

Then I got my legs up around him. That is the position I wanted in the second I wanted it and it is the position I got, and there is no way to be under a man that size and not be opened up by it. My legs went around the outside of him and they would not meet behind his back, because there was too much of him for that, and I felt the top of my thighs hauling apart like something being pulled, and it hurt, and I did not care about it one bit. I know why I liked that. It is because I could feel how much of him there was every way I was touching him, and because a girl does not get to feel that about a man unless the man is enormous and she has her legs open, and I had both.

My hands were on him the whole time he was over me. I want to try to get that down in the right order, because it is the second time in the night that I did it and it mattered more this time. I had both hands on his arms at first, right up high on the biceps, holding on to the size of them, hanging on to that man while he fucked me. Then I moved them onto his chest. I got my hands in the hair on his chest and I felt it under my palms and I moved them around. Then I went down him with my hands until I found the place on his chest where the muscle is on a man, and I rubbed it with my thumbs, and the man over me made a sound that was not one of the sounds he had made all night. It was a high sound. It is the only high noise I ever heard that man make. It came out of the top of him and it went straight through me, and I did it again because of what it did to him, and this time I did not use my hands.

I turned my face into his chest and I licked it. Right on the place his nipple is, I put my tongue on it flat and slow and I did it on purpose, and that is when the man screamed. It was not a big loud scream, but it was a scream, the first sound that man had let out of himself all night that was not grunting, and I put my teeth on it. Not hard. A little. Enough. And the whole enormous body over me came off its balance.

He went sideways. There is no other way to say it. That man's arm came off the seat back and one knee came off the floor and all of a sudden there was the entire weight of the biggest person I have ever been under coming down on the wrong side of me, and I thought in that half second that I was going to be crushed by a naked man in his own truck, and then he caught himself with one hand and one knee and stopped himself a foot above my face, and there was that red face over me with his eyes wide open and his breath going like a horse.

I laughed. I could not help it. I lay under that man with my hair all over the seat and my legs open and his whole body shaking over me and I laughed up into his face, It was the only time I laughed in that cab, and it came out of me because I was happy. He was not laughing. That man was trying to get his air back and hold up his own weight with one arm and he had a look on his face like he had just found out something he did not want to know about himself.

He got his wind back. And then he asked me. The biggest man I have ever been near, one hand on the seat back over my head and the other braced on the seat beside my shoulder and his whole weight on one knee on the floor, and he asked me with his voice still gone if he could keep on going.

So I told him he could.

And he came back down onto me, and I got hold of the inside of his arm with my hand and pulled it in across my face, because where I was under him his chest was over my face and the inside of that arm was the only other thing in the world I could reach. I got the bird right against my mouth. Then I did it, under him, on my back, with no air.

I snaked my tongue out onto the swallow tattoo.

I put my tongue on that bird and went up the inside of his arm with it, slow, all the way up the muscle, and I did it because it was the two of us in a truck with nobody in the world watching and it was my own time. And past the bird, up in the top of that arm, there was the hair that grows under a man's arm, and I got the tip of my tongue up as far as the edge of that hair, and that is as far as I got.

That is when he lost his balance again. The arm came out of my hand and the whole man came down and caught himself again on the seat back, his arm shaking over my head, and I heard the air come out of him and a noise in his throat that he cut off, and I did not put my tongue up in there. I wanted to. He had almost gone down on me before and I did not, and the only reason I stopped was that a man nearly fell on me.

He got himself back up over me and he went back into me, and I put my face back into his chest and I opened my mouth on the bird on the inside of his arm and I bit it.

A little. Controlled. Just enough that I felt the muscle under my teeth jump, the way a horse's skin jumps, and I felt the whole man buckle over me, and it was the same sound he made when I had my teeth on his cock, and I held on with my teeth and did not let him go.

And he did not stop. Everything in that night up to that point had been a man stopping when he was told. He did what I did not expect. He kept going. He fucked me right through it, through the bite on his own arm, harder than anything he had done to me all night, and I ended up with my hands flat on his chest and my legs hooked around his back and my mouth open on his skin and no idea what was coming.

He came without telling me. There was no announcement in that cab. One minute the man over me was going and the next minute every muscle in the biggest body I have ever been under locked up at the same time and he made a noise that I am going to have to write down badly, because there is no clean way to put it in a book. It started low and it came up through him and it came out of him in pieces, a growl that went on and broke and started again in the middle, and it went on long enough that I stopped being able to hear the reefer outside and could only hear him, and I have heard men make noise since then. I have never heard one make that one. It was the loudest noise he made all night, and it was the loudest noise any man has ever made in front of me, and I want that written down right here, after the part with my teeth on him, because that one was loud and it was not this. The man who had said so few words to me in a whole year and had kept his voice down through everything we did before that let all of it go at once inside me, and I had my face against the inside of his arm when he did it, and it came through his chest and through the seat under me and into my own ribs. If there was one sound in that parking lot that night it was that one, and it is the sound I hear when I remember him.

He came inside me. I felt all of it. His whole weight came down on me and stayed and I had it all, the sweat and the breath going past my ear, and the thickest part of him got thicker inside me than it had been all night, and I felt it and I felt every pulse of it go up inside me where he was, and I took every one of them, and there was more of it than there was room for, and I felt it come back down around him and run out of me along the inside of my thigh, and I held him by the back of the head and put my mouth on his neck and did not move under him.

And that is where the smell comes in, and it is the smell of the end of it and not the smell of the front. It was him. His neck under my mouth was salt and hot skin and the soap long gone and the man underneath all of it, the real one, the one he kept in that truck and did not take into a diner in the morning. It was both of us, the two of us and the whole of what we had just done, sweat and slick and my own juice all over his front and the two of us breathing it back up off the seat. And it was the truck. Hot vinyl and diesel and the cold air coming in off the gravel through the vent and the two plastic toys and the paperwork and the coins in the cup in the door. The three of those things together in that little cab is the whole of the night I am writing, and I have paid a lot of money in my life for things that smelled worse than that.

He stayed on me. I do not know how long. Long enough for his breath to come back down out of where it was, long enough for the heart in his chest to stop hammering against my ear, long enough for the two of us to go quiet in there with the dome light on and nothing in the world moving except the reefer out in the lot. He did not lift off me and he did not say anything. He stayed down on me with his face in the side of my neck and his whole weight on my body, and there was so much of him on me that my breathing had to happen around him, and I have never been held like that in my life.

And then something happened that I did not expect. The man got heavier. I thought he was relaxing at first and then I understood that he was going, his breath coming even into my hair, and the whole big weight of him eased down on me and stayed and his hand on the seat back went loose, and the biggest man in that parking lot fell asleep on top of me with his cock still in me in the cab of his own truck.

I let him. There was nobody there to see it and there was nothing in the world for me to do, and I did not move and I did not say his name and I did not try to put him off. He was crushing me. I could get about half of each breath and I laid there and took the half breaths and let him stay, and I felt the whole front of a big man against the whole front of me and his thigh heavy on my middle, and there was sweat drying on his skin and I could smell him along the side of my face and it was the best thing I had ever smelled, and I did not want him off me. I have never wanted a man to stay on me before or since the way I wanted that one to keep sleeping, and I lay there in the yellow light under a man who had his whole weight on me and ran my palm up and down the top of his arm where the bird was, and I did not wake him.

I do not know how long he slept. It was long enough that my arm went asleep and long enough that the sweat went cold on both of us, and then he came up off me on his own elbows, slow, like a man coming up out of water, and he got himself up and out of me and sat back onto the other seat, and he sat there in the dark of that cab with his elbows on his knees and looked at the wheel of his own truck.

Then he reached under the seat and came up with a little white pack of wet wipes, the kind a person carries in a truck, and he handed them to me without a word. I had been in that cab the better part of an hour and I had looked at everything in it, and I had not seen that pack.

I am going to describe what was on those wipes, because it is the last piece of that first truck.

It was pink. I got one wipe off that pack and put it between my legs and it came away with a pink mess on it, and I looked at it because I did not understand it for a second, and then I understood it. There was his come in it, and there was me, and there was blood in it. Specks of it. I had been bleeding since the morning before, in a different truck on a dirt road, and I had been sore since that same morning on a dirt road, and I had just had the thickest man of my life in a truck cab and there was a little of it left in me to give and it had come out with everything else.

He was cleaning himself off on the other seat with the last of those wipes and he looked down at himself. Then he looked again. Then he looked at the wipe and then he looked at me, and then he asked it.

"Were you a virgin?"

I do not know what he saw. He saw a stain on a wipe and a girl of nineteen with her dress in her hands who had told him what to do from the minute the door shut and had a mouth on her like she had been doing this for years, and I had a whole lie in my pocket and about one second to decide what I was going to be in that man's life.

"Yes."

I said it quiet, and I let my eyes go wet, and I put my hand on his leg. And then I gave him the rest of it.

"I wanted it to be over. It's been over for me for a long time," I said. "I wanted to do it with somebody I picked. And I picked you."

That is the sentence I gave him. It was a lie I told with the truest words I had. Every one of those words was true. The same thing was true of me the morning before, in a different truck on a dirt road, with a man whose name I am not going to say here. I just moved them. I took the realest thing I had ever said about myself and what I wanted and I handed it to a man who had not earned one word of it because I wanted him to have it, and I said it in his cab with his come coming back out of me onto a wipe.

I do not know what he thought I was telling him. I think he thought I had given him something. He did not know that the girl sitting on the other seat of his truck had said those same words to a man the morning before and gone through with them and had blood on a truck bed and a puddle of her own come to show for it. He thought he was the first man I picked. He was the second man I picked that night.

He put his hand over his own mouth. He sat in the other seat of his own truck, a grown man with sweat on his belly, and he put his big hand over his mouth with his eyes open and wet and looked at me like I had come down out of the sky.

Then he smiled.

That smile is the thing I remember out of that whole truck. It was the same smile I had seen once in a year, over a slice of pie I put in front of him for nothing because it was going in the bin anyway, and I had carried that small smile around for a year thinking about it, and here it was again and I was the reason for it and it hurt my chest. I have been given things by men since then. Nothing has ever felt like that man's smile in that cab.

He did not say thank you. That is the thing I have come back to a hundred times, because there is a thing men say at the end of a night like that. They say thank you, or they say something about what it was, or they say they will see you, and a man who has been given a night like that by a girl like me says one of those things and then he is gone out of your life and you never hear it again. He said none of them. He only sat there with his hand on his mouth and his eyes wet and smiled at me, and I have decided since that the smile was the whole of what that man had, that a man who does not say thank you is not a man who is not grateful. He was grateful. He was more grateful than any man has ever been to me in my life, and the only way he had to say it was to sit in the dark of his own truck and smile at a girl with his come on her hand, and I would take that over a thank you from anybody.

He sat forward and opened the pack and handed me another wipe, and I cleaned myself up while he pulled his clothes back on in that cramped little box, and I got my own dress back on over my head while he did it, and the two of us worked around each other in there like people who had done this before.

My eye caught the paper cup in the door pocket, the one full of coins. He stacked his coins by his plate every night he ate with us and left whatever was in the stack on the table and it was never less than a dollar over, and that cup was a year of that, and it was sitting in the door pocket of a truck with two toys on the dash and a bed he did not have. I looked at it for a while. I did not take one cent of it and there was not one minute in that truck when anybody offered me anything, and that is for people who think they know what a girl like me was doing out there.

Then I did the thing I came for and had never once said out loud to my own self, and I leaned over the dash and I stood the cowboy back up on his feet in front of the windshield. He was flat on his face. I picked him up and set him back against the glass where he had been, and I got him standing the way a person stands, and I left the spaceman where he had fallen because I did not want to be the girl who fixed everything.

Rob watched me do it. He watched me do the whole thing with his shirt half on, and I saw him understand what I had done, and I saw that he was not going to say one word about that either.

I gave him one last kiss, right on the mouth, and I did not say anything to him because there was nothing to say that was not a lie or a goodbye, and I got my hand on the door handle and pushed, and the dome light came on again and lit the whole inside of that cab up like a room, and the lot came back in through the door, cold and black with that reefer going somewhere behind it.

I climbed down on my own. I did not need him to help me and I did not want him standing over me on those steps, and I got down onto the gravel and my legs were not steady and I stood there anyway. I was leaking out of myself into a dress with nothing under it, and my jaw hurt, and my knees hurt, and I could feel the wet in the back of my legs, and I am not going to pretend any of that was not true.

I did not look back at him. I never looked back at that truck once that night and I am not going to start now, and I still have no idea how long he sat in there in the dark before he turned his key.

I stood on the gravel and got my breath. To my left the blue one sat dark behind its curtain with the reefer humming, and at the end of the line there was the grey truck with one yellow light on in the back window and the curtain pulled shut behind it, the same little square of light I had looked at from across the highway all night, and there was not one other light on in that whole parking lot.

An hour with him, maybe more. Over an hour for the first one, and my legs still shaking under me, and two trucks left.

One thing belongs to the end of that first truck and not to the middle of it. I was scared in there. I was scared from the second the door shut to the second I had my hand on it again, and I did not know it while it was happening, because I was busy, and I have had people tell me since that a girl who is afraid does not do a thing like that, and all I can say to them is that they have never been inside it. And when I stood on that gravel with my legs going and my own come and his coming out of me and the sky still black over the lot, what I felt was not scared. I have never said this out loud to one person in twenty years. What I felt was grateful. Grateful that it had been him, grateful that I had gone and done it and it was done, and grateful that the first one of the three had turned out to be the easiest man in that whole parking lot and had been kind to me in a way I did not have a word for yet.

I tell the second one from the same place, with the years on me, and there is more of it I understand now than I did in the hour I had him.

I walked toward the hum.

Michael was already out there.

Same spot as before, off the nose of the blue truck, like he had never gone anywhere. He had stood in that gravel through every sound that flatbed made, the whole hour of it, and there is no man in that lot who does not know what that sound is. Beer in one hand, cigarette in the other.

He watched me come and there was no hurry in it at all. When I was a few steps out he tipped the last of the beer down his throat in one long swallow and threw the can off into the dark without looking at it, and then he took one big pull on the cigarette and let it back out slow, and the smoke came off his face and hid it.

I kept walking.

His hand came out when I came past him and closed around my wrist above the bone. Not a grab for show. The kind of hold a man takes on a thing he does not intend to lose.

I did not fight it. My feet had to hurry. He was already moving, hauling me across and off my own line, and my step doubled by itself to keep up under me, and the gravel came up at me fast in the dark and the blue truck got big.

I looked back one time, while I was still on my feet. The light at the end of the fence. Dale, still up, still waiting on me.

Then the blue truck filled the whole front of the world and the light was behind me and I could not see it anymore.

He stopped at the door and looked down at me, and something went out of him. I felt it go before I understood it. He had found it in my face. He knew what I was thinking, and he liked it, and the corner of his mouth came up slow.

"You scared?" he said. "I thought this is what you wanted." Then he put his hand flat on the door up over my head and leaned down into my face. "I am going to show you what you are asking for."

I had nothing in me. Not one word. I could not get enough breath to say one if I had found it. I understood the hand on my wrist then, what it cost and what it meant, and I understood that I had walked up to him wearing that face and that he meant to make me keep wearing it. I kept one thing in my own head, where it belonged, and it was that I had one more to see that night and it was not him, and that I had not come down off that flatbed to end up against this truck.

He opened the door and stood aside.

I stood at the step a second before I went up. There was no reason to stand there. I did it anyway. I have stood on that step a hundred times since.

I went up. I went up into it because I had decided to, and not because he had my arm.

The door shut and the hum came down over everything. Not loud. Under everything, like the sound of my own blood. The reefer on the trailer, running its cycle the way it ran all night with the engine off. I worked out, standing there, that the hum would eat any sound I made in that truck. I was right about it.

I smelled him before I could see much. Cigarette first, off his hands and his shirt. Beer under that. Then the man under both, sweat and diesel and the truck itself.

He pulled the shirt over his head one-handed and dropped it.

Heavy. The kind of heavy that sits on a man and stays, and it had gone wide on him, barrel chested and stocky and thick through the shoulders and the arms, still strong under it, with a layer over the muscle. His face was red the way it got by that hour, up over the cheeks. A bald head, shaved down to the skin. A beard gone black and grey and trimmed to a point. A mat of hair across the chest and down the arms. Down lower the hair stopped, shaved off clean across the top, the way some men keep it. The bunk light was off. What light there was came in over the dash and through the seams of the curtain, and it was enough to see by.

He sat on the edge of the bunk and started the speech.

It was the same speech. The one from the fence. A girl like me out in a lot at that hour, in a work dress, walking down to three men who were not her friends, and every word of it warm and slow and reasonable, the way he said anything, patient, like there was all the night in the world to say it in. I knew it before he got there. I could have said it along with him. And the why of me was never in his speech. It was them. They had come through that town for a year and I had carried their plates the whole time and knew all three of them by truck and by order and by tip, and I had wanted all three of them and had not let myself know it. I wanted the big one's look and the talker's face going homesick in the middle of talking about his wife, and the old one had called me sweetheart for a year and never once put a hand on me, and that was the whole of it and I do not need a better reason. And I knew why he had it out in here, in a truck, with his shirt off, and that knowing sat in my chest like a coin I had swallowed. This was what I got for the laugh. For "Not you." He was telling me what I was with his clothes coming off, and it was the same speech as the fence and it did not mean one same thing.

Then he reached out and took a fist of my hair.

Not hard. A handful up high, and he turned me by it and put me where he wanted me. Then he had himself in the other hand and brought my face down to it.

"You take it," he said. "Open up."

"Yes," I said. Small. I heard myself do it.

He was not built like Rob. Not near. But he knew what to do with it, and he put his cock in my mouth slow and deep and steady until it reached the back of my throat, and then he kept going there, and I gagged on it and choked and my eyes ran, and he did not stop.

"Go on," he said. "Take it down, just like that, and do not you use your teeth. What a whore you are."

He held me by the hair and went deeper, and I opened wider and got my tongue down and did it the way he said, because I could not do anything else, and because some part of me wanted to show him I could.

Then he pulled back and started in on me slow. All the way in and all the way out, and his other hand came down on the back of my head and closed on it and stayed closed, and there was no hurry in any of it. That was the part I had no way to be ready for. There was no air in it and no rest in it, and what I got I got through my nose in little pieces between the times he was in me, and he was not going to let me up off it any sooner than he wanted to. He was pumping into my face and there was not one thing I could do about it, and what air was in me was going thin in my chest. Every time he got to the back of my throat I gagged on him and moaned around him, and it was not a thing I was doing, it was a thing my throat did, and he heard it, because he did it again.

"Fuck, your mouth feels good, the whore that you are," he said.

Then he went faster. It was not slow and it was not careful anymore and he had both hands on my head and he was using it, and it was his to use, and I could not keep up with any of it and I did not have to, because he was doing the whole of it himself. He was grunting and panting over me and his breath went wrong, and the big legs under my hands went tight, and then I felt it. He swelled in my mouth. He went thick on my tongue in a way he had not a minute before, and it did not go back down, and I knew what that meant and I had no idea in the world what to do about it.

The tears were running off me and it was not the pain and I was not asking him to stop, and I got my eyes up the whole length of him to his face. It was red the way it got by that hour, and gone darker than that, and his eyes were rolled back so it was all white and the blue under the lids.

"Take that, slut," he said. "Take my cum, and do not spit it out."

And then the growl came up out of that big chest with no word in it, and my mouth was full of it. It was more than I had any idea a man had in him, and it did not stop where I thought it would, and his hand stayed closed on the back of my head the whole way through it.

Then he finished. He did not pull out to do it, and he had told me what he wanted with it and he told me again while it was going. It was hot and it was salt and it was skin and beer and the cigarette under all of it, and it was him. I did the thing he told me and I did no more than that, because there is a second thing a girl can do with a mouthful like that, and he had not said that one, and I was not going to ask him. The taste of that man was in my mouth the rest of that night, and I have never been able to put it down since.

My throat was slick the whole way down after it, his come and my own spit gone together into one thing in there, and at the back of it, where he had been hitting it, there was a raw place, a soreness I could feel even with my mouth still full of him. I stayed down there on the floor of that truck and held the two of them at once, the slick of what he had put in my throat and the raw of how it got there.

Then he pulled me off it and stood me up and took the dress.

My work dress, up over my head, and my shoes off, one and then the other, and I stood in the dark in front of that big red-handed man with nothing on and the hum going under all of it. He looked me over top to bottom, slow, unhurried, the way he did everything.

"I think you left your underwear at Rob's," he said.

I did not correct him. It was not true, I had just not put them back on, but I was not going to open my mouth about Rob in that truck or about anything else, so I stood there and let him have it.

He laid me down on the bunk.

The mattress was about three feet by six and a half, a thing that filled the space wall to wall. He could not stand straight in there and neither could I and there was no room to swing a hand. He came down over me with the ceiling a foot off his back.

He put his hand on my breast, small and heavy in his palm, and worked the nipple up with his thumb and then bent his head and bit it, a real bite, teeth, enough to make me gasp, and then he did it on the other one.

He kissed down my belly and stopped low, and then he sat back on his heels and put his hands on the inside of my knees, and pushed my legs apart, and looked at what he had in front of him for a long time without one word.

"Well now," he said. "Would you look at that." He put two fingers on me and pulled me open a little and looked right down in it, the way a man looks at a motor he already knows the sound of. "Pink as a peach, and not one hair on her."

I did not tell him it was not for him. I had kept myself that way since before any man, for myself, the way I kept my nails and my uniform, and no one had ever asked me about it until him. So I let him have it, the same way I had let him have the other thing, and I lay there and let him take my being quiet for a yes.

Then he ran one finger up the middle of me, slow, all the way up, and found the top of it, and he did not stroke it the way a man strokes something he is trying to give you. He worked it, quick and light and even, the way you flick a switch to see if it still works. I came up off that bunk. The sound that came out of me was not a word and it was not a name and it was not a thing I had ever heard out of my own mouth before, and I have never found the word for it since. It was an animal noise, and it was out of me before I had any say in it, and my hand came down and closed on his wrist, and I did not push him off and I did not pull him in.

He liked that. I could feel the weight of him change where he knelt, and I understood that he had gone looking for that sound and had got it, and that the sound was the whole reason he had put his hand there. Then he took his hand off me and put his mouth where his fingers had been, and there was not one part of that deciding that had been mine.

He was good at it. That was the thing I did not expect.

Nobody had ever put his mouth on me before, so the only one I had to put him against was Bill. Bill did it to Megan in the back of that truck with his mouth going and his fingers working away in her, and I was at the front of it listening to her try not to make a sound, and Megan gave me the rest of it after, a little on the phone and a little in the car. Every way I had it told, the mouth came with a hand in it. Michael had already had his hands on me, and he took them off and put his mouth on my hole and used nothing with it. No fingers, no thumb, nothing working inside me while he did that, and there was a dance to the whole of it, and he knew how to lead it, and he did not need his hands on me at all. I lay there under it and thought, this is what it is supposed to be like, and he is better at it than Bill is, and Bill was all I had to put him against.

He went slow and patient the way he talked, not rushing it, his tongue flat and then circling and then inside me, and his mouth closing on me until I forgot the roof and the hum and the man and there was only the one thing happening. I wondered, floating, whether he could taste Rob in me. Whether a man could tell. I decided I did not care, and he did not say anything about it, did not lift his head, did not stop, just kept going until I came, and my heels drummed once on the mattress with it.

Then he sat up and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

"Such a whore," he said. He did not sound angry. He said it the same way he had said the speech.

I lay there getting my breath and looking at the wall of the sleeper, and in the light from the curtain I could see what was taped up over the bunk. A photograph. A woman and three children out in front of a house, squinting into the sun. The girls were near grown, both of them, good-looking in a way that made you look twice, and the boy was younger, maybe thirteen, dark-haired, with his father's shoulders already coming in on him. I looked at them and thought what I had thought at the counter in town, that Michael must have been handsome once, before the age got him and the beer got him, and that the handsome was in the children now, all three of them, waiting around in a frame above a truck bunk for a man to come home. The bottom corner of it had worked off the tape and stood out from the wall a little. I got one finger under it and turned it, and the back was written on in pencil in a woman's hand. One word. Erick. That is the boy, I thought, from the shoulders. I let the corner go back the way it was and I never said one word to him about it.

He reached into the dark at the head of the bunk and came back with a small box, and the corner of it caught the light and it was blue. He did not open it in front of me. He had it in his hand and then he was over me, and his knee came down between mine.

"I am going to fuck you now," he said. "And you cannot get pregnant off me. That part of it is mine to carry, not yours. I got you."

I heard the box in his hand.

"I am on the pill," I said. Flat. I did not dress it up. "It is fine if you do not use one."

He looked at me a second. Then he laughed, low, one note, and shook his head.

"Aren't you nasty?" he said.

And he put the box down on the ledge and did not open it.

I lay still and listened to it not happen, the rubber staying in the box, the box staying on the ledge, and I did not know why I had said it and I did not know why he had listened. I had not needed to lie. He had come up with his own answer already, in his own hand, and I had put my own thing down on the table in front of it anyway. I only understood, later, that the lie was the one thing in that truck that was mine, that I had made a place in it with my own mouth and he had let me keep it, and that I had kept one small thing in a room where he had taken everything else.

Then he had me by the wrist and pushed my arm up over my head and lay his weight down.

He went in slow and then not slow.

I was wet from his mouth and thank God for it, because the way he started I think it would have torn me if I had not been, thick as he was and going all the way the first stroke and the second the same. He lay on me and took my wrist up and held it there over my head so my arm was strung long and I could not move it and could not hold onto anything, and that was the point, I understood it in my body, that with the one hand held I could not do anything but feel every inch of it at once.

He bit my ear. He put his mouth at my ear and bit the edge of it and breathed into it, and I moaned, and then I was shouting, short and loud and out of my control, and the hum came up around my voice and took it.

"You like that," he said, and he did not wait to hear one thing back.

I wondered, a couple of times, if the hum really was eating my voice or if it only felt that way, if a man standing out by the blue truck could hear me through that, and the wondering went out of my head with the next stroke.

He had his other hand under me and onto my ass and he brought it down flat twice, hard, the sound lost in the hum and the sting not lost at all.

"You little slut," he said. He was not out of breath. "You come out to a lot like this and you go up in a truck and this is what you want."

And I lay there and took it, and the knowing came back into me, the coin in the chest. In that lot, right after Dale told him to shut his mouth, I had looked straight at him with the laugh still in my voice and said, "Not you." He did not laugh. He went still with it and did not hide it, and I made him watch me say it and I did not take one word of it back. Then I finished Dale's beer and I took his can off him and drank out of it with all three of them watching, and I put my hand flat on the front of his jeans and got one more slow stroke in on him, because I wanted the man who lectured me standing there with it hard in his jeans while I picked somebody else. Then I picked Rob off the row, and he watched me do that too. Every one of those was in this now. He was doing this to me because of it. He never said it. He would never say it. A man like him does not hand you that. But it was there in the hand on my wrist and in the bite on my ear and in the pace he set, and I read it off him like I read the clock off the sky.

He finished in me and did not get off me for a beat, and then he did.

"Get up here," he said. "You ride it."

I got up off my back and over him, and this was where the sleeper was different from any seat I had ever done this on, because it was a bunk, a flat thing three feet wide and long enough to lie down on, and he lay back full length on it and I went down over him and put him in and sat down onto it and started to move.

He lay back looking up at me. That was the mistake.

"It is you," he said. "You want it, do you not?"

He put one hand on the front of my throat.

Not a choke out of nowhere. He put it there the way you pick something up to look at it, and then he pressed, and I felt it close. My breath stopped. Not most of it. All of it. And the room went very quiet and very bright at the edges.

I kept moving even with no air, because my body did it on its own, and that was the thing that scared me, that it was good. The stopping and the pinch and the going bright and the thing inside me all came at once and my body liked it, and I did not want to like it, and I liked it.

He kept the hand there and looked up at me and did not hurry it.

"Sue, you listen," he said. "I got three kids and a woman who thinks I am in Ohio."

He never said the word wife. Not once in a year at that table, and not then with his hand on my throat. He said a woman, and he said it the way you say a truck.

Then he said, "Now you take it."

I could not answer. I had no air for it. So I took it. I moved the way he wanted and I did not stop, and it was too much, far too much, and one of my hands came off his chest and grabbed his wrist and pulled the hand off my throat.

Air came back in a rush and the room went grey and then normal.

He let me do it. That mattered.

I had both his wrists then. I got them up, both of them, and I took his hands and pushed them up over his head and held them there on the mattress, mirroring him, doing to him the thing he had done to me, and the look on his face changed to something I wanted to keep.

I had done this to Rob. I thought of it right then, in the middle of it, the armpit, how it had turned Rob to water on his own seat. I thought, maybe it works on him too.

I bent down over him and put my face into his armpit.

He reeked, and it should have been the worst smell in the world and it was not, it was intoxicating and warm and it was him, and I got my mouth on him and kissed it and sucked at the skin the way I had done to Rob, working on him, testing him, seeing if I could get him weak. And I put my teeth to his nipple, once, because he had put his to mine and I wanted him to know I had not forgotten it.

He liked it.

"Nasty little girl," he said. He said it up at the ceiling with his hands over his head under mine. "Look at you. That is nasty."

I liked him saying it. I put my teeth in the armpit a little and he growled under me and his hips came up, and I brought my hand down flat on his chest once, and moved down onto him harder and held his wrists and worked him the way I had worked Rob. It did not make him weak the way it made Rob weak. It made him rougher. But he came. I made him come, and that was mine. Somewhere in the middle of that bunk I took a piece of the night back off him and kept it.

"Turn over," he said. "Onto your stomach."

I did it.

He came down on me and put his hand on the back of my neck and pinned me to the mattress, and there was nowhere for me to go and nothing for my hands to do. My face was turned to the wall and my cheek was on the mattress and one knee was under me and he was behind me and on me and into me, and it was the tightest and the fullest thing of the whole night.

I could hardly breathe. The weight of him and the angle and my face turned into the ticking and the hum going on and on. I let it. I did not fight one bit of it. I stopped choosing things. My body was not mine to steer anymore and I handed it over and let him do what he wanted with it, and I had never felt anything like the relief of it.

It was my favorite. I knew it before it was over.

This was the thing I remembered after, when I thought about that night in the years that came after it, when a man had me from behind and pushed down on the back of my neck, the one whose smell came back to me was this one, the smoke and the beer and the deep warm animal of him, and the way it felt, the way it went all through me. I came while he was in me like that, more than once, and he felt it, I know he felt it, because he put his mouth down by my ear.

"That is it," he said. "A whore who likes it from a man way older than her."

I came again with him saying it.

There was a reason I gave that man the whole of that hour and it was not the mouth he had on him and it was not the words he used. It was that he was the one who told me to walk back to my car, and he was the one who put his hand on me out in that gravel and then stood there and watched me pick a different man off the row, and a man like that does not ever get over a thing like that. I let him have every bit of it because I wanted him to have it, and I took something off it that I did not have a word for at nineteen. A man can have your throat in his hand and call you a whore with your face down in a mattress and still be the one that got took, and I knew that the whole time he was in me.

Then he was over me and I felt the change come into him, the hurry, the short breath at my neck, and he took my hip hard in one hand and leaned down the whole of his weight and got his mouth at my ear.

"I am fixing to come inside you again," he said. "You hear me? In you. Now you take it."

And then, "Take it all."

I could not see his face. I never said his name while he was inside me, not once all night, and some part of me kept that even then, even with him telling me what I was and what I was for. He said mine. He said "Sue" low against my ear and pushed it home.

I took it. He came in me the way he said he would, and it was true, and I thought about how true it was, that he had told me and then done the thing he said, and that the lie in my own mouth had made all of it possible, and I did not have one regret in me about it.

His arm came off my neck and he rolled off onto his back beside me, and the whole bunk was not big enough for the two of us to lie in without touching, so we lay against each other and got air.

He was up again before I was.

"One more," he said. He got his hand on my hip and pulled me back toward him.

"No," I said, and I was laughing, and he was already at my ear, biting the top of it, and his fingers were at my ribs, tickling me, and I was laughing and pulling at his wrist and curling away, and this was the Michael who cracked the joke at the counter and told the story about the dog and said his own name across a diner twice a night, and I could not get him off me for laughing.

Dale was still out there in the dark waiting on his turn, and I was thinking about him even while I was laughing, and I got a knee under me to climb out of that bunk.

"Not yet," he said.

And then I stopped laughing. I do not know why I stopped. I only know that I stopped, and I lay back down on my side, and I did not say no again.

"You have come more than once now," I said. "How can you still keep going?"

He laughed, one note, up at the roof of that sleeper. Then he told me.

"You have got a face on you that a man does not forget," he said. "That is your problem. I have sat at your counter for a year and I have not got tired of looking at you one time."

"And a man that has been out on the road away from his woman has a drive on him that does not quit," he said. "That is one half of it. The other half is you. I have not had one bit of resistance in me since you walked down to that lot."

"You put your hand on me out in that lot, before I ever had you up in here," he said. "Right in front of both of them. Then you went up in that other man's truck and stayed up there a while, and I stood out in that gravel the whole of it with it standing up on me, waiting on you to come back down. So do not ask me how I am still going. I have been going since the lot, and I am still going up here in this bunk."

"No resistance?" I said. "You're the one who told me to walk back to my car because I have no business with the three of you. What, no resistance, you're saying?"

Michael smiled, and there was that sarcasm in his voice.

"You trying to get smarty with me, huh?" he said.

I laughed.

"But I am glad you did not," he said.

Then he took my wrist and brought my hand down and closed it on himself, and he was hard in it and wet from me, and he held it there until I had the whole of his answer in my hand.

I was flattered. I am putting that down here with the rest of it, because I have told this part of the story for years with the flattery left out of it, and that is a lie of a kind. I did not take my hand back and I did not get up off that bunk, and there was a minute in there where I could have. Every man who had put his hands on me that night took something out of that truck with him when he was done with me. That one handed me something and then asked me for one more, and I lay there in the dark holding it and let him have that too. I am going to come back around to this.

I was past saying anything, past choosing anything. Whatever came next in that truck was going to come, and I was going to let it.

But he did not take me. Not then. He let go of my hip and sat back and reached over my head to the ledge, and I heard the pack come off it, and the little click of the lighter, and the first pull.

He smoked inside the truck.

That was the thing nobody would believe about that night, that the smoke was the worst of it. The window in the sleeper door was shut and the curtain was drawn across and there was no air in that little box that did not have his smoke in it. The first of it came over me and I did not mind it. Then there was more. It hung in the dark up at the roof and came down slow and got thick, and it got into my nose and into my throat and behind my eyes, and I lay there and thought about how easy it would be to reach up and put my hand to that curtain and crack the window, and I did not do it. I was too tired to say one word about it. Too tired to ask a man for air. So I lay on my side on his bunk in his smoke and breathed it and did not complain, because complaining would have taken something out of me that I did not have left to give.

He smoked it down and did not talk. I could hear the little paper sound of it when he pulled on it, and the sound of him letting it out, and under both of those the hum, going on and on the way it had since the door shut behind me. I closed my eyes to keep the smoke out of them, and it was easier with them closed, and that was all it took.

I drifted.

That is the only word I have for it. Not asleep and not awake. The mattress was warm under me from the whole long night of us in it and the hum was in my bones by then and the smoke sat over everything like a lid put down on the dark. I could feel my own cheek in the ticking and my own arm heavy across my own body, and then I could feel less, and then less than that, and I let it happen.

He finished the cigarette. I heard it go out. I heard the pack and the lighter go back down on the ledge. And then I lost him. That is the truth of it and I have never dressed it up. I went down under the hum and the smoke like a stone dropped in a well, and for a while that night there was nobody home in me at all.

What woke me was the weight.

He was on top of me.

I came up out of the dark with his breath on my face and his chest on my chest and the roof low over both of us, and he was between my legs and pushing into me, slow, all the way in and then back out and then in again, going at me the way a man goes at his wife when the light comes up, steady and patient, like this was only the next thing after the smoke. He went in easy. There was no resistance in me at all. I was wet through from the whole long night of us, slick and open from the other three times he had already had me, and I could feel what he had left in me moving back out of me with every stroke and running down into the ticking under my hip. I knew what it was. I knew how much of it there was. And there was not one thing I could do about any of it from under him. My legs were wide because he had put them wide. His arms were down on either side of my head and he was braced on them and he was watching my face.

He saw me wake.

He did not stop, and he did not hurry, and he did not say one thing about it. Nobody had ever had me like that. I do not mean a man in a bunk in a lot. I mean I came out of the dark in the middle of it and did not know when it had started or how long he had been up there over me doing it, and none of it had been mine, not one minute of it.

That was what did it. That was the thing that finally got me up and out of that bunk, and it was not Dale waiting on me out there. It was that I had gone under in a man's truck and come back up with him on top of me and no idea in the world how long I had been under it.

So I got my hand flat on his chest and I said it out loud.

"Stop," I said.

He did not stop straight away. He went on, one long stroke and then another, like he had not heard me, or like he had heard me and would finish the thought in his own time. Then he stopped. He did not come out of me. He held his ground over me and his breath came down on my face, and I could feel his cock in me, hard and full and nowhere near done, and I lay under him with my hand still on his chest and waited him out.

Then he drew out of me slow and rolled off onto his back.

He reached for me again and got his hand back on my hip.

"Not yet," he said.

"I have got to go."

And then I said it plain, because a soft word was not going to hold a man like that. "Dale's turn," I said. "He is still up there waiting."

He lay still a second. Then he laughed, a short one, out through his nose, and he shook his head on the mattress. It was not a mean laugh. It was a man hearing the whole of the night said out loud in one plain line, and having to sit with how it sounded.

"Three in one night," he said. "And you got them in an order. Like a man with a route to run." Then he said it again, quieter, like he was still working it out. "I have never heard the like."

Then he let go of my hip and dropped back onto the mattress and put one arm over his eyes. "All right," he said. "Go on, then."

I got up on my knees and went looking for my dress.

I was tired in a way I had not been before in my life. The mattress and the hum and the smell of him had got into me like a fever and I could have stayed and slept there until light, and I wanted to. But Dale was still out there under that light, the way he had been all night, and it was his turn and I wanted it, and I was not going to lie up in a warm bunk and leave him sitting.

I could not have said how long I had been in that truck. I lost count of it in there. The hum did something to time.

He watched me from the bunk while I found my clothes.

Near the head of the bunk he had a cooler and a kettle and a couple of shirts folded and stacked, and I took the top shirt off the stack and put it between my legs, and the wet came out of me in a rush, more than I had thought was in there, and not all of it was mine. I had been holding it in without knowing I had been holding it, and standing up had let it go. It ran down the inside of my thigh and I caught it in the shirt and cleaned myself the best one shirt would do, and the cotton came away through and heavy and wet in my hand, and he raised his head off the mattress.

"That is clean," he said.

"I know," I said, and I used it anyway.

He put his head back and laughed at that, up at the roof of his own truck.

Then he reached for the cigarettes off the ledge and lit another one, and lay on his back in the dark with the smoke going and watched me put the dress back on over my head and get my shoes.

"You cannot tell anybody about this, Sue," he said. "Not about tonight."

I did not say yes and I did not say no. I did it up and stood there. He was not sorry, and he did not say it like a man who was. He was only telling me where it would land. A woman up the road and three kids up the road, and him a stranger in this town and gone again, and if it ever got told it would run up the road after him and it would be them that paid for it. He said it like a fact and left it. And I did not have any use for a story told about that night either.

"I would take you to breakfast," he said.

"Not this morning," I said.

He nodded like he had known that all along and had only been saying the shape of the night out loud one more time.

I pulled the curtain back and put my hand on the door. He got up off the bunk and came after me, naked, still half hard, and when I was on the step and he was over me at the open door he brought it at my face and rubbed it there, grinning, a man doing a joke.

I turned my face and swatted at his thigh and he laughed and stepped back.

Maybe the fear out in the gravel was silly, I thought, going down. Maybe he just fucks like that.

When I looked back up he was at the curtain with the cigarette up over his head and his eyes closed.

"Goodnight," he said, soft. Then, without opening his eyes, he said, "Let me know when you are done with Dale." That was the last thing I got from him.

I stepped down and the door shut and the hum cut off the way a noise does when you have stopped hearing it, and it was very quiet out in the gravel all at once. I looked back once. The sleeper light went off while I was looking at it. The truck went dark from the curtain back.

I stood there a second in the black lot. Breakfast if I wanted it, and a man inside a dark truck who had told me exactly what I was all night and then let me go because I asked. Down the line the flatbed sat dark where the big one was, and the hum was the blue one's, running under everything the way it had all night, and past all of it the light at the end of the fence.

This one I can stand inside, and I have not had to put the years between him and me the way I put them between the others.

I walked toward it.

I walked the length of that fence with the dark on one side of me and the three trucks on the other, and I was the only thing in that whole lot that was moving.

The light was at the end of the line, in the back window of the grey one, pulled tight behind the curtain and no bigger than a hand. Somebody had a little room on the end of that fence and had left the light on for it.

The step was cold under my shoe and I stood on it longer than there was any call to. Then I went up.

The curtain was not all the way across and the door was not locked. I put my hand on it and looked in before I moved anything.

He was on his back with nothing on him at all, and his mouth was open, and he was snoring.

With his mouth open like that I could see what he had left in it. Most of the back ones were gone, up top and bottom, and there was one in the front that had gone brown down at the gum and stayed in there anyway, and on the left side there was a gap where two of them had come out, and the gum over it had gone smooth and pale the way a socket goes when the tooth has been out long enough that it is just a place now. That was the mouth I asked his name out of earlier that night, down in the gravel, with a beer in it, and what came back at me was one syllable and a mangle, and it could have been Dale and it could have been Dell. The talker said his name was not Dale, and I handed him one myself off that mangle, and he answered to it. Not one person in that diner, that night or since, ever said one word about the mouth that name came out of, and I had been looking at it across that counter more nights than I can put a number on, with his can halfway up and his mouth full, and I had never once seen the whole of it, the gone ones and the gaps and the pale gum, because a man who is eating and drinking and talking keeps his mouth moving and keeps you from getting a good look at anything.

It was a bad sound. Not the big comfortable kind a drunk man makes when he has got himself to sleep. The other kind, where a thing in him works loose and has to be made to come back each time, and every time I waited for it.

I stood in that curtain and listened to an old man hold himself on this earth.

The bunk was the cleanest thing in that whole parking lot. Sheet on it, pillow under his head, his boots standing up under the bunk end to end, his shirt hung off the mirror arm. A man who has lived in a truck for years and keeps it like that is not a slob and is not a sick man. He is a man who has nobody to keep it for and does it anyway.

And he was naked, and it was all right there in the light, and I had already done two men that night and had not stopped to look at either one of them.

He was thin the way a fence post is thin. All the hair on him had gone white and grey together, on his chest and down his arms and on his legs, and there was a lot more of it than there was of him. His ribs stood up under it. His skin had been in the sun for a lifetime and had that look at the end of the day, dry and brown and a little loose at the neck, and there was a fold of it at his belly and a fold of it under his arms, and none of it moved when he breathed except the one part of him that had to.

His cock was laying over on his thigh, soft, in all that white and grey hair.

I had never seen one that was not cut. Every one I had seen in my life, on every boy in that loop and on both of the men I had had that night, came out of the skin with the head showing like it was the plan. His did not. His had a hood on it and the head was inside, and there was just the shape of it under there, and I looked at it a long time before I put a hand on it.

I put a hand on it.

I picked his cock up off his thigh and it was warm and heavy and soft, and I moved it in my hand a little and it moved back at me and did not do anything else. I pulled the skin back off it and the head came out.

Pink. Wet at the tip. Red where it had been inside. Smaller than I had it in my head and nothing at all like the others.

I let the skin come back over it and did it slower, and that time he moved in his sleep and said something that was not a word.

I did it again and his hand came down over mine, slow and heavy, and stopped there.

Then his eyes came open.

"Hell," he said.

He looked at my hand on him and then he looked up at my face and then he looked back down at my hand, like he wanted to be sure of the order that those things went in.

"You," he said.

"You said there was no chance in hell," I said.

He laid there and worked on it. I could see him going back over it, which of the three of them I had been with first, and how long I had been gone, and whether any part of this was his business. Whatever he got to, he did not say it. He just put his other hand up and rubbed his face all the way down it and looked at me again from behind it.

"Sweetheart," he said.

That was the word. He said it the way he said it over the coffee, the way an old man says a thing to a waitress he is fond of, and he had said it to me a hundred times in a year and it had never once made my skin crawl, and it did not then either.

"What are you doing in here?" he said.

"I'm doing what I want," I said.

He looked at me a while with the hand still over his mouth. Then he put his head back down on that pillow and looked at the roof of his own truck and let me keep my hand where it was, which is the whole of what that man was.

I worked him. I did not hurry it and I did not ask him for anything and I did not say a word about it, and he got partway up and then he was not. I took his cock in my hand and put it up against his own belly and let him go and he went back down. I did it again. He got to where he was most of the way and then he lost the middle of it, and the more I did it the less it did, and after a while I stopped, because a woman knows when doing it more is only making it worse.

"I'm sorry," he said.

That is what he said. An old man in his own bed with a nineteen-year-old girl's hand on him, and the thing he said was I'm sorry.

"There is nothing to be sorry for," I said.

"No," he said. "There is."

And then he started to talk, because there was nothing else in that bunk for him to do with himself, and I have thought since about how a man will talk when the other thing has been taken off him. Dale was the one who could talk the ear off a dog. I had watched him do it over dinner forty nights. It was not the same voice in that bunk. It was the same mouth.

He did not tell me a story with an ending in it. He just went out flat on his back and let it come.

He said it had been ten years.

He said he did not know how it got to be ten. He said that is not a thing a man plans. You do not sit down one day and decide to go ten years, he said, it just goes on, and then there is a morning you count it up and there is all of it behind you and nothing on it, and after that you know what you are, and knowing it does not help you any.

He said there was not a woman in the world that had a reason to look at him, and he was not asking for one, and he had made his peace with the shape of his own life, and then a girl walked into a diner and winked at him with his own coffee still in her hand and it took him all the way back.

"I never did figure out what that was about," he said. "Did I give you something?"

I did not answer him out loud.

I got up off that bunk and I stood where the light could get at the whole of me.

He did not ask me what I was doing in there a second time. He did not say one word.

I reached back over my shoulder and got the tab of my zip and brought it down, and the dress came loose at the top and I took it off my shoulders and let it go. It went down over my ribs and over my hips and it was on the floor of that truck with everything else that night, and I stepped out of it, and I stood at the foot of that bunk with nothing on me at all.

I could have covered up. There was a whole second in there where I could have. I did not. I did not cross my arms over my tits and I did not put a hand down in front of me and I did not turn my hip away from him. I stood with my weight on one leg and let him have the whole of it in that little light.

He looked. He did not say anything clever. He went down me slow and he came back up me and he did it the way he did everything else, like a man reading a load sheet, and when he got to my face he stopped there and stayed.

I was nineteen and there was not a mark on me yet. The tan stopped where the dress stopped, at my shoulders and halfway down my arms and my legs, and the middle of me was white against it. My tits were small and they stood up on their own that year and the tips of them had gone hard in the cool of that truck. My belly was flat and there was no child in it and no mark on it. My legs went all the way down to the floor of that truck and my feet were black from the gravel. My hair was down and it was wet at the back from the night.

I turned around for him without being asked. I put my back to the light and looked at him over my shoulder and let him have that side of me too, the whole length of my back and the small of it and the backs of my legs, and then I turned back around, because I wanted him on my front and I wanted him to know I wanted him on my front.

That is the thing I was doing. I was not showing him a body. I was telling an old man in a truck that there was one person in that whole county that night who wanted to stand in front of him and be looked at. He had told me there was not a woman in the world with a reason to look at him. I was standing in his light with nothing on, and the reason was me.

And it landed. I saw it land. Something came up in that old face of his that had not been in it all night, and it was not the sex and it was not the talk, and I did not have a word for it then and I have one now and it is not a word I use.

"Sweetheart," he said, and there was nothing in front of the word this time and nothing behind it.

Then I got back onto that bunk and put my hand back on him, and I was bare doing it, and the light was on the front of me where he could see.

"You got a daddy out there somewhere," he said.

I did not answer that one. He did not wait on it either, which is how I knew it was not a question he asked me.

"I got a boy," he said. "He is grown now. He is over in the next state and he is grown and I do not know him, and the last time I talked to him he was twelve."

He said that and laid there.

And then he said the thing I have carried since.

"The day that boy stopped calling me Dad was the day something in me shattered."

He said it the same way he said everything else, flat, the way he said the coffee was cold or the load paid bad. There was no water in it at all. That is the part I could not get over for years.

"They give a boy a new daddy and the boy takes the new daddy's name," he said. "That is what they do. Nobody has to be ugly about it. His mother married a man and the man had a name and the boy got it, and after that the boy was calling him Dad, which I do not blame him for one bit, and the name went on the school papers and the name went on everything, and there was me in a truck with a last name that was not on one piece of paper about my own son."

I did not understand where he was going with it yet. I have thought about that since.

"So I took it too," he said.

"You took what?" I said.

"The name," he said.

He said it like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. He said it like a man saying he took the money or he took the load.

"Whose name," I said.

"That man's," he said.

And then he told me, and in that bunk at the end of that fence at whatever hour that was, he said the name out loud, and it was one syllable, and it was not Dale, and I heard it plain with nothing in his mouth.

That was the name of the man his son called Dad.

He said he signed it on the line one day at a courthouse and that was that, and it did not cost him anything to do it, and it has never been worth one thing to him since, and he has never once taken it back.

"Why would you do that?" I said.

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me a long time.

"So that when that boy says Dad," he said, "the name that comes on the end of it is mine."

For a while neither of us said anything. My hand was still on him.

Then I said the name I had for him, out loud, the way you try a thing to see if it still fits.

"Dale?" I said.

"Not Dale, Dell," he said.

He did not say it hard. He said it the way a man reads a thing off a paper. Then he laid there and let it stand, and he did not tell me to use it, and he did not ask me to give the other one back. He only put the name down in the dark between us, and neither one of us picked it up.

And the other half of it is the same thing turned around, and I have never said this part to one person either.

His name was not Dale. Dale was mine.

I made it up in the gravel off a mouthful of beer and a mangle with no teeth behind it, and I gave it to him, and he took it, and it answered for him from that night on. Nobody else in that county ever called him that. It was a thing I made, and I made it for him, and it is the only thing I ever gave a man that he kept.

And he called me sweetheart. That was his. Not Sue. He knew my name. He had it off the tag on my uniform and off the ticket with his order on it every time he sat down at my counter, and he had it a year to say, and he never once said it. He said sweetheart and he said little girl and he said my girl.

So there we were, the two of us, in a bunk at the end of a fence. He had taken another man's name off a courthouse line and I had made him one up in the gravel, and neither one of us had the other one's real name in our mouth the whole night. We called each other by what we had made up. I have never had that with anybody since.

I have told his story to one person in my life and I have just told it to you, and I did not tell it right. It is not a thing you can say right.

I did not understand it in that bunk. I want to say I did. I was nineteen years old and I had a man in a chair at home who I was lying about that same night, and I did not have one piece of what it took to hear what that old man in that truck was telling me. I heard it. I did not take it in. I got there a long time later, on a different night, in a different bed, and it hit me and I had to get up out of it and walk the floor.

And while he was talking I had not stopped working him. That is a thing I am not proud of and it is what happened. My hand did not leave his cock the whole time he was telling me about his boy. Not when he said it had been ten years, and not when he said the name he took off that man at the courthouse. I held it the way you hold a thing you are waiting on. It laid there in my hand, warm and soft and heavier than it looked, and more than once I felt something start up in it, and every time it gave out on me and went back down. He never said one word about my hand being on him and he never moved it off him either.

I had nothing on me by then and I had stood in the light in front of him and let him look at all of me, and I have thought since that it was not my hand that did it, it was that. A man can hold out against a hand. He could not hold out against a woman standing in his own light wanting to be there.

He felt it before I knew it had happened. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked down the length of himself and then up at me, standing there in the light with nothing on me at all.

"Come here," he said.

His voice was different. So was mine, if I am honest about it. I did not say anything. I put my mouth on his cock.

His cock was not one I had to work at. It was soft and it laid there and the skin slid on it, and I put the whole of the head of it in my mouth and the hood of it moved back over the head under my tongue, and it was the strangest thing I have done and I did not stop doing it. I did it with the flat of my tongue and with my mouth and with both my hands flat on him, and I watched his face while I did it, and his face was that of a man who had been given something back that he had signed away.

I took his cock all the way down and came back up slow, and I did it again, and then I felt it start. It came up in my mouth the way a thing comes up when it has been gone a long time, slow and not sure of itself, and it got heavy on my tongue, and I had my hand around the bottom of it and I did not let it go.

He felt it too. He did not say anything for a while, and then he said it so low I felt it more than heard it.

"Don't stop," he said. "Sweetheart. Don't stop."

It was not an order. I have had a man give me an order and I know what that sounds like. This was a man asking, with the whole of himself going in my mouth and nothing he could do about it.

Nobody has ever asked me that. Not one man, in all of it, has ever asked me to keep going.

I did not answer him. I could not have, with my mouth full of him. I did not stop and I did not come up off him. I kept at it with my tongue and my hand until there was nothing soft left in him, and he was hard the whole way up, hard enough to fuck me, and I had done that.

Michael had put his hand in my hair and held my head where he wanted it. This one put his hand on my hair and left it there, and after a while I understood that he was not doing anything to my head at all. That is one of the two or three things I know about the difference between men.

I came up off him to breathe and put my mouth on him a different way, up at the side of his neck and his ear, and then his mouth, and his mouth was not like the others either. He kissed me like he had been saving it up, one small bite and then another one and then a slow one, and under all of it he kept saying sweetheart into my mouth in the middle of the kiss.

That was where I found them all at once, with my mouth on his. The gap at the side was the first thing, and it was smooth under my tongue, and the bad one in the front was there under my lip the whole time he kissed me, and the ones he had left in the back were worn down low from a whole life of use. I did not mind one bit of it. I was nineteen and I had spent that whole year liking what men looked like, and this was the oldest mouth that had ever been on mine, and I gave it more than I gave either of the other two that night, and I am not going to explain that, because I cannot.

Then he put his hand down between my legs.

He put his hand flat on me there and did not do one thing but hold it, and I was wet, and he felt it, and he stopped kissing me and looked at me.

"Sweetheart you're so wet," he said. "Is this for me?"

And I said, "It is."

That was a lie and I will put it down as one. It was not all for him. There was a whole night in that answer, and two men in it who were not him, and I looked that old man in the eye in the light of his own truck and gave him the whole of it as if it was his. It cost me nothing to say and he could not have known the difference, and I have thought about why I did it and I think it is because he had just told me the truth about himself and I could not bear to hand him one of mine.

He got me on my back on that bunk.

It went in soft. That is the only word I have, and I do not mean he was soft. There was nothing to brace against and nothing to take and nothing to get used to. Both of the men before him had to be moved in, one of them slow and one of them fast, and this one just went in and stayed there, and the size of it was the whole of me and not one inch more than that, and I did not have to think about it one time.

He got his knees in under him and came down on his elbows over me and did it slow. Slow is the wrong word. He did it careful. He knew what he was, an old man in a bunk at the end of the night, and he moved like a man carrying something that was not his, and every time he came all the way down into me he stopped there a beat and let me have the whole of it before he went on again.

"Am I hurting you?" he said.

"No," I said.

"Say it if I do," he said. "I will stop. You say the word and I stop and that is the end of it, I do not care what we are in the middle of."

"Nobody has ever said that to me," I said.

That was true. It was true about that night in every way it can be true.

And then something gave in him.

He had been so careful with me that I had stopped watching for anything else. He got his weight up onto his hands and his hips came into me hard. Not once. He did it again, hard, and again, and it was not the same man that had asked me a minute before if he was hurting me.

He had told me to say the word and he would stop, and I did not say one word. He was all the way in me and both his hands were on the bunk either side of my head and he had the whole of me if he wanted it, and I laid there under him and took all of it and never once asked him for anything.

He made a low sound, and it was not a word, and he did not slow down. And then he did slow down, the way a man slows when he has got hold of something and does not want to spend it.

He put his mouth down at the side of my face and did it to me and talked to me the whole time, the way he talked over his dinner, and it was the same man's mouth and it was all turned the other way.

"That's a girl," he said. "That's my girl. You be good for me now. You lay there and let the old man have it. You got the prettiest little pussy I ever had, and I am not doing one bit of the work in there, you are. That is all I want out of you, sweetheart. Just let me."

He did not speed up and he did not stop. He was holding himself where he was on purpose, the way he had slowed down a minute before, and he gave the words the breath he had left and took it back on the next stroke.

"You hear that," he said. "That is you. You got the whole of me up in you, sweetheart, and you are so wet I can hear it. I have not been this hard in ten years. You give it to me and I take it."

He called me his girl and he called me sweetheart and he called me little girl more than once in there. The little girl was the one that got through me, because everybody has a father and mine was a man in a chair in the next room with a bottle under it, and that man in that bunk gave me a whole hour of something I did not have.

I did not think of my daddy once while he had his cock in me. I thought about the man over me, who could not be one, being one anyway for as long as this lasted.

I got my arms up around him and my hands flat on his back. He was old and he was hot and his back was wet under my hands, and I held him down onto me and I moved up with him the whole of it, and I did not lay there and take it the way he had told me to. I kept my hands going on his back the whole time, up to his shoulders and back down, and every time he came down onto me I pulled him in with them.

He was not hard the way the other two had been. Rob had been hard the whole of it and it had nothing to do with me, and the other one had been hard like a piece of his truck. This one was neither. There was a give in him at the root of it and it moved with the two of us and not against me, and inside me he was a thing I could close on and know the whole shape of, and it was good.

"You feel good," I said, right up at his ear and loud. "You feel so good in me. Keep going."

"It's been a long time," I said, with my mouth at the side of his neck, and I did not take my hands off his back.

"You said there was not a woman in the world that had a reason to look at you," I said, and I said it slow at his ear with both my hands on his back. "And here I am under you. And I'm not laying here letting you. I'm up here and I like it. You had that one wrong."

I got my face against his ear and let him have it. I did not hold anything back. I moaned for him, loud, right into his ear.

"Oh God, oh God," I said into his ear. Then I got the rest of it out. "You're making me come."

That one I said for him and I knew I was saying it for him, and it was not only for him either. I was close and I had not known it until I heard my own voice say it, and then it came up through me with him in there, and I went tight and close around him, and I could not keep still for it, and there was nothing of it for him then.

And he felt it. He was going at me the whole of it and he felt me close on him, and he did not change one thing he was doing, and he was still right there in me when I came down out of it.

"Did I make you come, sweetheart?" he said.

"Yes," I yelled, and it was not shaped like a word by the time it got to the roof of that sleeper.

He liked that. He liked it better than the thing he was in the middle of. I heard it in him before I could see one thing in that old face, and he laughed, low, right down over me, and it was a sound I had not got out of him all night.

He asked me that with himself still in me and not one thing got for himself yet. He had been holding himself where he was the whole of it, and now I knew what he was holding it for.

"Sweetheart," he said, up against my ear, and his voice had changed, and I felt the change come into him the way I had felt it in the other one.

"Sweetheart, I'm gonna cum," he said. "Is it ok?"

It was the second kindest thing any man said to me that night, and it is the only time in my life a man has asked me before he did it.

"Yes," I said.

And he did.

I was under him and I could see the whole of his face in that little light.

He came and his eyes went back up in his head. The sound that came out of him was not a sex sound. It was the sound of a door coming off a hinge. Red all the way up his neck and over his ears and standing in his face, and then he was not breathing.

I did not know that when it happened. I knew it after. There was no air moving in that truck for a while in there, and there was a man on top of me who had gone still and hard all over and who was not coming back down, and I waited on one breath of his with a hand flat on his back, and it did not come.

I thought I had killed him.

I laid there under a dead man with his whole cock in me and my hand on his back, and he was not moving and his weight had gone heavier, and I thought about a woman in the morning finding me in a truck with an old man on me, and I could not get out from under him to do one thing about it. And underneath all of it, and I want this in the record because it is the truth, my own body was doing something I could not stop either, because he was still all the way up in me and it had been going on long enough that my body had stopped taking orders off me. My hips came up at him once with nobody driving them.

Then he breathed.

A long one, all the way down, and then another one after it, and then he came down on me and put his whole weight on me and stopped holding anything up, and his eyes stayed shut.

He stayed there.

That is the part I did not have any answer for. He stayed in me. Most men I have had got up on their arms after or rolled off and went quiet on their back. This one came down over me with his face in my hair and stayed in me, all of him, going soft and staying, and I let him, the way I had let Rob, because there was nothing in me that wanted him off.

I got my arms around him. That is the other thing. I had my arms around an old man's back while he fell asleep inside me, and it was the stillest thing that happened to me that whole summer, and nobody was paying me for it and nobody would ever know it.

His face was down against the side of my head and his mouth had gone loose on it, the way a mouth goes when a man stops holding his own face up, and I could feel the gap in it against my hair and his breath coming through the gap, and it did not bother me. I put my hand on the back of his head and left it there.

And I started to go. Right there, with him on me, at the end of the fence in the last of the dark, with nothing left in me at all. Warm and heavy and gone, and a couple of times I caught myself starting off the edge of it and I did not fight it.

What brought me back was the light on the curtain.

It was grey in there. Not daylight. Grey.

And I was under a man who was asleep, and the counter at my job was going to want wiping down before the sun, and I had one shift and then another one behind it, and I had been going a long time, and I could not have told you how long, and there was a whole night behind that truck that nobody was ever going to hear the half of.

I put both hands flat on that old man's shoulders and pushed, and said his name.

"Dale," I said. "Dale."

I said it more than once. The last of it was after he had told me it was not his name, and he answered to it the same as he always had.

He came back to himself a piece at a time. He lifted up off me and the whole of him slid out of me and I felt the wet of the night come out behind it, and he looked down at me with one eye half open and the other one shut and he said the first thing a man says.

"Did I hurt you?"

"No," I said.

"Good," he said.

He got himself turned over onto his side of that bunk and put his arm up over his eyes, and I watched two tears come out from under it and go in different directions down the side of his head, and he did not make a sound about it, and he did not say one word about it, and I did not say one word about it either.

That is when I gave him mine.

I do not know why I did it, except that he had handed me his whole life in the dark and I had to hand him something back, and the only thing I had in me that was worth anything was not true.

"My daddy is dead," I said.

He took his arm off his eyes.

"When?" he said.

"A while back," I said.

And then I went on with it, and once I started it came easy, which I have thought about plenty since.

"I don't have anybody," I said. "I never did. He wasn't nice to me. He was worse than not nice. He used to tell me I wasn't wanted in his house. And he wasn't a drunk like people say, he was worse than that. He was a mean man in a clean shirt. And the day he died I didn't cry. That's why I came up into your truck tonight. That's why I put my hand on you in your sleep. Because I looked at you over that counter for a year and I told myself, there's a man who'd have been a good daddy. And I had the wrong one."

Not one word of that was true except that I wished it was.

I had a man at home in a chair with a screen door he had put his hand through, and he never once in nineteen years said one unkind thing to me, and he never once asked me where I had been either, and he was going to be sitting in that same chair with the TV loud when I came through that door, and I was going to lie to him too.

I told an old man in a bunk that my daddy was dead and that he was a mean one, and then I told him that I wished I had had Dale.

He was quiet a while.

"You are a good girl," he said.

He said it into the roof of that truck. He did not look at me.

"You are a good girl," he said again. "You listen to me. Whatever that man in that house was, you did not get it from him and it is not on you. You come out of that place with something of your own."

And he put his hand out and put it on my arm and left it there, and that old man laid in his own truck and comforted a girl about a father who did not exist, and he was the last of the three I gave a lie to that night, and I gave him the only one that mattered.

Then we laid there, and the curtain went from grey to something better than grey, and he did not ask me one more question about any of it, and he did not touch me again.

I laid still and listened to him start to breathe the way he had when I first came in, working a little on each one.

Then I sat up.

There was a roll of tissue paper in that bunk, the flat kind a man keeps for his nose, and I got a piece off it and put it between my legs.

I did not know there was that much of him in me. He had been up in me a long time, and I had not thought one time about what he was going to leave behind, and it kept coming out of me warm onto that paper until the paper was no good to me, and I took another piece. I cleaned the whole of that night out of me in the grey without one sound, so as not to wake him.

I found my dress and put it on and put the flat of my hand on the bunk beside his shoulder one time, and he put his hand over mine and held it there a second without opening his eyes.

"You sleep on," I said.

"Sweetheart," he said.

That is how we left it.

I pulled the curtain and got the door open and went down the steps backwards, the way you go down off a truck, and I put my hand on the mirror arm on the way and it was cold.

The door shut behind me on its own weight.

It was grey out in the gravel. The whole lot was grey, and the sky in the east was not; the sky was going, one hand at a time, the way it had been going while I laid in there with an old man asleep on me, and I had missed the whole of it.

The fence line was right there in front of me all along. It was the grey truck I had come out of, and the flatbed where the big one was, dark, and then the blue one with the reefer still humming under it for the power.

And there was a man standing out in that gravel.

Everything from here I say from after it, with the morning done and the years behind me.

Michael was out there with a cigarette going, in the mouth of the dark between the blue one and the grey one, in the same spot he had been standing all night, like he had never gone anywhere at all.

He had been out there while I was in with Rob. He had been out there while I was in with Dale. The night had run all the way out over him and he had not gone anywhere, and he was still standing in the same gravel in the same shirt with his collar wrong, and the strangest thing any man did that night he did without ever putting a hand on me.

He watched me the whole way. I did not hurry and I did not slow down. It is a long walk across gravel at a man who is watching you do it.

"That bad?" he said, when I got even with him.

I did not answer him. There was nothing out of that truck I was going to hand a man standing in the same lot, and he did not ask it twice.

He looked at me for a second. Then he took the pack out of his shirt pocket and turned it up and held it out at me without one word.

I have thought about that more than I have thought about most of the night. He did not ask me if I wanted one and he did not say anything at all. He just held it out there the way you hand a thing to somebody you have known a while.

I had never smoked a cigarette in my life. Not one, not behind the trailers with the other girls, nothing. My dad smoked every day of my life with a beer on the arm of his chair, and I had never once put one in my mouth.

I took one.

I do not have a why for it and I stopped looking for one a long time ago. I think it is that he did not ask me anything while he did it. That whole night had been one long line of men wanting things and me saying yes to them, and a man just holding out a pack at me like I was a person who smoked was the first thing anybody handed me all night with nothing on the back of it.

He leaned in and got the end lit off the coal of his own. I took one pull and I coughed until my eyes ran, and he laughed at me, low and easy, the way he did everything.

"All right," he said. "That is a start."

I smoked the whole thing. It took a while and it was mostly smoke and it left the inside of my mouth tasting like him, and I stood out in that grey lot with a grown man at the end of a night I am never going to be able to tell anybody the whole of, and I smoked a cigarette.

Then he said the other thing.

"The room is still there," he said.

It came out the same way it had come out the first time. The difference was that there was nobody out there to laugh at it this time. No table, no counter, no two men with a beer, no joke to hang it on. Just a man and a girl and the last of the dark and a thing he meant, and he had meant it the whole time, and we both knew it standing there.

"No," I said.

I want that word down the way I said it. It came out flat and it came out easy and there was nothing under it. Every no I had said that night had been about something smaller. Stop. Not yet. It is all right, which was not a no and should have been one. This was a no about me, and it was the first thing I said all night that was only ever about me.

And then I took the offer apart, because a no on its own is a small thing to hand a man and I did not want one piece of that offer standing when I walked away from him.

"Not the room," I said. "I can't in that motel. I work there."

He did not say anything to that, so I said the rest of it.

"I already told you."

I had. I said it at that table hours before with his cup still in his hand and the other two sitting right there, and the laugh went around the table and he was in it, and he was the last one of the three of them to laugh because he had to work out first whether I was joking. That is the whole difference between that table and this gravel. At the table a thing said out loud is a thing a man can call a joke after, and he called it one, and the laugh settled it. Out in that gravel there was nobody left to call it anything, and it was the same thing out of his mouth, and he had heard me say it once already and made me say it again.

Because that motel is my work. There is not a bed in that place I have not had my hands on. Three mornings a week I take a cart down those walks and strip what men left in those rooms, and I have stood at those windows and looked out at that highway, and the room with his name in the book that night was one of mine. I had made that bed up with my own hands that week. He did not know it at the table and I never told him, and I have thought since about the fact that he was going to sleep in my work and then stand in this lot and hold the door of it open for me.

He did not smile it off. He did not tell me he had only meant the shower, and he did not tell me it had been a joke, because there was nobody standing in that gravel to say that to but me. He looked at me a second longer than a man looks at a no he is going to drop, and then he dropped it. He put the cigarette down in the gravel and set his boot on it.

And then I did not go.

There was a whole other end to that night and it was forty feet away in the dark. My keys were in my pocket and my car was over there and the loop was nine miles off with my bed in it, and I could have walked away from him and from that lot and from the whole of it and been asleep in my own room before the sun was all the way up, and nobody in this world would have known one thing about any of it.

I did not go.

I put my hand on his wrist instead. That same wrist, and that same hand, because a man had taken me by the wrist down in that gravel hours earlier and walked me at this truck like a thing he had decided on, and I wanted to be the one who did it this time.

He looked down at my hand on him and then up at my face, and something went across his eyes. He was tired all the way through by then and the tired did not make him slow, it made him plain, and what I saw was not a man who thought he had won anything. It was a man being handed one more thing at the end of a long night.

"Not the room," I said again. "Here."

He did not say anything to that.

"And not rough," I said.

That is the sentence. I have said a lot of things to men in my life. I have never once before or since stood in front of one and said my terms out loud while he waited to hear them.

He looked at me a while. Then he said it.

"Yes ma'am," he said.

He got the door and I went up the steps ahead of him the way I had the first time, and there was a moment there where I could see the whole lot over my shoulder one more time, the flatbed and the grey one at the end with its curtain pulled, and then the door shut and the hum was on me again and I was back inside that truck.

The sleeper was cold. He had been out in that gravel the whole time and nobody had been in that bunk since me, and the mattress was cold under my hand, and that cold is how I know how long he stood out there.

He got the little light on at the curtain and the room came back. The same roof low over both of us, the same window, the same smell of him and smoke and the stale air. And there on the ledge was the pack he had been smoking out of, and next to it the box of rubbers he had brought, sitting exactly where it had sat in the dark all night with the lid still on it. Not one of them out. I looked at that box for a second and I thought about the lie I had told him in this same bunk hours before, and I did not say one word about it then and I have not since.

Then he was careful with me.

He was rough with me in his hour. I know what that was and I stopped him and I know why. This was the other man. This was the one off the window and the table and the gravel, the one with the talk and the smile, and he did not do one rough thing with his hands the whole time he had me.

He heard me. That is the part I want on the record. I said not rough and he did it the way I said, and he kept at it like that the whole way through, and he did not stop hearing me once. The same man, in the same bunk, hours apart. It is not a high bar and no man has cleared it for me since.

He put me on my back and came down over me the way you get into a bed in a house, and he kissed me slow on the mouth, and I kissed a man for a long time in the dark of his own truck with the curtain pulled and the morning coming up on the other side of it.

He was a good kisser. I have not had the chance to say that about many men, and I did not expect to be able to say it about one in the back of a truck at that hour. His mouth moved on mine like it knew the way, and it was not rough and it was not in a hurry, and I felt it everywhere at once. And while his mouth was doing that to me, it came into my head that a man does not learn to kiss like that off a table at a window for a year. A man kisses like that at home. I wondered whether he had his eyes shut and I was that woman up the road while he did it, and the wondering did not cool me one bit. It put me up higher than the whole of the night behind me, and I kissed him again while he held me up off that bunk.

There was one man before that bunk and it was Bill. Bill was the first man I had ever been with, and the first man who had ever kissed me, and Bill had been good to me. I want that down plain. He was a man in his forties and I was nineteen and he took his time and he had a beard that scraped and he knew what he was doing, and I had liked it, and I had told him to keep going, and there was not one thing wrong with it. That was all I had to go on. One man and one mouth and one morning, and I was nineteen years old and I thought that was the whole of what it was. So when a man put his mouth on mine in the back of a parked truck and took his time about it, I had nothing to set it against but Bill. It was not that Bill did it badly. Bill did it the way a man does it who is good at it and knows he is. Michael did it slow and patient and like it mattered to him, and nobody in my life had ever kissed me like that, and of the whole of that night it is the one thing I have carried the longest.

And then there was the other thing.

I have never been able to explain it to anybody without sounding like a fool. A rough man has somewhere to put it. The rougher he is with you, the more of a place you are for him to put it in. That is what the hour had been. This was not that. This was a man holding on.

He held me. He got one arm under the small of my back and the other across my shoulders and he held me up off that bunk while he worked, the way you carry a thing across a room, and he put his face down into my hair and left it there, and he did not come up out of it and he did not once hurry. He went in slow every time, the whole way in, and he stayed there at the end of each one before he took it back out, and I could hear how wet I was around him. More than once I felt him start to hurry into me, and every time I felt him take it back and go slow again, and every time he did that he made a low sound down behind his breath like a man keeping hold of himself. And somewhere in the middle of it I stopped being a girl in a bunk and understood what I was in.

He was not doing it to me. He was doing it because it was the shape of a thing he did not have. There is a woman up the road somewhere who thinks he is in Ohio, and a house, and kids, and a bed of his own, and I was not any of it. I was nineteen years old in the back of a parked truck and there was not one inch of me that was her. He knew it. I knew it. And he was reaching for her anyway, over me, with his face in my hair, and doing it the way a man does it when he has missed somebody for a long time.

He never said one word of it. He did not say wife and he did not say lonely and he did not say her name and he did not say missing. I did not get one bit of it out of his mouth. I got it off his body, off the holding, off a man slowing down when another man would have hurried, off the way he stayed.

And it did the thing to me. It made me a different kind of a woman while it was happening. Not the girl who walked up onto that gravel. Not the one he had called a slut in this same bunk with his hand on my throat. A woman that a man holds onto because there is somebody he is missing, and I was the one he had his arms around. Nobody meant to give me that. It was not a present and it was not a kindness and it was not for me. It landed on me just the same, and I have carried it ever since.

That is what took me in the end. Not his hands and not the size of him and not the whole long night of it. He did what I told him. He stayed slow because I said not rough, and he kept his hands off my throat and he did not take me from behind and he did not put my head where he wanted it, and every single thing that man did in that bunk he did the way a nineteen-year-old girl at the end of a fence asked him to do it, and I came with a man over me doing what he was told.

I did not say his name. I do not know why I did not. I had it in my mouth and it stayed there.

He finished inside me. I am not going to dress that up either. There was nothing left in me to protect by then that the whole night had not already put there, and he came in me slow with his face in my hair.

Then his weight came down and he held there.

He did not roll off me. He lay over me with all of his weight and his breathing at the side of my head and he did not move for a long time, and I lay under him with my hands flat on his back and I did not know what I was doing with them and I left them where they were.

Then he was talking.

He talked low into the top of my head, the way a man talks when he thinks the woman is asleep. There was a road in it. There was a load in it. There was a boy in it. I do not know if he knew he was saying any of it, or if I was already gone to him and he had nowhere else to put the words.

And then I was gone.

That is where I put my head down and I am not going to pretend I have the rest of that night, because I do not. I stopped hearing him and the hum stopped and the smoke and the man all went down together.

What I have of the rest I have in pieces, the way you have a thing you slept through. I have his weight coming down on the bunk behind me. I have the dark going soft at the edges and the light never coming all the way. I have being moved and turned and the sheet dragged out from under my hip. I have him over me again with the hum of the truck and the hum of him both going in my ear and a word in it I did not catch.

And I have the one time I came up far enough to know what was happening.

I knew it, and I am not going to sit here and tell you I did not. He was in me and the weight of him was over me in the dark and I knew the whole of what it was. I did not say one word. I did not stop him. Not because I could not. I was already under, and coming all the way up out of it to do anything about it would have cost me more than I had left in me, so I put my arm over my face and I let him have it, and I went back down.

More than once. I do not know how many times and I never did, because I was not awake for the whole of it and there was no counting in that bunk. He had me while I slept and woke up in the middle of him and slept again, and every time I came up he was there, and I did not bother to stop him, and that is the whole of what I can tell you about the rest of that night.

A girl can sleep through a man and wake up in the middle of him and go back under. That is what I did. The not-stopping was not a thing I decided in the light, because there was no light in any of it.

And the next thing I had was the light.

I woke up with the sun on my face and a man's arm under my head.

The curtain was bright and moving at the end of the bunk, and the truck was hot, and I was curled into his side with one hand flat on his chest and one leg over his, and I had one of those mornings where you do not know where you are before you know everything. Then I knew everything.

I was sore in places I did not have names for. My jaw ached where a man had held it open. My knees ached from gravel and from a bunk. There was the shape of a hand on my hip where somebody had held me, printed into me in the night, and I lay there in the morning light and could not tell you which one of them it belonged to, and I did not lie there and worry about it either. That is the truth of where I was by then.

And I woke up crusty and moist both at once, and that is the way it was and I am not going to pretty it up. Dried on the outside of me and wet through under it. The inside of my thighs gone stiff with it in the heat of that bunk and the hair of me stiff with it too, and the ticking gone dark under my hip where it had run while I slept.

Some of it was mine. Some of it was the men I had been with that night, dried on me where they had been. And most of it was his, because he was the last one and he had had me more than once and he had not used a thing. I did not get up to wash one bit of it off.

And my hair was out everywhere and my mouth tasted like smoke and the night, and I smelled like that truck and like that man, and I lay in the sun with him and did not want to get up.

He was awake.

He was on his back with his other hand flat on my arm and he was looking up at the roof of his own truck like a man with nothing on his mind at all.

"Morning," he said.

That was all of it for a while. He did not reach for me and he did not hurry me out of his bunk and he did not lie there acting like a man who had held me like that all night either. He just let me wake up in his arm. He was easy. He was the man out of that window and off that table and out of that gravel, the one with the talk and the smile, and he lay there with me down his side in the morning light like it was any other morning in any other life.

Then he said, "You got work."

It was not a question. He knew. One of us had said it in the night and he had kept it, and he said it the way a man says a thing he already has the answer to.

"I got work," I said. And the work was the rooms. Three mornings a week at the motel past the interchange, a cart and a stack of sheets and a list with other people's names on it.

"I got a room up the road," he said. "I never did get in it."

I did not say one word about that room. I let him think it was just a room. What I knew, lying there in his arm, was that I was going to see him again. I did not have a reason for it I could have said out loud and I did not need one.

And then he did not move for another minute anyway, and neither did I. Both of us lying there with places to be and a morning going by outside that curtain.

Then he sat up.

He reached across me and got his jeans up off the floor of the bunk and dug his wallet out of them, and he took out some bills and held them out to me.

"Get you something to eat," he said.

I did not take them. I sat up in that bunk with the sheet pulled into my fists and I looked at his hand in the middle of the bed between us and I did not take it.

"I do not want your money."

He did not tell me what it was and he did not tell me what it was not. He just held it out there and let me look at his face while I made my mind up, which is the same thing he had done down in that gravel when he held the pack out and never said a word, and I have thought since that that is the whole of him in one move. He does not ask. He holds a thing out and lets you decide what you are.

And I looked at his face and I did not see a man buying a girl. I saw a man who had woken up in his own truck with a nineteen-year-old who, for all he knew, he was never going to see again except across a counter, who had money, and who did not have one other thing to hand her before she went.

So I took it.

A hundred dollars, and I folded it and put it in my pocket with my keys and the sixty one dollars that had been in there since the night before. It took me most of a year to work out what that money was and what it was not. It was not a payment and it was not a kindness and he did not mean it as either one. It was a man with a woman up the road and three kids and a load to run, putting a hundred dollars into a girl's hand because it was the only thing in that truck he could give her that did not cost him anything he was not going to spend anyway.

We got dressed. He sat on the edge of the bunk with his back to me and pulled his boots on and got his shirt on and buttoned it wrong and fixed it, and he did not look at me once the whole time he did it, and I stood on the floor of that sleeper and got my dress over my head and my shoes in my hand, and that was the end of it.

He got the door and got down first and then took my elbow and handed me down the step like it was a porch, and then he let go, and that was the last time that man ever touched me in that lot.

The lot in the daylight is the saddest place I have ever stood in.

There is nothing in this world like a truck stop in the morning. The lights are all off and the gravel is just gravel and every truck is just a truck. It is the most ordinary place on the face of the earth, and a few hours before it had been the whole world, and there is no way to say the difference except that it was the difference between the night and the day.

Rob's flatbed stood in the middle with the tarps and the chains on it, and there was a man asleep sitting up in the seat of it with his mouth open. I looked at him a while and felt nothing, and that nothing is the truest thing about that whole night and the one thing in it I have never told anybody. That man had had his cock in me a few hours before and I stood in the sun and looked up at him and there was nothing in me about it at all. Not shame. Not fondness. Nothing. I say that as a fact about me and not as a boast.

The grey truck was at the end of the line with the curtain drawn in the window and no light in it, and there was an old man in there asleep with a name I had made up for him off a mangle, and I stood in the sun and looked down that fence at it and made myself put it away. I got very good that summer at putting a thing away and taking it back out later, in the dark, on my own time.

Michael walked me to my car. He did not have to. It was the other end of the lot and he had a load to run and he walked me anyway with his hands in his pockets and did not say anything for most of it, and when I got my door open he stood back and let me get in.

"You go on," he said.

I got in and shut the door and put the key in and I was not going to look at him. I looked at him anyway. He was standing in the gravel with his shirt half tucked and that big truck behind him, and he lifted his hand off his pocket about an inch and put it back, and that was the whole of the goodbye, and then I drove out of that lot.

Nine miles with the windows down and the radio off, and the fields on both sides going by flat and green and the sky the color of nothing, and a dress on the seat beside me and a hundred dollars in my pocket and the smell of that man all over my skin, and I was nineteen years old and I did not have one idea in my head about what I had done.

I did not go home first. I went to the drugstore off the highway, and I stood in it with my hair wild and my dress on from the night before, and I bought the morning pill with that man's money before I bought one other thing in my life with it, and I took it in the car with a bottle of water, and then I drove the rest of the way home and had the bed until it was time for the motel, and then I went to work with the whole night still on me and his money already turned into a pill inside me. His name was on my list that morning. I stood in that room and made his bed again, and it had not been slept in, and the beds did not care what I had done the night before.

And that afternoon I saw him again. I want that down, because it is the part of that Friday I left out.

When I came off my shift at the motel he was pulled in at the end of that parking lot with the reefer off and the engine running, waiting on whatever it was they wait on, and I went out to him because he was leaving that town and I wanted the last of it. I got up in that cab with him one more time. I got his cock out and sucked him off, and when he was close I stayed on it, and he finished in my mouth and I swallowed it and I made him watch me do it, because he was the first man who had ever finished in my mouth and he had done it in the dark the night before and told me only the one thing about it, and I wanted him to know I had worked out the other one on my own. He laughed the whole way through it and said I learned quick, and called the whole thing a performance out loud, and when I got down he gave me money again and I took it that time, because he had turned it into a joke and I liked that a man could do that with me.

He smiled at me when he pulled out, and it was a different smile than he had used on me all summer, warm, and I smiled back at him and stood in that lot and watched him take the truck out onto the highway. That is the last I saw of him for a while.

And inside the month I went on the pill proper and I stayed on it, and I have stayed on it since. That is what came out of that night. It is not a good story and it is not a bad one. A man put a hundred dollars in my hand for food and I used it to make sure the night could not leave me with anything, and then I made sure of it for good. That is the most sensible thing anybody did in that whole lot.

Michael found his way back to that town, and for the rest of that summer I was the girl a married man kept in a town he only passed through. I am not going to write down what went on between us. There is another page for that and it is not this one.

What I kept out of that lot is this. I walked up that gravel at nineteen and put myself in the hands of three strange men because I wanted to be wanted and because nobody on this earth had ever wanted me for nothing, and I came back down it in the light with everything I had brought in and nothing taken off me, and that was luck. Pure luck. Not one thing that went right in that lot had anything to do with me being smart or careful or good, and I have known it every day since. What I took out of that lot was the grip I keep on my own life. I have had a hand on it the whole time and I have never once taken it off, and the reason is not the night. The reason is the morning. It is what you understand later, standing in a lot in the daylight and looking at what you walked into in the dark with your own two feet.

End of Chapter 04: Sue p.2 /POV