Instead, I blinked slowly, as if my eyes were a camera shutter, so that I could freeze my brain, extract the memory at any given time of the bliss of just this. Aunt Josie wasn’t gonna believe it. She didn’t believe half the shit that came out of my mouth, but she really wasn’t gonna believe that I could have a dream-come-true moment like this. We’d both given up on dreams, probably the night our daddies died.

She’d been begging me to move in with her ever since she’d got out of this hellhole, but I’d been held back in by Mama and all her needs. It felt good to have my needs fulfilled and as Trevor sipped his coffee he looked at me, puzzled, and said, “What about you, Darla?”

Oh my God, could the man read my mind? Was I that transparent? “What about me?” I said, a cagey tone seeping in.

Joe set his cup down, looked at Trevor, looked at me and said, “He’s right, where’s your coffee?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to admit that I didn’t have another cup.

Trevor stood, pulled the sock off himself, and started to get dressed.

“About time,” Joe said, taking another sip.

“Hey, man, I spent twenty-four hours buck naked doing God knows what.”

“I know what you were doing,” Joe said, shooting me a jaunty, slightly naughty, incredibly evil little grin.

“We were only doing that part of the time,” I said innocently, batting my eyelashes. “I have no idea what happened to him before I found him.”

“Nevertheless,” Trevor interrupted. “I’m getting dressed now but it’s not my natural state anymore.”

Joe snorted, coffee almost spraying everywhere but he held it in, a general politeness and decorum in all of his actions. As I spent more time with the two of them, even these twenty minutes or so, I saw how much of it was in Trevor too. There was a gentility that was bred into them – or maybe it was just forced into them – by so many years of being taught, or scolded, or both. It was what people around here would call snobbery – or in a more slang way they would say, You think you’re better than us?

There was a tone of that in both men, that kind of politeness, that kind of polished pattern to their words, the perfect grammar (unless they were talking smack on purpose), the near-flawless eye contact, the gestures that were well thought out and sophisticated. The whole way that they operated in one smooth, collected, classy way. No one in my life acted like this – and for sure no man in my life acted like this. I just liked watching the two of them, but I especially liked watching Trevor’s body as he slipped into the ill fitting clothes – which prompted Joe to take a final swig of his coffee, hand me the cup, and jump up out the door.

“Wait, don’t get dressed yet.” He held up one finger and sprinted outside.

“Which is it?” Trevor complained. “You want me to get dressed. You want me to not get dressed. What the hell?”

“Maybe he wants a threesome,” I joked, winking at Trevor – who went dead still.

He turned around to me with exquisite clarity and said, nostrils flaring, eyes widening, hands reaching out for me, “Is that an option?”

God knows what I might have blurted out – my mouth seems possessed half the time, conduit for God the other half – so I was grateful when Joe burst back into the room holding a small paper bag, the kind you get at really nice grocery stores that we don’t have around here.

“I brought you a change of clothes,” he said, shoving the bag at Trevor.

Still staring at me, Trevor seemed reluctant to end our conversation. I was grateful, though, for Joe’s intervention saving me from needing to answer a question no man had ever asked and that I’d assumed no man would ever ask. Around here, a threesome meant some good ol’ boy who got so drunk that he hired two women to come service him because he forgot about the first one and then ended up too drunk to perform for either of them but owed one fuck of a lot of money.

Trevor’s idea, though, had an edge to it, something that would tip us into a new dimension. I wanted to make sure before I answered that he meant what I thought he meant. Even if he didn’t, the better route was to say nothing. So, thank you Jesus, thank you God, thank you Joe.

Breaking eye contact, Trevor looked in the bag. “Awesome,” he said, nodding, pulling out a cotton t-shirt that had some sort of joke I didn’t get on it, a pair of jeans that slipped onto him like a glove, his own socks, and a pair or Merrills. He dressed with unthinking familiarity and grace. Now he just looked like any old college student.

Fumbling under the bed, he found what he was searching for and put the straw hat on his head.

“What the hell is that?” Joe asked, laughing.

“Beats me.”

“That’s what he had on him when I met him,” I said. “Well…not on him. All he wore was a guitar and a collar.”

Joe gaped at me. “A guitar?”

“That’s it. Just standing there on I-76 with his thumb in the air and a big old silly grin on his face.”

“When you put it that way, who wouldn’t stop for him?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but Trevor stopped me cold.

“Hey,” Trevor whispered, his hand snaking over my hip. The way he touched me, like he possessed me – I liked it. His lips were next to my ear and I shivered. “Thanks for last night.”

I turned around, found myself in his arms and looked up. “No, the pleasure was all mine,” I said, smiling.

Joe cleared his throat and stepped outside. “We really need to get on the road,” he called out. “Sorry.”

“I’m the sorry one,” Trevor said, his eyes full of mourning. I imagine mine were filled with more. He kissed me softly and then suddenly, like a drowning man, his hands were all over me, grabbing my ass, sliding over my ribs, cupping a breast. The passion was like a dying man going after his last meal before execution. I felt it too, the desperation, but the words that kept going through my head weren’t going to come out.

No, they weren’t. Dammit.

I wasn’t going to ask, I wasn’t gonna say we’ll meet again or you can always come back or any of the other things that raced through my brain a million times a minute because I wasn’t going to be that girl. I wouldn’t beg. I wouldn’t plead. If someone like Trevor Connor wanted me he knew damn well where I was and he could find me. The hurt I’d risk from asking would wipe away all the pleasure and the fun of the past day. I could risk having my heart broken by having him leave, but I couldn’t risk having him break my heart by saying he wouldn’t come back.

“Hang on,” he said, pulling away breathless – and then he trotted outside and said something to Joe.

Joe came back in and said, “Can I get another cup of coffee before we hit the road? I’m exhausted and Trevor can drive but – ”

“Yeah, yeah,” I stopped him in mid-sentence, poured him a cup. “It’s good. It’s all cool. Where’s Trevor?”

“He just went out to talk to his mom.”

“Oh, OK,” I said quietly.

For some reason I could hold it together when Trevor was in the room, next to me, his scent filling the air, but Joe was a stranger. He sat in silence. I didn’t know too many people who could do that. Actually, I didn’t know any people who could do that, including me. His body was tight, a bit nervous, as if he weren’t quite comfortable in that beautiful skin of his. I wondered why not. If I looked as perfect as he did I’d walk around all day admiring myself and being the most comfortable person in the room.

My mind clung to that brief little interlude just so that I could keep the tears at bay. Trevor was leaving, this madness was done, and my life…well, the clichéd thing to say would be my life would never be the same but that was a big load of shit and I knew it. My life would go back to being the same. The same thing every day, the same job which, by the way, I had to be at today at four o’clock, working a stupid four to nine shift. The same everything. Trevor had come into my life – a hitchhiker who took me for a ride when it came down to it. And now Joe was here to take Trevor back to his world and leave me stewing in mine.

I looked around my little cottage and suddenly it seemed so silly, so child-like. A little girl’s attempt at an escape from a very dismal reality. Maybe that was it? I thought as I let the tears fill my eyes, because fuck it, if Joe was gonna see me cry, Joe was gonna see me cry. When Trevor came back in he’d find a red-faced Darla and if I was never gonna see him again then why did I care?

I felt like a little four year old again, confused and not knowing why I was so sad, except now I was twenty-two and I knew exactly why I was so sad. Because I was losing the one guy I’d ever responded to on every level and that had to be OK. I had to be OK with it.

But I wasn’t OK.

“So you play with Random Acts of Crazy,” I said to Joe, hearing the shake in my own voice, hoping he was polite enough to pretend it wasn’t there.

That blindingly beautiful face turned to me. He leaned back in his chair, a little awkward now, but trying to give the impossible impression of casualness. “Yeah.”

Oh, boy. This one was talkative.

“And are you going to keep going on tour with Trevor?” I said slowly, trying to figure this guy out. Breathe, Darla, breathe, I told myself. Get through the moment and you’ll be OK. Trevor will be back in a minute. Let the man’s mom chew him out. Let him come back and say his goodbyes.

Joe looked completely stumped by that question. “Tour? We’re not – we don’t do this seriously,” he said, shrugging.

“You don’t?” I said, incredulous. “You realize how much of a following you guys have online?”

“That’s online,” Joe scoffed, waving his hand. He took a sip of his coffee and peered at me as if completely oblivious to the force that those men had become in indie music circles. As our eyes locked, we held the stare for a few seconds longer then we should have and then I broke away because it was weird. Like, really weird. There’s no way someone like that would want someone like me.

You said that about Trevor, a voice whispered in my ear.

Yeah, another voice said, and he’s leaving.

Joe

Well, this was awkward. More awkward than walking in on Trevor and Darla naked – or nearly naked. I could see what Trevor saw in her even though this woman was nothing like any of the chicks he normally banged. She was big, curvy, and what people would call full-figured back in my grandmother’s generation. In Massachusetts other women our age would call her fat and maybe she was, a little bit – but there was a deep confidence in the way that she moved her body that made her seem more substantial, more present – more there. Like someone who was real and grounded and firm.

Nobody back home would have given her two looks. Our friends would have just passed her by, so I wondered why Trevor picked her. The more I watched her, and then the more I tried not to watch her, the more I was drawn to something.

But where the hell was Trevor? This was taking too long and I was sick and tired of being chewed out by his mom. We needed to get on the road so I could get him back at a reasonable enough hour that all of this could just go away. Plus we had finals coming up. I wasn’t going to blow my senior year finals and not be able to go to law school in the fall. That would be the biggest fucking nightmare of my life and the fallout from my parents would…well, even Trevor wasn’t worth that.