A gentle tug on my hair made me look up to find a loopy grin plastered across his face, the eyes warm and caring. “Hold on there. I want to make sure we take care of you, too.”

Huh?

Trevor’s warm hands slid under my shirt, then stopped as he leaned across the stick shift to come in for a kiss.

“Oh, shit!” he declared, looking past me out the window. Familiar blue and red flashes caught the periphery of my vision. Cop car. Staties, most likely. Trevor’s hand reached into the back seat and flailed for his hat, the only piece of covering we had in the entire car unless you counted a crumpled McDonald’s bag, which at this point might very well need to count.

Because Trevor deserved a break today.

“Damn it,” I whispered under my breath as Trevor put his hat back on and we watched the lights. Our lucky night (or not), for they sped on by, leaving us with racing hearts and erect nerve endings, both a sign of frustration and arousal that neither could ignore.

And yet…this was a message from whatever power managed this fucked-up universe of atrocious timing. I could tell from the disappointed look on Trevor’s face that he understood, too, that we needed to find a different way through the next thirteen hours before his friend came and got him.

With a heavy heart I turned to him, mouth open to say the words, and then he lunged at me and licked the words away, his mouth eager and needy, those hands on my breasts and around my back, clinging to me and making me feel special. Trying to explain it defies the feeling, the hot breath between kisses in my ear, how those hands possessed me, the push of his torso against mine like a communion of bodies. Sensual and sultry and defiant, what his body said to me as he ate away the space between us was let me take you.

My body answered hell, yeah!

But where? My car was all-too-public, and now that we’d had a taste of fear of law enforcement, it made no sense to allow ourselves to be caught like this.

The screech of metal against metal assaulted my ears as he pulled back, that wicked grin on his mischievous face inviting me to join him as he put one finger over his lips in a shhhhh gesture and opened his door.

“What are you doing?” The night was oddly warm for early May in Ohio, especially our part, where the remnants of giant snow piles could be taking up whole parking spaces still, trickled down to little ice bergs along the perimeters of parking lots. This was more a light flannel shirt and tent night, neither of which I had for him, my own shirt keeping me just warm enough, but offering absolutely zero to cover naked tight-butt man as he unfolded himself from my car and stood, beckoning me to climb out and follow him on antics my pulsating core begged me to engage in.

No need to ask twice. Scurrying out, I shoved my keys in my purse and grabbed it, then walked around his side, astounded by how tall and lithe he was, body like a lyric of flesh. An idea hit me – Jesus, Darla, could you be any stupider?

A quick scurry backwards and my hands pulled my keys out of my purse and I popped the trunk. Score! A cheap Mylar blanket and my old raincoat, bought at the Goodwill in Kent on a crazy night of nightclubbing a few months ago.

Trevor’s jaw dropped. “You had this the whole time?” he gasped, pointing at the coat.

Warmth flooded my face as a wave of embarrassment hit me, hard. “It wasn’t at the top of my mind.” I handed him the coat, which he held in his hand, a pensive look on his features as the moonlight brought his handsome face into stark relief. I grabbed the Mylar blanket and began to unfold it.

He grabbed my hand and we sprinted to a grove of pine trees a good distance from the shit-brick building, far away from prying eyes and the streetlamps designed to make such pit stops safer.

Who needs safe when you want to have your brains fucked silly, to come under the moonlight in waves of need so pent up it’s almost painful to release them?

Not me. I spread the Mylar blanket out as if we were on a picnic, about to feast on some tasty little snacks. Which we were.

Kinda.

Pulling me down to the ground, Trevor got himself comfortable, my raincoat bunched up like a pillow and the moonlight spilling over and illuminating him like some sort of painting in a museum. Except I couldn’t have sex with a painting in the Louvre (well, not legally), yet here I was, about to touch and explore and feel this one.

I cringed as his sculpted ass nestled itself on a bed of pine needles, the Mylar blanket so small it barely held one body. “You OK?” I asked.

“I will be when I’m in you,” he growled. Growled! “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said softly, his hand caressing my jawbone as I lay down next to him.

It made me laugh. “That’s nice, but you don’t have to lie. I don’t need a line to convince me to sleep with you, Trevor.” Maybe I’d become cynical a little too early in life, or maybe it was just from being in a town where the height of sensuality was a pole dancing bar, but this was a little too suave for my needs.

His hand froze and he frowned. “It’s not a line. I mean it. I’ve never slept with anyone outside at a rest area while hitchhiking naked.” His lips pressed into an impish smirk.

“So I’m popping your naked hitchhiking in Ohio cherry?” I laughed, his hand unbuttoning my pants, breath hot on my shoulder, the night air and his focused attention making the world pinpoint into nothing but him and me, our bodies like a little dimension that crowded out the rush of cars speeding on the road behind us, the glare of security lights in the distance, the flutter of new moths riding light breezes.

“You should be honored.”

“Oh, I’m – ” With a powerful pull my jeans were down around my knees and his mouth was on my belly, tongue licking a little trail to a place most guys around here would plow but not, well –

My fingers ran through his wavy, blond hair and it felt like I could do this forever, just rest on a cheap rescue blanket under a layer of pine tree branches that blocked out the moon, the clouds, and the rest of the world. My needs were small. A rest area on an Ohio interstate was like the penthouse suite of the Times Square Marriott right now. As long as I had Trevor with me, preferably naked and aroused, the world was all mine.

Mine.

And then the searchlight gone and ruined everything, a blinding, harsh, artificial ray of all-consuming white light that made us both pull back and fling our arms in front of our eyes, like a still picture from any standard alien encounter movie.

To my everlasting, supernatural horror, I would have preferred aliens over what came next: the voice of the last man I fucked shouting, “Get your naked ass off Darla right this fucking second, or I’ll shoot!”

Trevor

The first time I stared down a searchlight, it was the Wayland cops catching me and some friends on the baseball field at the high school, chugging cheap beer someone’s older brother had gotten for us. We thought we were so badass, a bunch of ninth-graders breaking all the official rules, getting chewed out not by our parents, but by the cop, about how our permanent records would be ruined and we’d never get into a top-10 school. The fucking cop was worried about our chances at Harvard because we drank a few cans of beer.

Can you blame me for sucking down every drug I could get my hands on for the next four years, to find some sort of escape from being so tightly controlled that law enforcement officers were like school counselors?

Call it a hunch, but I had a feeling this cop didn’t give a shit about whether I’d be able to get into Harvard or not. Holy shit, was that a shotgun he was pointing at us?

It was.

Being naked, with my face against Darla’s bare belly, was about the most vulnerable situation I could be in. Add in a shotgun, which made my raging boner become a sack of tiny potatoes, and the first deep rumblings of fear coursed through me. I really could die right here, right now, without ever seeing my family again. Never perform on stage again.

Never make love to Darla. Ever.

Because some yokel cop pointed a gun at us.

“Jesus H. Christ, Davey, get that damn gun off us,” Darla shouted, struggling to prop herself up on her elbows as I backed off her, slowly, my skin cold now from the night air. “Way to kill the mood.”

The light and gun lowered slowly, the man peering out at us. He was wearing a uniform and a badge, and had a beer belly that made standing up defy the laws of physics. “You OK, Darla Jo? What’s this guy doin’ to you?”

“You know him?” I whispered.

She struggled to pull her pants up, face flushed and loose, with a touch of anger and embarrassment I began to resent – not that she didn’t have every right to feel all that, but the intrusion made my fists clench and my temper rise, protective and defensive of her. I wanted to be the one she was thinking about right now. More than that, I wanted to be in her right now. Darla was so responsive, so eager, and so willing – man, if we had an entire night together, and, preferably, an actual bed…the places we could go.

My needs were very basic these days. Pants. A bed. I might as well have been galaxies away from Sudborough, where camping meant no mints on the pillow and denying a kid his cell phone for an hour was akin to waterboarding.

“I do, indeed, know him,” she hissed furiously, fingers clumsy as she struggled to button her pants. “What the hell are you doing here, Davey?” she called out to the cop.

“I got off my shift and was driving by and saw your car. Figured it broke down again and you needed some help.” Davey frowned at me, his features already drawn into a deep scowl by nature, it appeared, which meant the frown made him look like an angry lunatic. Tall and big in a way most men weren’t in my area of Massachusetts, he had a beer gut but arms and legs that were normal, a bit muscular but mostly gone to pasture. Coloring like mine, but the blue eyes were a rheumy and yellowed, faded like something that spent too much time in beer-soaked sun. He was older than us – maybe thirty? – and the adrenaline that fear had pumped through me receded like his hairline, fading into a bald calm.

“Get some clothes on, man,” he sputtered, turning away.

“I can’t,” I answered honestly, reaching for the blanket, which I wrapped around me. It felt like a lifeline, to finally have something that I could use to cover myself. Simple pleasures. Stripped down to nothing, I was finding myself more than I ever had while I was surrounded by so many riches. Seriously – give me Darla, pants, a good burger and some condoms and I had found the meaning of life.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” he bellowed, marching toward me. The way he walked told me a great deal; I could outrun him easily, and this was going to be more about using our wits than any brawn.

Except for the wild card of his shotgun.

“Davey, get the fuck out of here,” Darla charged. From the way she used her voice and the arm that stretched out, pointing to his car, it was clear she had no fear for the cop, and a part of me cringed in horror as I rose up in awe. Hot damn, she was one tough, determined woman. No sickly, gym-toned BU girl would defy a cop like that. She might call Daddy and get his lawyers to chase like yippy dogs after the police force, after the fact, but face-to-face confrontation like this, no holds barred? No fucking way.