Closest Encounter (6 page)

“How’d you sleep?” he asked when he had managed to reach an all-purpose enough gear for his current driving needs.

“All right,” she said.

“Any strange dreams?”

She gave him a look and said, “Maybe. You?”

“Very strange,” he said. “I dreamed we were driving the truck and got lost and ended up at a diner to ask for directions and grab a bite to eat. But in the diner everybody was naked and a woman was lying on the counter with her legs spread and shoving a bottle of syrup up herself with a pat of butter melting on each nipple. Then another waitress told us to seat ourselves, so we found a booth a little bit away from all the commotion.”

“Seems odd we would still want to eat there,” Beth said.

Brad said, “Well yeah. It was a dream, wasn’t it?”

“Fair enough. Then what happened?”

“We had coffee. You asked the waitress if she recommended anything and she said everything was good but we would do well to stay away from the sausage links.”

“Did she say why?”

“Not that I recall, but it seemed to be implied that the chef had maybe had his way with them in some unseemly fashion.”

“Coffee would seem the safer choice then.”

“Yeah. What about your dream?”

“Mine was stranger.”

She could feel him looking at her, waiting for more, but she did not know how to even begin relaying the visions she had had last night. She was not sure she even wanted to. It seemed like a rather private memory that she preferred—for the moment, at least—to keep to herself.

The truck edged slightly onto the shoulder, kicking up loose gravel in the process. Brad jerked it back onto the road.

Beth said, “In your dream, were you an especially good driver?”

“I was all right,” he said quietly.

“That was a strange dream then.”

“Oh come on,” he said and she laughed, closed her eyes and felt the vibration of the truck beneath her, half hoping that he would be forced to downshift soon. She had not intended to fall asleep.

* * * *

She was Beth but not Beth again—a graceful, beautiful translucent creature hovering above the black living sea. But no longer was she being penetrated by the searching limbs of an unseen behemoth from the depths beneath her. Rather she hovered several feet higher, the tips of her lower appendages just trailing along the water. Gazing out across the undulating waves toward a distant horizon, she thought she could just make out the shimmering existence of some other creature, much like herself. It glided toward her and Beth and not Beth felt a kind of electric anticipation. One of her appendages reached out into the air toward it, wavering like a ribbon in the wind as—

Brad ground the gears and the entire truck shuddered to a halt.

She opened her eyes, and tried not to sound irritable when she said, “What?”

“We’re lost,” he said. “I think I missed the cut-off about twenty miles back, but I’m not sure.”

“So, stop for directions?”

He nodded out the window. They were in the parking lot to a diner. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“Tell me that’s not the diner from your dream,” she said.

“Actually, it’s not
not
the diner from my dream.”

“That’s not at all what I just told you to tell me.”

He shrugged and killed the motor.

Chapter Nine

No one in the diner was lying on the counter making love to a bottle of pancake syrup, so that much was good.

“Not like your dream so far,” Beth whispered to Brad as they waited for the waitress to clean off a table in the corner for them.

“No,” he said. “So I guess sausage links are back on the menu.”

“Good to know.”

Seated, they ordered coffee first and contemplated the rest. Pancakes seemed safe enough. They both ordered those and ate mostly in silence for the first one on the stack. Brad was adding syrup to his second when he said, “You know, I’ll be a little sorry when this is all over, Beth. I’ve gotten kind of fond of hanging around with you.”

She smiled and said, “You call saving the world ‘hanging around’, Brad?”

“You know what I mean. It’s nice. And I don’t just mean because of the naked stuff we got to do—”

She nearly choked on her pancake. “Naked stuff,” she repeated.
How can anyone be so manly and boyish and adorable and handsome, all at the same time?

“You know what I mean,” he said again and of course she did, and was remembering it all vividly right that second—so vividly that she could almost feel him at the tips of her fingers and taste him in her mouth. It had been nice hanging around with him. She agreed with that part without reservation, but it would be nice to have that other stuff again too. The stuff with the nakedness. To feel his hardness against her and inside her. To feel him pulsing with his need…

Brad was just adding more syrup to his last pancake when something caught his eye. His mouth fell open slightly. He put down the syrup bottle and pushed away the plate.

“What?” Beth asked and he nodded to a spot at the opposite corner of the diner. She turned to look. At this point, it was hardly even surprising anymore. The cook had the diner hostess bent over the juke box, with one hand up her skirt and the other down her blouse.

“It seems like maybe it’s starting again,” Brad said.

“You think? We should probably get out of here before it gets any worse.”

“Damn. And these are really good pancakes,” he said, scooting from the booth and rising to his feet, only to be blocked by the sudden presence of their waitress.

“Was everything all right with your pancakes?” she asked, standing closer than good customer service warranted. Beth, who was already proceeding toward the diner exit, turned back to see Brad’s progress thwarted. The red-haired waitress standing in front of him was small and pale. Beth figured Brad could have pushed past her without much difficulty. Hell, he could have picked her up and placed her on a shelf if he had wanted to. But it was hard to say what it was that Brad wanted to do. The waitress was pretty and the look on his face was not completely unknown to her.

“Brad!” she said.

He looked at her like a person just waking from a dream.

The waitress looked at her too. Smiled a particularly red-lipped smile.

“I don’t want anyone to leave unsatisfied,” the waitress said.

“I’m sorry, miss. I have to leave,” Brad said, trying to push his way past her as gently as possible. The waitress stepped closer, pressed her small body directly against his now, reaching one dainty, porcelain-colored hand deftly into his pants, taking a firm grip on whatever she found there.

“You don’t seem like you want to leave,” she said.

“Hey now… Seriously…” Brad extricated her hand from his pants as politely as he could. “The pancakes were great. I mean, really great. But my partner and I just have a job to do… For the good of all mankind and all that…”

With a slightly awkward gait, Brad made his way by her and joined Beth at the door.

“I thought I was going to have to come after you for a second,” Beth said under her breath when he met her at the door.

“For a second, I thought you were too.”

As she grabbed the handle of the door, a second hand, thick and meaty, enveloped her own, preventing her from turning the knob.

“Why you leaving so soon, honey?” the owner of the hand said. It was the short order cook. He looked like he was about to say more but Beth cut him off with a quick, sharp punch to the face. The short order cook staggered backward, away from the door. Beth and Brad exited quickly across the parking lot to the truck.

Brad said, “Hey, I want you to know. I was completely prepared to punch that guy myself.”

“I know you were,” she said. “Turns out you didn’t have to.”

“Also, I wasn’t really going to fuck that waitress.”

“And I was prepared to punch her if you had.”

“Turns out you didn’t have to,” he said.

She smiled to herself. She believed him. It was a pretty impressive display of willpower on his part, she thought, given the effects the alien object had had in the past on lesser men and mailmen alike.

They got in the truck. Brad started the engine, found a gear, found a different gear that worked better, then pulled the truck out of the lot and back onto the road in what they hoped was still more or less the right direction.

* * * *

A mile later, on what seemed like a forgotten highway through empty fields, and boarded-up factories, Beth said, “Pull over.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I want you,” she said. “Right now. We’re not going to find our way to the right road until we can clear our heads a little.”

“You’re so sexy when you’re being pragmatic,” he said.

“Seriously,” she said. “Pull over. I need you inside me.”

Brad down-shifted the truck to a crawl, hit the brakes and put it in Park at the side of the road.

Beth was already unbuttoning her blouse when she asked, “Did you successfully down-shift and park this truck without a single mistake just because there was a good chance of sex for you once you did?”

“My understanding was that it was a better than good chance,” Brad said, removing his shirt, unbuckling his belt, and sliding off his pants and underwear in one not entirely graceful move. His cock stood at perfect attention.

“Better than good,” she said, leaning forward to take his cock into her hands, pressing her lips against the bulbous head of it, flicking the taste of him from the tip. Her warm breath against the soft skin there made a shudder run through him. His hands moved through her hair with surprising gentleness as she lowered her face onto his shaft, taking nearly the whole of him into her mouth, gripping his girth at the base, sliding her hand with a gentle, teasing urgency along the flesh made slick with her saliva.

He slid her blouse from her shoulders, let his fingers trace the line of her back as her tongue swirled over his cock. With some reluctance, she let him slide out of her mouth, kissed the head, running the length of his cock with the tip of her tongue, feeling the pulse of him beating in the shaft.

She sat up, removed her shirt and bra the rest of the way and tossed them onto the dashboard. She kicked off her shoes, undid and slid off her pants. She was about to remove the last thing—her panties—when his hands on her hips stopped her. He hooked his fingers around the waistband and drew them down until she could kick them the rest of the way off. As he did, his lips and tongue grazed the firm swell of her belly.

A moan slipped from her lips. She felt his smile on her skin and she cradled his head there against her for a second before rising up to straddle his lap.

The head of his cock, as if possessed of either magical powers or heat seeking technology, found the mouth of her pussy instantly and she dropped herself onto him, feeling the entirety of his impressive cock enter her at once.

Her face fell against his bare shoulder, her mouth open, breathing warmly into his hard flesh.

“Oh God,” she said.

Not the most original thing to say with a cock filling you from your nerve endings to your center, but she said it anyway and sincerely. It was a sensation beyond words. “Oh God” would have to do.

His hands held her hips with firm tenderness as she writhed, her clit pressing against his hard dick as she leaned toward him, her nipples just grazing his chest.

She may have said “Oh God” again.

His own sounds were even less articulate. They were animalistic moans that vibrated against her as his mouth pressed hotly to the hollow of her neck, the rise of her collarbone, the erect tip of each breast.

With one hand she held onto his shoulder like the horn of a saddle while the other traveled down the rippled muscles of his torso before finally reaching the point where their bodies met. Her clit was slick with her juices and fairly jumped at her touch.

She rose and fell upon him again and again, her back arching at the touch of his hands, her fingers blurring across her wet clit as he entered, his own hips rising to meet each thrust. He filled her, but she was not full. She wanted him in her deeper and forever.

“Fuck me,” she said into his ear. It was unnecessary. He was and he continued to, while everything she had ever felt seemed to be balling up in preparation of an explosion inside her.

Her hips slammed down hard and repeatedly against him. All her nerve endings sparked and the smell and sound of their wet flesh slapping filled the air of the truck’s cabin.

Something deep within her—too profound to describe as a tickle—began to grow till it was like every molecule of her was bouncing off the other. And somehow, as if temporarily possessed of a superhuman awareness, she could feel the tension of the cock inside her building to its inevitable explosion. His breath was ragged, his flesh damp with his sweat. His hands gripped her hips and she swore she could feel his cock vibrating inside her, pulsing, ready to explode.
She rushed to meet him, her fingers blurring across the slick, enflamed flesh of her cunt where he split her open and thrust in and out with increasing necessity.

He exploded inside her, the sensation of his cum shooting into her just the extra thing she needed to send her over the edge. Her hips spasmed uncontrollably on him, squeezing out each drop from him as she climaxed, her brain erupting into a thousand sensations that became just one overpowering feeling of a series of hot waves crashing over her.

She collapsed against him, feeling every bit like a rubber band that had been stretched to the end of the universe and snapped back again.

It took a while for either one of them to breathe normally again.

They found their clothes and dressed. Brad started the truck engine, figured out the gear and lurched it forward back onto the road.

A few miles later they found a crossroad that led back to the main highway.

“See?” Beth said. “We just needed to clear our heads.”

Brad said, “Uh-huh.”

“It was very practical fucking.” But even as she said it, some part of her didn’t quite believe her own words. It had been more than that.