LAST EXIT TO BABYLON

LAST EXIT TO BABYLON

Chapter One

Need Gas

The highway does the talking. Radio low. Bugs in the high beams that never make it as far as the glass.

Dean drives with one wrist on the wheel. Rae has her bare feet on the dash, ankles crossed, travel skirt fallen back to mid-thigh. The L’eggs are cheap and honest in the instrument light — Silken Sheers, egg-pack thin, the kind a drugstore puts by the register. When the car hits a seam in the road the nylon whispers.

Dean glances over and doesn’t bother hiding it.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” he says. “The legs. The hose. I’m trying to keep this thing in the lane.”

Rae flexes her toes in the sheer and grins at him.

“I put them on for you, babe” she says. “So you’d spend the whole drive thinking about getting your mouth on them when we stop.”

He laughs under it, the sound he always makes when she gives him that one. He takes her left foot off the dash just long enough to kiss the instep through the nylon and set it back. The scent of skin mixed with nylon and the sweat from her flats. Shivers travel though him.

“God, they stink.”

“You love it.”

“I so do.”

He kisses once more.

A green mile-marker slides past. The fuel light has been on long enough to become a joke. Dean taps the gauge with one finger.

“Princess wants gas. And I want a drink. 7-up for you?”

“Yes, please,” she says. “And don’t forget the ice. These feet will be waiting for you when we are back on the road.”

He takes the exit still smiling. The ramp dumps them into a bright little island that already looks like the last one — pumps, a low store, bugs working the canopy like they pay rent.

Dean kills the engine. Heat holds the lot. He takes the wallet from the console. Rae finds her flats. Skirt down when she stands, far enough to hide the seam where the control top meets the sheers. She shakes a cigarette from the pack in the door pocket.

“You coming in?”

“I’ll be at the door,” she says. “I need a smoke.”

He leans in and she lets him have a real kiss, mouth and a little hum in it, her hand on his chest.

“Hurry back,” she says. They exchange smiles.

The store is too bright after the highway. A bell on the glass. Cold from the coolers. A line at the counter that is not a line until Dean joins it — a man counting change, a clerk with a register that wants a code, a woman arguing about a lottery ticket that did not hit. Dean takes a place behind the change-counter and looks at the drinks the way a man looks at a promise he already made. Lime. Water. Ice if they have a bag that isn’t leaking. He is still thinking about her mouth on the word hose. He is still thinking she is in a good mood.

Through the glass door he can see a slice of the lot: her shoulder, smoke, the ...