by Roxie Noir
It’s someone new, thought Seth. Maybe they’ll give me a ride.
He stood up straight and waved at the truck with both arms, stepping slightly into the road, and to Seth’s relief, the truck slowed to a crawl.
Very gingerly, the truck drove to the side of the road, parking behind Seth’s truck, the dusty windshield obscuring his view of the driver.
Seth waited, smiling to himself.
They can’t have been here for long at all, he thought. Still driving carefully like that.
As an Obsidian native, Seth had never learned to drive carefully. For that matter, he’d never driven a car that wasn’t almost as old as he was — and as he got older, the cars got dicier and dicier.
The door to the other truck opened.
A vision stepped out.
Seth’s mouth went dry and all he could taste was dust, his vision narrowing in suddenly, forming a black tunnel around the short, curvy girl who’d just awkwardly hopped out of the truck.
The sheer lust was near-instant and dizzying, not to mention baffling. Seth had never felt anything like it before, and he shook his head, trying to clear away the tunnel and restore himself.
It didn’t work. His heart beating wildly, feeling like it had grown wings and was trying to escape his chest.
What the hell is happening? He wondered. Am I having a heart attack? Am I dehydrated and delirious?
She shoved the door of her truck shut, squinting at him, a wide-brimmed hat casting a long shadow over her face.
Do I know her?
Calm down, Seth. You’ve met attractive women before, you know.
The girl put one hand on her hip and addressed him.
“Your truck break down?” she asked. The wind gusted and she held the top of her hat to her head, even though she had the chin strap securely fastened.
Seth stared. Then he swallowed.
Answer her, dumbass, he thought.
“Yeah,” he said.
Charming, he thought.
She blinked and walked to the front of her truck, pausing. Even though she was wearing a long-sleeved button down white shirt, jeans, and big, ugly hiking boots, Seth couldn’t stop staring. The swell of her breasts, the curve of her waist, and the way her ass looked in those jeans awakened something deep inside him that he didn’t think had ever awakened before.
“You need a jump or something?” she asked. “I’ve got cables somewhere, I think.”
Seth shook his head and jammed his hands in his pocket.
Suddenly, he found himself totally unable to remember what people did with their hands when they talked.
“It’s beyond a jumpstart, I think,” he said. “I’m closer to needing a fire extinguisher.”
The girl wrinkled her nose, a sea of freckles cascading together.
“Shit, that’s no good,” she said. “I haven’t got one of those. How bad do you need it?”
Seth shrugged, and felt a smile tug at his lips.
“I don’t yet,” he told her, looking back at the truck behind him. “At least, not unless I torch the thing myself.”
To his relief, she laughed.
“That’s one way to solve that problem,” she said.
“There’s nothing out here to burn anyway,” he said. “Maybe I ought to and then collect the insurance money.”
Not that I can afford car insurance, he thought.
The girl laughed, and Seth felt his heart explode again.
I made her laugh! He thought. It made him happier than anything else he’d done for at least a week.
“You need a ride, then?” she asked. “I’m sort of headed off into the middle of nowhere, but I’m not on a schedule, so I can take you back into Obsidian, or wherever.”
“That would be wonderful,” Seth said.
He reached into the passenger side seat of his truck and grabbed his aluminum lunch box and jacket. If he worked after sundown, like he did pretty often for the overtime, it got cold, fast.
Seth took the rebar out of the truck’s hood, slammed it shut, and tossed the metal back into the bed with an enormous clang, making the girl jump just a little.
“Sorry,” he said. “This thing’s a tank, so sometimes I get a little rough with her.”
She just nodded, and if Seth hadn’t known better, he would have sworn that he could see some color rising to her cheeks.
“Is it locked?” she asked.
“Nah,” he said, walking around to the side of her truck. “Anyone who can steal that thing right now deserves it, if they can get it running.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Seth was more attached to the truck than he wanted to admit, even to himself. After all, his parents had owned it, and every time he got into it, for a second he was ten again, sitting in the middle seat, shifting gears when his dad gave him the go-ahead.
He tried not to get nostalgic, though. It was just a truck. Nothing more than a way to get from home to work and back, and not even a good one at that.
Before the girl got into the truck, she took off her big hat and placed it carefully on top of a canvas bag sitting in the back of the cab. There was a tight red bun coiled messily at the nape of her neck, curls and twists of hair already sticking out of it.
“All right,” she said. “Where are you heading?”
Seated, she looked over at him with hazel eyes, green in the center and brown around the edges, and Seth felt like he was looking downward into a perfect, refreshing pool of water in a forest, falling into her gaze.
She raised her eyebrows.
“A couple more miles down this road,” he said. “There’s a left turn, then a construction site a little ways down it. It’s the only thing out here, hard to miss.”
“Got it,” she said, turning the key and bringing the truck’s rumbling engine to life. “You work construction?”
Seth nodded. “There’s not too many jobs out here, but that’s one of them. This one’s funded by the federal government, but that’s all I know.”
The truck clunked into gear, and the girl checked her mirrors, looking carefully over her shoulder. Seth couldn’t help but chuckle.
“What?” she said, sounding just a little defensive.
“Nothing,” he said. “You seem like you’re new out here. Locals don’t check their mirrors much. If something were coming, you’d know.”
The truck eased onto the dirt road, and the girl smiled a little, just barely blushing, and Seth could feel the matching heat rise in himself.
“Good point,” she said. “You’re right, I’m new.”
“I’m Seth, by the way,” he said. “What brings you to Obsidian? We don’t get much fresh blood out here.”
Could you seem creepier? He reprimanded himself. Really, fresh blood?
“Juliana,” she said. She held out her right hand, hovering over the stick shift as she barreled along the road, and he took it.
He felt like he dwarfed her, his hand easily a third bigger than hers, and he took it gently, almost afraid of hurting her.
“That’s your handshake?” she said, shooting him a teasing glance with those hazel eyes. “Come on, I thought you worked construction.”
Seth squeezed harder, feeling the flesh of their hands press together, little jolts of electricity running up and down his arm.
Juliana smiled, glancing between him and the road.
“Better,” she said, shifting gears again. “Everyone calls me Jules, by the way.”
“That seems a little more fitting,” Seth said, settling back into the truck’s bucket seat. He redirected one of the AC vents so it was hitting him right in the face, letting the cool air wash over him.
“Juliana seems a little formal,” he said. “Princesses in poofy dresses, that kind of thing,” he said.
“Yeah, I think my mom was hoping for a girlier girl when I was born,” she said. “I’ve got three older brothers, so she put me in a lot of tutus and stuff, but I’d just get them muddy immediately.”
For a moment,
an image came to mind: Jules in a mudpit, her clothes sticking to her curves like glue, her laughing and tugging on his arm.
Engines, he told himself sternly, fighting an erection. Serpentine belts and transmissions and brake fluid.
It worked, but barely.
“What brings you to Obsidian?” he asked.
“I’m a staff geologist for Quarcom,” she said. “I’m doing some testing on a big mining project that they’re doing out here.”
Seth frowned and looked at her.
“There’s a mining project?” he asked.
Deep down, he had a sudden inkling of trouble. A mine, in Obsidian? He’d seen other towns turn into little more than giant waste pits from big mining operations.
“Yeah, it’s way out in the middle of nowhere,” she said, gesturing at the desert. “They put me up in a trailer for a little while, and then I’m off to whatever the next place is.”
That made his heart squeeze, like talons had closed around it
“How much longer are you here?” he asked. “That’s the turnoff, by the way,” he said, pointing.
“Just a few days,” she said. “I’m almost done, and then they break ground.”
She downshifted and the truck rumbled onto the side road, this one even rougher than the dirt road they’d been on.
“They don’t pave much out here, do they?” she muttered to herself, leaning forward in her seat, peering through the dusty windshield.
“There’s really no point,” said Seth. “The dirt is almost as hard as asphalt, it never rains so it never gets muddy, and we’ve all got high-clearance trucks already.”
Up ahead, construction equipment loomed, and Jules pulled in next to it. A few guys in hard hats looked up from pouring concrete to the girl in the truck.
“Thanks for the ride,” Seth said.
“My pleasure,” said Jules. Then she looked away from him quickly, and Seth thought that she blushed a little.
“I know you’re not in town for much longer, but I could show you around a little. As payment,” Seth said, grinning at her.
In his chest, his heart thumped, its wings beating at his ribcage.
Her eyebrows went up, and a mischievous sparkle came into her green-brown eyes.
“You gonna take me to the auto parts store?” Jules said, teasingly.
She had a good point.
“I can borrow a car,” said Seth. “I know people. Come on, I’ll pick you up in the nicest Ford from the 1980s that I can find.”
This time, she laughed out loud.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sold.”
She reached into the glovebox and grabbed a pen and paper, writing her number down, then holding it out toward him between two fingers.
“If we don’t at least go to the laundromat-slash-bar-slash-diner-slash-general store, I’m going to be very disappointed,” she said, her eyes dancing.
Seth grabbed the paper and hoisted his arm over the back of his seat.
“Jules, I know the owner of the laundromat-slash-bar-slash-diner-slash-general store personally, and I will get you the finest slice of strawberry pie that Obsidian has to offer.”
Now her cheeks were bright pink, obscuring her freckles just a little.
“Sounds good,” she said, and then added, her voice a little more subdued, “Can’t wait.”
Seth’s heart soared.
He hopped out of her truck and then waved as she drove away, disappearing back down the road they’d driven in on.
Behind him, he heard a long, low whistle.
“Least you’ve got a good reason for being late this morning,” said Brad. He stood with his hands on his hips, his dirty t-shirt tucked into dirty jeans accentuating his paunch.
“My truck’s busted again,” said Seth, watching Jules drive away. “I got a ride.”
“I’ll say,” said Brad, waggling his eyebrows at Seth, who had to force himself to laugh.
It wasn’t that Brad was funny, it was that he was still giddy from getting Jules’s number.
“She was nice,” he said, trying to downplay the whole thing, even as his heart hammered in his chest.
“She new?” asked Brad. “Don’t recognize the truck.”
“Only here for a little while, doing something or other for a mine that’s going in,” Seth said.
He frowned, remembering that part of his drive. A mine near Obsidian?
Maybe it’s nothing, he told himself. At least, I hope so.
“Passing like two ships in the night,” said Brad, like he was trying to sound philosophical.
Seth gave him a funny look, and Brad just shrugged.
“It’s from a book or something,” he said. “Come on, this concrete’s not gonna pour itself.”
Seth grabbed his helmet, put his lunchbox in the lunch area under a tent, and got to work.
2. Jules
Jules kept her eyes glued to the rearview mirror as she drove away from the construction site. Seth didn’t move, just watched her as she drove away.
She’d thought she might be having heart palpitations, and prayed that he hadn’t noticed how sweaty her palms were on the steering wheel. Inside, she was practically shaking with nerves, remembering the look in his gold-brown eyes.
I don’t even know whether to be pleased or angry, she thought. I finally find the one super-hot guy in town, and it’s when I’ve only got three or four more days here.
The truck jolted over a pothole as she picked up speed, and she made an involuntary oof noise, hitting the brakes.
“So much for driving like a local,” she muttered to herself.
She had her GPS mounted to the dashboard, but it wasn’t much to look at: just one line stretching off into the desert with a red dot at the far end, the site where she was supposed to be testing dirt mercury levels after Quarcom had sunk a few preliminary holes.
Not for the first time, she felt bad about her job. It wasn’t the work itself that she disliked — far from it. She’d always been a big dork who liked getting dirty and playing in the mud, so hiking for miles to collect dirt and rock suited her pretty well. Plus, she actually liked the lab work, the puzzle of figuring out how to get the information that she wanted from what she had, and then trying to put it all together into a bigger picture.
It was Quarcom she wasn’t quite sure about. She told herself that someone was going to do her job, whether it was her or not, and that she was actually helping the world by making sure that Quarcom didn’t do too much harm to the environment.
The thing was, it still felt like a lot of harm sometimes. On her last job, in Canada, she’d watched as they razed mountaintops and flooded a river in the far north, all to mine toxic metals so that people the world over could have cell phones. Sure, someone was going to do her job, but did it have to be her?
She went over another bump in the road, lurching around, and the seatbelt across her chest dug in uncomfortably. Jules made a face and tried to rearrange the thing so that it didn’t dig quite so much into her boobs, but she knew a losing battle when she saw one. It didn’t help that the truck had clearly been made with someone about eight inches taller than her in mind, not to mention that the truck’s ideal owner didn’t have breasts.
I should have taken the USGS job, she thought, and not for the first time. After college, she’d figuratively hit gold and gotten two job offers — especially amazing, since most of the other kids she knew were moving back in with their parents and working at fast food joints, utterly unable to find any kind of work in their fields.
The United States Geological Survey job had sounded interesting, and it could have led to more research and fieldwork, maybe even influencing environmental policy.
The job with Quarcom had sounded interesting, too, despite her reservations.
It had also paid fifty percent more than the USGS job.
She’d taken a night to think it over, staying in her parents’ little house in the mountains of West Virginia, a couple of hours from Morgantow
n, where she’d gone to school.
That night, after dinner there’d been a knock on the door, and her mom had answered it as her dad washed the dishes.
“Hi, Mrs. McCade,” said a vaguely familiar voice. Jules had gotten up from the kitchen table and stepped to one side to get a look at the guy at the door.
“Do you have ten dollars I could borrow?” he asked with a slight lisp.
Jules gasped when she saw who it was: Bobby Hale. They’d gone to high school together. She’d been wildly uncool, but he’d been the quarterback of the football team, dated the head cheerleader, the whole nine yards.
Now, he was skinny, his hair dull, his eyes sunken in. He was missing at least half of his teeth, and the remaining ones were turning gray in his mouth.
“Bobby, you know I don’t truck with that,” Jules’s mom said, her voice stern.
“Please, Mrs. McCade, they turned the electricity off again so we ain’t got no way to cook...” he said, his voice trailing off.
“I’m sorry, Bobby,” her mother said firmly.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Bobby muttered, and then turned and walked away.
When her mom turned, Jules could see the tears just starting in her eyes.
“Was that Bobby Hale?” Jules whispered.
Her mom just nodded.
“There was an accident in the mine and he hurt his back pretty good, so he can’t work no more. Collects disability, and the doctors put him on pain pills. He found his own way to meth.”
Jules covered her mouth with her hand, and her mother fixed her with a steely look.
“There but for the grace of God goes you,” she said, her mouth a hard line. “If your father had ever gotten hurt like that, we’d be right where Bobby is, and don’t you forget it.”
The next morning, Jules had accepted the job with Quarcom. She put nearly half of every paycheck into a savings account, and the rest went to food, rent, and her student loans.
In the truck, Jules could see the red dot coming up on her GPS, even though there was still nothing that she could see out the windshield, no matter how hard she squinted.
Could be wrong, she thought. I used latitude and longitude, though. Ought to be something out here.
