It was cold as fuck.

Pewter gray clouds scudded in from the west, moving low and fast as I stood in line for the bus at the Greyhound terminal in Des Moines, Iowa. Dawn bloomed as a small ball of muted yellow, cowering underneath the stratus. I huddled inside my winter coat, the hood shielding my head, my hands pulled up inside the sleeves, trying to keep to a minimum my exposure to the chilly morning air.

My belongings were in the backpack next to me.

I was twenty years old.

The bus driver motioned me forward. As he took my ticket I looked back along the line of seats, scanning for a large unused space at the back of the bus where I could put down my pack, kick back and stretch out.

The bus driver returned my ticket to me and gestured half-heartedly to the back of the bus. I wrestled my backpack awkwardly down the center aisle of the bus, looking for a place large enough for me and my stuff. All I wanted to do was throw my pack onto a seat and lean my head against the window and let the vibration of the glass against my head numb me into an uneasy sleep until I arrived in Minneapolis.

I walked the length of the bus. No empty rows of chairs. Everyone had taken the window seat in their own row. Someone had laid out on the very back bus seat and appeared to be sleeping. In order to sit down I was going to have to take a seat next to someone.

Fuck.

A kid bobbing his head to the beat on his Walkman sat in the seat in front of the sleeping figure. I resigned myself to sitting next to him.

“You wanted to sit back here, didn’t you?”

I turned and looked down at the person who had laid down in the back seat. A young woman met my gaze. She appeared lost in the thick oversized hoodie she wore. The hood covered half her face.

“I did the same thing,” she told me. “I wanted the back of the bus all to myself. But someone else was here, some old guy. So I had to sit in the seat up front, next to that kid listening to Zeppelin on his Walkman, until the old guy got off the bus. When he did I took the back of the bus over. I didn’t want to take any more chances. I’m sorry. It was rude of me.”

I didn’t know what else to add. “It’s okay,” I said. I flung my pack onto the racks above and prepared to sit.

“You can sit here,” she said. “Next to me. If you want. I mean, it’s a free country.” She looked down and away, toward the cheap ripped plastic of the upholstery.

I’d made her feel awkward. Now I had to decide between acting on my guilt and sitting next to her, and my desire to sit by myself and turn off my brain for the next four to five hours.

Guilt won.

I sat down next to her. She kept her gaze averted from me, and I assumed she still felt awkward about our initial encounter.

“I don’t mind,” I told her. “I wouldn’t mind somebody to talk to either. It’s gonna be a long trip.”

She turned toward me, smiling brightly. “Yay! I love to talk!”

I didn’t love to talk.

I couldn’t figure out if she was conventionally attractive or not. Her body was fully camouflaged by her gigantic hoodie and a long, loose, colorful skirt. Her wide, over-eager eyes took up all the focus when I looked at her face, locking onto my sporadic eye contact like a tractor beam. Her nose looked red and raw, as if she was recovering from a cold. Her full lips were pocked with ragged skin, chapped and peeling.  

I tried to picture here dressed nicely, with makeup, and minus the redness and chapping.

I really didn’t want to spend the day talking to her if she was unattractive.

I was twenty years old.

I sat down next to her.

She said, “I gotta admit, I saw you walk onto the bus and hoped you’d come back here. I’m glad you did.”

I shrugged off the compliment, not wanting to get overly involved.

“I was just looking for a place to sit,” I told her.

“So sit,” she said. I realized I’d offended her again. I hated when women were angry with me.

“Where are you going?” I asked her. I tried to sound friendly. Friendlier, anyway.

“Minnesota.”

“Well, yeah, but where in Minnesota?”

“Owatona.” The observation that she was only giving me one word answers was not lost on me. “You?”

At least it was a question. I told her, “I’m going to Minneapolis. I have a friend there. Gonna live on their couch for awhile.” It was a true statement, strictly speaking, but it left out most of the important details. The gender of the friend remained conveniently hidden.

“Are you moving there?”

“I dunno. Yeah. Maybe.” I didn’t know what I was going to do.

“Well, it’s a nice city. Lotsa good music.”

The conversation lapsed. A few more people entered the bus and took their seats, none of them near us. The driver closed the folding front doors, started up with a wheeze of diesel, and shifted into gear. The bus lurched out of its bay in the Greyhound terminal and onto the slushy surface streets of Des Moines, Iowa. Within five minutes we’d merged onto Interstate 35, headed north.

Minneapolis was six hours away.

We were out of downtown Des Moines within minutes. The suburbs disappeared behind us within a half an hour, and rolling, snow-covered hills stretched to the horizon in every direction. I’d grown up in that landscape, and had always found it repetitive and dull, the monotonous conformity of the scenery a perfect match for the people who chose to live there.

Or so I thought. I was twenty years old.

“My uncle lives in Owatona,” she said. “He got me a job at Dunkin Donuts. I’ll have to pay him a little rent, but not much. It’s a small town. I can save money, stay out of trouble this time, figure out what I want to do next.”

My interest perked up a little. “You were in trouble?”

She laughed, loudly enough for others to turn around.

“Oops, sorry.” She laughed again anyway. “Yeah, I was in a little trouble.” She paused, waiting for me to ask what kind of trouble.

“What kind of trouble?” I had nothing else to do.

“Whaddaya got?” she said, laughing again. “Sorry. Again. That’s from an old movie. I dunno what happened. It doesn’t matter, you don’t care.”

I didn’t want her to think that. “Try me,” I said.

“Okay. I saw a dead guy.”

“You saw a dead guy.”

“Yep. I saw a dead guy.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.” She laughed again. I was beginning to recognize she laughed a lot. “The guy next door got shot. By his girlfriend or his wife or somebody. We were partying in my apartment, next door.”

“We?”

“Me and Dolph and Joanie and Tim. Dolph’s my boyfriend. WAS my boyfriend. Joanie and Tim are just friends. And we were partying, like I said. Nothing hardcore: just booze and weed. And we heard a gunshot.”

“What did it sound like?”

“What do you think? It sounded like a gunshot.” Another laugh. “We all look at each other. And we’re buzzed enough to think that going over there to check it out is a good idea. So we do.”

“That doesn’t sound smart.”

“We walk over there, Dolph pounds on the door, pretty hard, because there’s music and TV playing loud in there. The door swings open. Just like in a horror movie. We walk in. The whole place reeks of booze. Weed too, but mostly booze—I find out later it’s because there’s a broken bottle of Crown Royal on the floor of the bathroom. I mean, like, why bring liquor into a bathroom?”

“It doesn’t sound like they were thinking too clearly.”

“It gets worse. WAY worse. First, Dolph stops and says, ‘I smell gunpowder.’ Dolph wasn’t exactly a smart guy, but he knew guns. I knew what we’d find the second he said that, and I was right. We turned the corner into the living room and there’s the dead guy, face down in a puddle of blood. Dolph goes over there right away, he’s a hunter, he’s the most comfortable with this kinda stuff. He takes the dead guy’s pulse, looks at me and shrugs his shoulders. Joanie and Tim go over. I just watch them standing over the body, talking. And after the shock wears off everything just seems so normal. Someone lights up a cigarette. They start talking about football. Fucking football. And I realize how quickly all this became ordinary. Weed and booze. Blood and glass. Guns and murder. And I hear the TV and the radio from the other side of the wall and I want to scream at those assholes to turn it down, and realize it’s my own apartment. My radio, my TV making all that noise. I’m the asshole I wanna yell at.”

“That sounds rough.” My sympathies beginning to kick in, against my will.

“Eventually someone calls 911, we go back to my place. Same smell of weed and booze in there—we open a window to air the place out before the cops show up. They show up, ask their questions, they smell the weed, they don’t care. We state partying again as soon as they leave. And about one in the morning Dolph gets up off the couch, and he stops, like, trying to regain his balance, he’s really fucking drunk. He stands there, absolutely still, like a telephone pole, for what seems like forever.

“He leans back, he leans forward, like he’s being blown by some invisible wind. Then he falls straight forward. His head slams hard right into the TV. Bone against glass, POW! And it’s loud! The screen cracks. It’s not one of those thin screen things, this was a big-ass cathode tube TV.

“I’m too scared to move. Another dead guy. After a really long pause, Tim checks Dolph’s pulse. Tim shrugs his shoulders just like Dolph did, back in the other room. And it’s like the same moment all over again. TV and music on at the same time, playing loud, the smell of weed and booze everywhere. And some guy who might be dead on the floor.

“I just got up and walked out. Fuck it. Didn’t even wait to see if he was okay. I got a text later that he was fine. By then I’d already taken all my money outta the bank and bought my bus ticket.

“If I hadn’t seen the dead guy I wouldn’t be here now.”

Pause.

“Dolph?” I asked.

“What?”

“His name was Dolph? Your boyfriend? Weird name is all.”

“Tell me about it. No, his real name was Ted, but he hated it. He looked a little like an actor we saw in a movie once. Dolph Lungren. You’ve probably never heard of him.”

“Sure I have. I Come in Peace!”

Together, and with surprising precision, we said, “And you go in pieces!” We both started laughing. The laugh felt genuine, and refreshing.  

Our laughter ebbed.

“He sounds like a dick,” I offered.

“He was kind of a dick,” she admitted.

The silence that followed deepened into introspection. Empty white fields slid past us at fifty-five miles an hour, broken stalks breaking through the snow like the buildings of a ruined city. Nothing loomed on the horizon except a farmhouse and three grain silos, clustered together, as if huddling together from the cold. I leaned my forehead against the ice-frosted glass of the window.

The kid in front of us opened his Walkman, flipped the cassette to side two, closed it, and hit ‘play.’ The opening notes of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” sounded through his tinny earphones.

“So why are you on this bus?” she asked me.

I kept my eyes trained on the landscape outside. “I thought I told you. Gonna stay on someone’s couch for awhile.” I didn’t think the situation required any more explanation.

“That’s one of those answers that’s really just a bunch more questions, pretending to be an answer.”

“Huh?”

“You’re gonna stay on someone’s couch, right?”

I nodded, without turning around. I didn’t want to talk. I felt a headache beginning to creep up on me.

“Whose couch? For how long? Why? What’s wrong with your couch?”

I might have answered the first question or two. All those questions posed at once left me weary and overwhelmed. I didn’t respond, or even react much.

“Your kind of a dead guy yourself, huh?”

I didn’t expect that. “Whaddaya mean?”

“You don’t say much. You don’t do much. You don’t even seem to listen.”

“I listen.” I did listen.

“Prove it. What did I say?”

“Your boyfriend’s name is Dolph. Someone got shot in the apartment next to you. You and Dolph went inside and found a dead guy.”

“Mostly. Actually what I was thinking was that we were all dead already. A room full of dead people. But, close enough.”

Whew. Dodged a bullet.

“So, again. Why are you going to Minneapolis?”

She wasn’t going to give up, and Minneapolis was still five hours away.

I lifted my forehead from the glass. “Okay. Okay.”

“Yay!” Her tone was light, but she studied my face intently as she said it.  

“That thing you said about everything seeming normal?” I began.

“Yes?”

“Well, it’s kinda like that.”

Silence. I wasn’t sure any more explanation was necessary. I felt a heaviness invade my limbs. I felt very tired. Tears welled up from someplace inside me, though I had no idea why.

She noticed. She touched my arm.

I didn’t feel like talking. Or at least I didn’t think I felt like talking. Because, when she reached out and touched my arm, the words came pouring out. “I live with my parents. I work at the Hy Vee. When my shift is over I come home to my parents, to the same place I’ve lived for twenty years. The Hy Vee is the place I used to go get candy from when I was a little kid. Everything is the same as everything else. One day blends into the next. Nothing changes.”

She put her hand on my knee. “You are changing. You’re on this bus, right now. You’re leaving where you were. You’re moving to Minneapolis, right?”

“I’m gonna stay on a friend’s couch. Not the same thing.”

“Who’s the friend?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We have the time. And you have a captive audience.”

It was a long story, but I wasn’t going to tell it to her. “Old girlfriend.”

“Well that sound’s like it could be comforting.”

It wasn’t an old girlfriend. It was one of my friends from high school. Not even that good of a friend. Just someone I knew from back in the day. I knew his couch was free, I knew he’d be willing to let me stay as long as I wanted. Nothing too bad, nothing too good. Just another day. Normal. It would all seem normal.

Just two dead guys, hanging out together.

Other things that seemed normal in the past few weeks: Going to work drunk. Losing my job. Getting kicked out of my parent’s house. Going to a friend’s house and getting kicked out of there too. Sleeping by the river. Waking up cold and wet, shivering and covered with chigger bites. Bumming change for food. Stealing the money for bus fare from my Mom’s purse.

I’m not sure why I told her I was visiting an old girlfriend.

I was twenty years old.

She pressed against me without pretense, leaning in to kiss me. I felt her lips pressed against mine. My mind fed me an unbidden image of her lips when I’d first met her, chapped and unappealing. I thought about that image during the kiss. I wish I’d felt more. I wish I felt anything. Mostly what I felt was, what do I do now? How do I get out of this?

“Why did you kiss me?” I asked her, when she’d broken the kiss.

“You looked sad.”

“I’m not sad,” I told her. I wasn’t sad. Not exactly.

“Did you enjoy it?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to explain to her that I didn’t feel much of anything. Everything felt like everything else; it was difficult to tell the difference. Things blended together until it was all the same.

I marveled at her ability to put it all out there: talk to some stranger out of the blue, offer a seat, tell him some extremely personal details about your life, then kiss him, like an hour into talking to them. And then ask if they enjoyed it.

Part of me pitied her for the ease with which she opened up.

Most of me was envious.

How did she do that?

“Don’t be a dead guy,” she told me. “You’re so cut off. But you don’t need to be. You’re not a dead guy. Don’t act like it. Please?”

It was her “please” that stirred me. I did not expect it to. The air in the bus was cold, and there must have been six layers of clothes between her skin and mine. I felt numb to the world.

And yet: my cock stirred. Not much. My genitals were shrunken and shriveled, a reaction to the temperature and my own tangled thoughts. But that gentle, earnest “please” reached back to someplace inside me I’d considered unreachable. The head of my cock began to tingle with a familiar energy, my balls began to loosen and drop.  

My body knew things about me that I did not.

I was not a dead guy.

I told her so by sliding my palm behind her neck and pulling her toward me. The lips I’d seen before as chapped and rubbery now appeared full and soft and flushed with desire.

I closed my eyes to my surroundings: the cheap ripped Naugahyde seats, the cold glass of the window, the empty, frigid landscape sliding past outside.

I kissed her.

Nearly all of the other non-familial kisses in my life had been straightforward—the fumblings in the back seats of cars and my own boyhood bedroom, the tussle on couches in darkened family rooms, the end-of-date ‘I had a nice time’ leans forward. Simple motivations, concrete goals.

This felt different. As I surrendered to my feelings and my tongue entered her warm invitation of her mouth, I felt like I was leaping into the unknown, at the request of some newly-found, poorly understood faith.

I slid my hands inside the folds of her thick hoodie and was rewarded with her generous curves and warm skin pressing against my palms. I moved my hands up her body, her skin radiating heat and desire. As my fingers discovered her breasts, I felt her torso twist in pleasure, a bird-like cry escaping from her throat and into the warm comforting cave of my mouth.    

She wore no bra. I brought my thumb and forefinger up to her nipples and began to roll them softly between my fingertips. She moaned, and disengage from the kiss, bringing her lips to my ear.

“Oh God yes, I love that,” she whispered, biting the lobe of my ear.

My cock sprung instantly erect. Just as that first kiss from her had awakened embers I didn’t know were smoldering, her teeth on my ear caused flames to leap from the same banked fire.

Her hand slid up the leg of my jeans, she cupped and fondled my painfully stiff erection.

“Ooh, I love to feel you get hard,” she whispered. “It’s so hot.”

I opened my eyes, surveying the seats around us. “We can’t do this. There’s someone sitting right in front of us. They’ll hear.”

She laughed. “He’s got headphones on. It’s so loud you can hear it from here.” I paused, looked to the Walkman in his lap, the opening three-note strings-and-guitar salvo of Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” leaking full-blast from the earbuds—duh duh dunt, duh duh dunt—as he nodded his head enthusiastically to the beat. He wasn’t going to hear anything.    

Her tongue explored my ear. I pulled on her nipples; she gripped my cock and squeezed and a rush of blood tumbled through my weary veins. It was my turn to squirm and moan. I reached my fingertips out to contain more of her heat, massaging her breasts as she unzipped my pants and took my hardness in her hand.

“I need to suck your big hot cock,” she exhaled.

Her words struck me like a hot poker against my skin; I’d never heard a woman talk like that before. So free, so unfettered, a bird with outstretched wings, a fish leaping from ice-choked waters. 

How did she do that?

How could I learn?   

She fell to her knees, hiding behind the seat in front of us, and took me in her mouth.

I closed my eyes and leaned back into the complaining spring coils of the seat cushion.

Her tongue fluttered against the underside of my cock, where my nerves were bunched and crowded and firing wildly in response. I accepted that my body knew things I did not, and let my body take over. Her hand snaked down to the hem of her voluminous skirt, and disappeared behind the fabric as she bit her lip and sighed.  The scent of her pussy filled the cold air around me.

She took the head of my cock fully into her mouth. All I felt was her tongue and lips on my skin, all I heard was the tinny sound of Zeppelin through the earphones of the kid who sat in front of us, oblivious. Duh duh dunt, duh duh dunt, went the rising beat, and I swear I could feel my heart pound in rhythm with the song, my pulse speeding to keep up.

She played with my balls as she took me deeper into the silky insides of her mouth. Duh duh dunt, duh duh dunt. I felt my cock pushing at her throat. Duh duh dunt, duh duh dunt. My balls began to feel heavy, sparks rose from somewhere deep inside me; I knew I wouldn’t last much longer. Duh duh dunt, duh, duh dunt.

As if reading my mind, she pulled back, my hard length reappearing from the warm paradise of her mouth. She took me in her fist and squeezed hard. I moaned loudly enough for others on the bus to hear me. Even the kid in front of us listening to Led Zeppelin half turned toward us.

She smiled. “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?” She let her tongue loll, teasing me. “You’re so close,” she whispered. She leaned inches away from my now throbbing hardness. I could feel her breath on every tingling nerve as she cooed, “I want to taste your cum on my lips,” and suddenly I was ready to explode, her words like a riding crop. I thrust my cock back between her lips and pushed hard.      

Duh duh dunt, duh duh dunt.

She took me all in, she didn’t choke, didn’t falter, she just opened wider, her lips engulfing me.

Duh duh dunt, duh duh dunt.

Her whole mouth seemed to squeeze against me tightly, milking me, pulling at me.

Duh duh dunt, duh duh dunt.

 I felt a my cock jerk and quiver, warmth spread from my balls outward and suddenly I was cumming, cumming hard, hot jets of my stuff leaping down her throat as she continued to suck and squeeze, her eyes bright, her face flushed and eager.

I emptied myself into her mouth, four or five or six endless and uncontrolled spasms, before my rapture subsided, leaving me exhausted, my chest heaving. I sank back into the springs of the seat.

I opened my eyes.

She still kneeled on the floor, head between my knees, a wicked grin painting her face, a trickle of cum leading from her lower lip. Her entire body shivered, soundlessly, as she joined me in orgasm, eyes open, mouth agog. Her hand reappeared from beneath her skirt. She pulled herself of the floor and sat again next to me, her grin morphing into a satisfied smile.

“Mmm, that was nice,” she said.

I responded with sounds that didn’t really resemble words.

“Kiss me,” she commanded, leaning into my face to do so.

Ew.

I recoiled.

She stopped her movement toward me, looking confused.

“What’s wrong?” she asked me.

“Cum. There’s cum in your mouth.”

“So?”

“So?” I repeated, stating what seemed obvious to me. “Ew. It’s cum. My cum. I don’t wanna taste my own cum.”

“Why not?”

I struggled to explain what bothered me. “It’s gross. It’s wrong. It’s like, gay.”

She looked offended by my explanation.

I said, “I don’t know. It’s just…ew.”

“It wasn’t so ‘ew’ when I was sucking your cock.” She sounded offended. I didn’t know why. “It wasn’t wrong when you were cumming in my mouth.”

I just looked at her. It was cum. My own cum. Of course I didn’t want to taste it. My memory flashed back to taunting in locker rooms, and the casual, everyday cruelties boys inflict on each other. They taught me to be ashamed of my own body, be afraid of unruly feelings, be constantly on the lookout for anything that painted me as different.

She reached out and touched the side of my face. “Don’t be a dead guy,” she said, not unkindly.

I wanted to wipe her face, erase the rope of cum that clung on to the bottom side of her lip. In another context I might have found it sexy.

Why wasn’t I finding it sexy now?    

“C’mon. Taste yourself,” she said. “Try something new. Learn something. There’s so much world out there. Experience it. Learn what you taste like.”

Insecurities tumbled out of my churning mind. I was about to say “no” one last time, maybe even leave, change seats and hang out with the Zeppelin kid in front of us, when my limp cock twitched. I looked to the thin trail of cum on her lips. Another twitch, and a small drop of cum emerged like a curious animal, wary of injury.

My body knew more about me than I did.

 “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “No one is going to hurt you.”

I looked into her eyes and hoped she spoke the truth.

I kissed her.

I kissed her, and my cock jumped at the unexpected sensation. The salty tang of my cum bit at my tongue, coating my lips and teeth just as the bleachy acrid smell of it reached my nose, and as I leaned hungrily into her kiss my mind threw me into a clash of memories, a hundred sensual pleasures and confusions: the first exploratory touches of self-discovery, the furtive guilt and unhinged excitement, the bitter seawater mystery scent exploded from my cock as my spunk spewed onto my hand, my stomach, the sheets. I slid my tongue deeper into her comforts, she opened to me, wanted me, accepted me. My cock hardened again, pulsing as I explored her mouth and the nuances of my own taste and texture.

After a long while the kiss subsided. Our lips parted, we pulled unhurriedly away from each other.

“See?” she said. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“It was kinda hot,” I admitted. I wanted to tell her more but could not find words. I met her eyes and saw the simple joy inside them and concluded that I didn’t need to talk. I broke her gaze and looked out onto the frozen landscape beyond. The road signs told me we’d passed from Iowa into Minnesota in the last hour or so. Snow had fallen more heavily here. Smooth white dunes of the stuff piled up in the otherwise vacant fields. When the wind picked up, small whirlwinds of flakes danced in the frigid air.

The world seemed a little larger now.

A mileage sign rushed up in the window, and was past us and gone.

Owatona: 13 miles.

“You’re getting out soon, huh?” I asked her.

“Yeah. Like fifteen minutes.”

“What happens next? Where do you go?”

“I dunno. My uncle is picking me up. Didn’t I tell you this? I’m gonna stay with him for awhile, work at Dunkin, save some money. Then, well, we’ll figure it out.”

“What about Dolph?”

“I don’t care what happens to Dolph.”

“What about me?”

Her look softened. She took my hand. She said, “You get to do whatever you want. Go wherever you wanna.”

“I don’t know where I wanna go.”

She smiled again, and squeezed my hand. “That’s even better. You get to figure out where you wanna go. Decide what you wanna do.”

Ten minutes later the bus pulled off the Interstate and into the Greyhound terminal in the tiny downtown square of Owatonna, Minnesota. The brakes squealed, the bus rolled to a stop.

She gathered her bags from the overhead rack.

“My name’s Tracy,” she said. “Weird we don’t know each other’s names, isn’t it?”

“I’m Les,” I responded. “And it’s no weirder than anything else.”

“Let it be weird,” she said. “Weird is good.”

“When did you get so smart?” I asked her.

She graced me with the gift of one last laugh. “Born this way, I guess.”

She kissed me again, a light peck lacking the passion and mystery of our earlier kisses. Light danced in her eyes, emotions played at the corners of her mouth. Her cheeks flushed with life.

She was beautiful.

I hadn’t thought so only a few hours earlier. I’d not seen her clearly.

It was time to look at the world with new eyes.

She walked down the middle aisle, shot me a quick look as she reached the front door, then stepped off the bus and into the hazy winter air. An older man met her, gave her a hug, and together they walked to his pickup and got in.

She turned one last time and waved, then got in the truck and pulled away, disappearing onto the surrounding grid of country roads and on to the rest of her life.

The bus pulled out of the town square and clamored back onto the Interstate, heading north, toward the cold, the highway unspooling before me like an uncertain promise.  

I was twenty years old.