Special Delivery: Special Delivery, Book 1 (11 page)

“I about drove into Middleton to look for you.” Mitch’s voice was gruff. “Where the hell did you get off to?”

“I went down to the truck stop.” Sam nodded over his shoulder at the brightly lit set of buildings. “Must have missed you when I was around the back.” His breathing came short and winded, and his ankle still smarted a little.

Mitch is here. He’s going to take me with him.

Mitch jerked his head at the passenger door. “Well, come on—get in.”

Sam shifted his pack as he rounded the front of the rig, but he didn’t take but three steps before his ankle made him stumble. Whatever adrenaline had carried him down the hill and around the truck stop twice had run out. He had to all but drag his foot as he moved across the road, and it was a relief to climb up on the running board and haul open the heavy door to let himself inside.

“Why didn’t you sit still if you were hurt?” Mitch frowned as Sam settled into the passenger seat. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Sam pulled his right leg up, wincing as he did so. “I don’t know. I was trying to get here in time. Sorry.”

Mitch started to speak but stopped himself. “I gotta get this thing out of the middle of the road.” He shifted gears, and the truck moved.

He’d done it, Sam realized. He’d gone with Mitch. They were going. West. He was going west, with Mitch.

Mitch wound them around the truck stop and toward 965 and the on-ramp. “Are you serious, Sunshine? You’re coming along? All the way to L.A.?”

Sam only hesitated a moment. “Yeah. If that’s okay.”

Mitch fixed his attention to the road as he drove the rig. Sam kept quiet, watching at first with trepidation and then awe as Mitch maneuvered through the maze of vehicles and obstacles within the parking lot. When an SUV darted out from behind another rig and blocked their path, Sam gasped and shut his eyes, but Mitch got the truck stopped, regrouped and then aimed for the interstate.

“I don’t know how you drive this.” Sam looked around at the expanse of road they occupied as they approached the on-ramp. “Do you ever hit anything?”

“I try not to, but let me tell you, it’s usually some other asshole who pushes me into it.” Mitch grimaced at the taillights of the SUV as it zipped onto the ramp. “As somebody who has personally put 250,000 miles on the U.S. Interstates in the past five years alone, I’m here to tell you, if the road belongs to anybody, it’s the big rigs, bringing everybody their big-screen TVs and cheap toilet paper and produce off the boat from Brazil. Not to mention the damn cars people drive recklessly, trying to get us all killed.” He let his shoulders relax. “Sorry. Trucker’s soapbox. I’ll do my best to keep it to a minimum.”

Sam said nothing, only watched as Mitch put the rig onto westbound I-80. Sam paid attention to the way Mitch merged, using his mirrors, downshifting and pacing himself to make his way into the traffic safely. There weren’t many vehicles on the road, but the one car in the right-hand lane didn’t get over when Mitch approached, not until Mitch was almost on top of him, and when the guy finally moved, he also honked and tossed Mitch his middle finger.

“Not if you were the last guy on earth, buddy.” Mitch shifted gears a few more times and settled into his seat, glancing at Sam. “So.”

Sam fought the urge to wriggle uncomfortably. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here.”

Mitch shrugged. “Sure, but you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“You’ll bring me along, just like that?”

“Yep.” Mitch kept his eyes on the road.

Sam considered this. There had to be a catch. “I don’t have money. A little, but not—”

Mitch held up a hand. “I don’t want your money, Sunshine.”

Sam studied Mitch’s profile for a few minutes, trying to read him. He looked good, backlit by his dashboard. Sam realized it was just the two of them, so close, and it would be this way the whole time. They’d be together all day, and all night.

Heat spread through Sam’s body, but he wasn’t embarrassed. “I won’t mind paying…other ways.”

To his surprise, Mitch didn’t give him a wicked grin and a dose of innuendo. Instead, his hands tensed on the wheel. “You don’t have to pay me anything.”

Now
Sam was embarrassed. “Sorry.” He turned his face away to stare out the passenger window.

Mitch sighed, a ragged sound. “Sam—” He shifted in his seat. “Shit. I didn’t mean—”

“No, it’s my fault.” Sam tucked his feet up so he could hug his knees to his chest. “I’m just…edgy. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I feel pretty stupid.”

“You aren’t stupid. If you left, it wasn’t for anything but a good reason.”

Sam buried his face in the valley of his knees. “I couldn’t stand to hear about how depraved I am anymore.”

“This your aunt?”

“I live with her and my uncle. I have since I was fifteen, when my mom got sick. She had cancer. Pancreatic cancer.” He picked at a loose string at the seam of his shoes. “She had multiple sclerosis too. It started when I was little, and it was bad by the time I was ten. She was evening out, working to keep herself strong, and we were going to be okay. Then, boom. Cancer.” He pulled the string until it broke. “She was gone.”

Mitch let the silence hang a minute. “You been with your aunt and uncle since?” Sam nodded. “But you’re an adult now—surely you could move out?”

“I don’t have any money. I can’t get loans for school, and it takes years to earn enough on my own before I can get them. It’s a tax thing. My uncle claimed me because they were my legal guardians for a year. That’s all it took. With my mom alive just one more year, I’d have qualified for every need-based scholarship available. Under Uncle Norm’s income, I qualify for nothing. So they pay, but not much, and only part-time. Which is why it takes forever.”

“But you work.”

“Yeah. For
them
. Half of what I get goes for room and board, and the rest I need for books and gas and clothes and sanity. It took me forever to save for my phone, and it’s killing me to pay for the plan.” He realized without a job it was going to be impossible. What would the phone company do, he wondered, when he couldn’t keep his contract?

“That’s a shit deal. They owe you better.”

Sam shrugged and resumed picking at his shoe. “They paid my mom’s bills. They took me in.”

“Sounds like that’s what they owe your mom.” He shook his head. “Well, you’re rid of them.”

Sam rested his cheek on his knees and looked out the window. “All I can think of is how I would have been better off working the full three years until I could be declared independent and would have qualified for aid on my own.” He hesitated before letting his darkest regrets come out. “Maybe if I’d taken the time, I might have realized I didn’t want to be in nursing.”

“You don’t?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I think I got into it out of guilt because I wanted to help people, same as other people helped my mom. I thought I’d enjoy it, but it’s mostly a lot of horrible grunt work. I don’t want to wipe ass in a hospital. I don’t want to work insane crazy overnight hours for years until I can get into a decent schedule. Health care is good, and it’s a steady job, but—” He sighed. “I don’t know.”

“You’re young. You got time to figure this stuff out.”

Sam bristled. “I’m not that young. Anyway, how old are you? Eighty?”

Mitch lifted an amused eyebrow. “Thirty-three.”

Okay, that
was
a lot older. “I suppose you think I’m some stupid, whiny kid.”

“You’re attached to that word, aren’t you? Stupid. Is this a gift from your aunt, or did you take it on yourself?”

Sam didn’t answer, not knowing what to say.

When Mitch spoke again, his voice was softer. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re stupid, and I don’t think of you as a kid. If anything, you’re too damn old for your age. I know middle-aged men who fuss less than you. How about you give yourself a break, Sunshine? You took a pretty big leap, coming away with me. Yeah, there are a lot of unknowns, but you’re smart, and you don’t have anything to lose. Let yourself live a little.”

Sam let this sink in as much as it could. “I do have some money saved.” Guilt backwashed, though, and he had to add, “I should save it for fall tuition.”

“You don’t know yet where you’re going this fall,” Mitch reminded him. “If you’re going anywhere at all.”

“This economy is so bad. It’s stupid to goof my way through the summer when I could be working, even if it is for Delia. It’s stupid.
I’m
stupid.”

“If you say that word one more time, I will pull this rig over and paddle your ass.”

Mitch sounded serious, and Sam wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. He chose his next words carefully. “It’s not smart to waste money or time.”

“But if you’re headed down the wrong road, you’re wasting more time and energy than if you stand still awhile and try to sort yourself out. Except in your case, heading down the road is what counts as standing still. You said yourself you’ve never traveled, not really. Well, there isn’t anything like changing your environment to change your mind, or at least to give you some decent perspective. You don’t know something until you’ve stood outside it and looked at it objectively. Come see a sliver of the world with me, and I promise you a few months on the road will change your life completely.”

Sam couldn’t decide if changing his life completely was exciting or terrifying. “I can’t go with you for months.”

“Then come for whatever time is right for you. How much money you got saved, Sunshine? You got enough to buy yourself a one-way plane ticket home?”

“I do.”

“Good. Then you keep it tucked aside, and everything else is on me. You’ve got your exit if you need it, but other than that, you’re enjoying a side trip out of your usual life.”

Sam balked. “You can’t do that.”

“I can, and I will.” He gave Sam an arch look. “Would you care to tell me I’m stupid?”

Heat in those blue eyes caught Sam up, and he nearly said the word to see if Mitch was bluffing. “Why are you doing this? Why would you do this for me, if not for sex?”

He hadn’t meant it to come out so blunt, and he waited for Mitch to get angry, but Mitch shook his head. If anything, he seemed guilty.

“No, Sunshine.” He wiped his hand over his mouth. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“But—we
are
going to have sex. Aren’t we? Sometimes?”

Now Mitch smiled, staring out at the road as if he were undressing it. “Oh, I have no objection to that.” He flicked his thumb absently against the wheel. “Let’s put it this way: I like you, Sam. I want to help you. I want to be the guy who, when you look back at this summer years from now, you think of as the friend who helped give you the space to figure out who you really are.” He winked. “If you think of me as a damn fine lover too, I will not be put out in the slightest.”

Sam considered all this. It was surreal, what Mitch offered, which was probably why Sam could answer. “I wouldn’t have minded being your whore.”

Mitch’s easy, sultry smile fled so quickly Sam blinked. He didn’t understand how he kept doing this, saying things that upset Mitch. He panicked and started babbling.

“That’s what she called me. A whore.” Sam swallowed. “I shouldn’t want to be one, I guess, even with you.”

Mitch could not look at him long, but he did so as frequently as was safe, and he studied Sam’s face carefully. His own expression was unreadable.

He poked around in the dashboard for a few minutes, searching for something beneath the papers and wrappers there, but he eventually gave up.

“Do you say that,” he asked at last, “because if I made you pay your way in ass, then it would put you off the hook for such a big decision, or because you get off on the idea of doing whatever I tell you, of having your body be at my command?”

Sam thought about this. “Both.”

Mitch’s thumb caressed the wheel for several minutes. The road was completely dark now except for the semi’s headlights, making it seem as if the whole world were gone as the silence stretched on and on and on.

“Sorry,” Sam said at last. “I don’t mean to be awkward. We don’t have to—”

“It’s not.” Mitch looked at Sam. “You really want to play with me?”

Sam was glad it was so dark, because his face had to be scarlet. “Not if you think it’s gross.”

Mitch’s laugh was velvet. “Oh, I don’t think that at all.” He rubbed his chin, still staring ahead at the road. “Okay.”

Sam’s heart beat one hard thump against the wall of his chest. “Okay?”

“Yep. So long as you want it, so long as you get it’s a game, that you can call it off at any time, I will take payment from you for your portion of this trip in ass and other acts of submission and general sluttiness.” He tapped his thumb on the wheel. “But it’s a
game
, and it only goes on so long as everybody is having a good time. You got that?”

Sam nodded, trying not to look too eager. “Yes.”

“The thing is,” Mitch went on, “these games need a safe zone. You need to give me boundaries, and you need to give me a word.”

“Word? You mean a safe word? Is this BDSM?” His voice went up on the end of the acronym.