Page 14 of Goode Vibrations
“Apology accepted,” she said, her voice crisp and arch.
And she continued toward the front passenger side door, and unless I was greatly mistaken, she’d accentuated the womanly sway of her hips. Whether for my benefit or to bait me, I wasn’t sure, but either way, it worked, because I did indeed look again. I mean shit, an ass that nice, you gotta look twice.
She opened the front passenger door, slid the huge, overland-hike backpacking style bag in the footwell and tried to slide in with it. I stood at the sliding door, waiting for her to come to the realization that the footwell just simply wasn’t big enough for that. After a moment of struggling to fit herself and the bag into a too-small space, she slid back out and glanced at me as I stood at the open sliding rear door, an amused grin on my face.
“Yes, Errol? Have something to say?”
I shrugged. “Yeah nah, I was just thinking you might like to set it back here. A bit more room, eh?”
She blinked at me, stifling a laugh at herself as she hefted the bag by the straps and set it behind her seat, taking a moment to glance over the interior. “Super nice. It’s like an RV.”
“We call it a caravan, where I’m from. Or a campervan. I call it home away from home, for now.”
A moment later we were on the road, headed west, the radio tuned to whichever local country station came in clearest.
I examined my new ride-along partner: fuckingbreathtaking. Five-seven, maybe? Not tall, not short—just bang in the middle. Thick, long, wavy black hair—she had just the pieces that would get in her face tied up and back, the rest down and loose, and saying her hair wasblackis like saying the Pacific Ocean iswet, or the Great Wall of China islong. Black is a poor descriptor. Dig into your favorite tropes and clichés, and they’re all insufficient. Jet black. The exact shade of a raven’s wing, with the same purply glint in the sun, as if you could almost see your reflection if it would just polish up a bit. It wasn’t just stick straight, pin-straight, like Wednesday from Addams Family. A roiling cloud of inky waves around her shoulders. Soft, hazy almost. Like wisps and shreds of storm clouds. Glossy elsewhere. I could go on and on just about her fucking hair.
Eyes? Same story. I could say they’rebrown, like liquid chocolate bubbling in a Swiss chocolatier’s vat is brown. I’ve seen that, and it’s one of those memories with a vivid scent, one I can recall on command, almost smell it just thinking about it. Her eyes are that exact shade. Darker than milk chocolate. Not your shitty American bars of cocoa-flavored turd, oh no. I’m talking real Swiss chocolate handcrafted in copper vessels by tenth-generation artisans. That kind of chocolate. Molten, churning with sweet heat, the kind that melts the moment it touches your tongue. That’s Poppy’s eyes.
Skin…god, how do I describe her skin? Sun-kissed bronze? Too romantically melodramatic. To say her skin looked soft was, again, an egregious understatement. Sun-kissed was right; she wasn’t the type to tan or lay out, but she didn’t languish away under fluorescent lights either. It was impossible. Her skin just begged to be touched, kissed. So perfect it didn’t seem she could be real.
She had the straight white teeth of someone with great genetics and a stellar dentist she saw regularly.
An easy smile, the corners of her lips tipped up as if life had just blessed her and she was happy to simply be alive.
And, yes, those curves. Contained in a plain white tank top, her breasts threatened to spill out the sides just sitting still, and if she moved just so? Lordy lord, I got teases of heaven. Like, fuck me, but I wanted to rip that damned shirt off and just stare at her. How dare she malign the gifts they were by hiding them? They were meant to be viewed like art, but only by me.
Damn, though, where didthatcome from?
They were fucking incredible, for real. And real, which I was certain of, because you just didn’t get that kind of movement from silicone or saline, not that I had anything against implants mind you, they were very nice as well, but Poppy’s were just…nature’s bounty, barely veiled behind not quite see-through white cotton. I couldn’t quite make out areolae, but glimpsed a hint of darker flesh at the center of those glorious mounds beneath the shirt.
Hips defined by stretched skirt material spoke of mouthwatering curves; squishy, lovely round hips that would fit just so, in my hands, against my own hips. The skirt swirled around her ankles, but as she shifted to cross one knee over the other, I caught a slice of calf, a hint of under-thigh, strong and tan and flawless.
In short—I don’t think smitten is an exaggeration. Stunned that such flawless human female beauty could be found on the side of a remote Missouri road, sitting next to me, looking at me with open curiosity and—if I’m honest—appreciation for what she saw.
“So, Errol.” A smile, friendly, casual. Not flirty, not yet. “What’s your story?”
I laughed. “What, like the whole thing, sad bits and all? A bit much for having just met, I think.”
“You can leave out the sad bits, if you want.”
“Not much to tell, in that case,” I said. “Nah, only joking.”
I wasn’t actually really joking, because there were more sad bits than not in my life story, but you don’t get a pretty girl in bed with you by sharing the tragedies you’ve suffered because, believe it or not, sad girls aren’t horny. So no, not sharing the sad bits is a vital strategy in getting laid.
“Where’s home? Innocent enough place to start?”
I laughed. “You’d think. I don’t actually have a permanent home. I’m a photojournalist for Nat Geo, and I’m on assignment pretty much permanently. So I don’t really keep a proper home, as it’d be empty all but a few days of the year.”
She glanced back into the interior of the Westfalia—clothes, a few camera bags, a pair of gumboots, a hoodie draped over the backrest of the rear bench seat, a leather jacket, a couple other bags, and odds and ends…
“So that’s, like, everything you own?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I’ve got a storage unit in Christchurch I rent, and I’ve got my dad’s old Rover there, some stuff of my mum’s, a few other things I can’t really travel with. But, day to day, yeah, this is it. Pack it all up right quick and I’m on a plane in the next minute.”
“Photographer forNational Geographic, huh?”
“Yep.”