“I can’t believe they sent a limo,” Chelsea marveled, with some disgust.
A suited man hoisted her worn-out frame pack into the trunk of a black sedan. A warm, welcome breeze whirled around the exterior of the Hartford airport.
Charlie threw his pack in on top of hers. “It’s just a car service. But yeah, I’m not sure what we would have done without it.” He put a firm hand on the driver’s shoulder. “Nice to see you, Burt. It’s been a while!”
Burt smiled, and he went from looking one hundred years old to about sixty. “One whole year, Charlie boy! How were your travels?”
“Fun. Long. Exhausting.”
“You always were the adventurous one.”
“Don’t you forget it.”
Chelsea watched her boyfriend as he did this thing she’d seen him do countless times before: strike up a jovial conversation with anyone, anywhere. But there was something different about his tone in this conversation. He was projecting a sense of ownership now, a visible pride. Chelsea didn’t love it.
They climbed into the cool leather of the back seat while Burt adjusted mirrors and air-conditioning in the front.
“Should take about eighty minutes, Charlie boy. Same as always.”
“Okay, then. You mind raising the divider? We might try to sleep a little.”
A shield of tinted glass went up between the front seat and the back. Charlie and Chelsea were alone. She buckled her seat belt and looked out at the swaying trees as Burt navigated out of the airport maze.
She stretched out horizontally across the bench seat, her head in Charlie’s lap and her knees bent just enough to make herself fit. Charlie ran a finger through her tangled brown curls. His jeans smelled faintly like jerk rub and body odor. Eighteen hours of travel and they were both too ripe for civilized society. Charlie’s finger ran softly along her hairline, down her neck and the length of her arm. She was nearly asleep, but still on fire. That’s how it always was with them.
Charlie wasn’t the smartest or the most accomplished man Chelsea had ever been with, but he was the most curious. He wanted to taste everything and feel everything. He certainly wanted to fuck everything. It didn’t make him an animal in her eyes; it made him a connoisseur. He understood the inherent goodness of pleasure, as she did.
Chelsea had faith in lust—not only as a means to something deeper, but as the deep thing itself. Lust as the endgame. Why, she wondered, should we not wish to suck all the jelly from the center of the donut and discard the rest? Why not a life of only jelly?
Charlie was only jelly.
Chelsea fell in and out of sleep in Charlie’s lap.
The black sedan drove north on I-91, then west onto I-90, where the traffic thinned and the road narrowed. Industrial parks gave way to rolling hills of lush green trees. The rest stops started looking like little faux villages, the fast-food joints camouflaged in tasteful muted colors.
Chelsea woke after thirty minutes. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.
Charlie’s sleeping head was pressed against the window, his breath steaming a little patch of glass that evaporated instantly, over and over.
Chelsea knocked quietly on the divider. It lowered in response.
“Sir, where are we?”
“We’re entering the Berkshire Mountains now, ma’am. About forty minutes from Senator Bright’s lake house. You ever been here?”
She shook her head and leaned in closer. “No, I’m English. I’ve never been to this part of the US. I don’t really know what I’m getting into.”
Burt laughed. “I didn’t think so. Well, it’s real nice. And they’re nice people. I’ve been driving for the Senator, on and off, for about twenty years now.”
“Wow. Do you like it?”
Burt cocked his head, not quite nodding. “It’s good work, and it helps me take care of my wife. She had to quit working a while back. So it’s good for me. I don’t know what’s gonna happen now, though, now that he’s retired.”
Chelsea had no idea how to respond to this. She didn’t know what US senators did when they retired, and she definitely didn’t know what happened to their drivers. She’d never known anyone with a driver.
“So, if you’ve been working for this family for twenty years, you must know them pretty well by now, yes?”
Burt considered this. “I suppose I do, ma’am... I suppose I must.”
Charlie stirred beside her and opened his eyes.
Chelsea sat back in her seat. He reached a hand across the seat and laced his fingers through hers. “Are you excited?” he asked.
Chelsea’s eyes met Burt’s in the rearview mirror and she took a breath. “I suppose I am.”