In the Leaves

It's a Thursday night, and I've got a few hours to myself. My duties for the day are done—I've dropped off the appropriate people to the appropriate places for the evening. The night's chilly, but the car is warm. I'm not ready to go home.

The rest stop is busy when I pull in. It's barely eight, and already the trucks are lining the entrance and exit ramps as their drivers break for the night. I can hear their motors idling as I drive by. The sound’s a giant, mechanical purr. The spaces nearest the McDonald's are filled with commuters and family cars.

But I'm heading to the back of the lot, where there are only three vehicles. They're dark on the inside, but there's just enough light streaming down from the lamps above to show me that one is empty, while the other two have solitary silhouettes within. I park  between them, a few spots over from one, and across from the other.

To my left, the man in the cream sedan is pretending to sing along to music on his car radio. His lips are moving, anyway, but his head is turned in my direction. He nods. I nod back as I cut the ignition. The internal lights of my own car flick on—it's an automatic convenience, so that I can see the door latches. I'm aware that they give the men in both cars a clear look at me for a good fifteen seconds. Then they fade. I'm not going anywhere.

In the parking aisle facing mine, across from me and one space over, a white Ford truck has its nose pointed at the grille of my car. I can't see its occupant. The outline of him, dark against dark, gives the impression of maleness. My eyes read him as young—perhaps thirty or thirty-two. The truck itself is an older model. It's clean, and well-taken-care of, but it definitely was assembled a decade or more ago.

The man within is looking at me. I'm not even sure how I can tell. Watching him is like trying to track an invisible cloud against a midnight sky, when the only way of knowing of its presence is to observe what stars it obscures. Still, I can tell by the procession of his silhouettes that he's pointing his face in my direction. I tip my head, as if I'm trying to stare more intently at him—and I am. I rub my dick, and look down at it. He can't see my crotch, not from his angle. But he might be able to see the lift of my shoulder, the motion of my arm, the back-and-forth of my hand over the corduroy.

It might be working. He leans forward. His hands grasp the steering wheel. I look back and forth between the occupant of the truck, and the man in the cream-colored car. This might turn out to be one of those situations in which no one makes a move, and we all lose.

The truck's lights flick on, making me blink. He's started his ignition. When he backs out of his space, the lamp from above hits him for a moment, and I get an impression of short dark hair, a round face, clean, tight skin. He does seem like a younger guy, but it's an impression, a half-second's blur of the dark becoming light and then disappearing once again, and nothing more. I watch as the truck pulls out from its aisle and into the lane that leads past the McDonald's to the gas pumps and the exit lane. He's not leaving, though. He turns and pulls down the first aisle closest to the rest stop building, and proceeds all the way down to its furthest, and darkest, end. There he parks, and turns off his lights.

Okay. I wait a moment, and then, with my heart thumping, I follow.

I'm a little upset when I retrace the same route the truck's just taken, only to find him pulling out and past me in the opposite direction when I'm nearly at my goal. Did I mistake the cue? Was he trying to get away from me, and got pissed off when he saw me following? Did I imagine the entire thing altogether? I pull into the spot he's just vacated. I watch. He parks the truck into a space in the busy part of this aisle, and stops.

I'm confused. Then I notice that parked directly across from me is a stretch limousine. The driver's inside, talking on his cell phone, obviously killing time. Maybe the guy in my truck didn't like being so near a potential witness.

It looks like I'm right. The truck pulls out of its new space and heads back my way. It drives past, and pauses where the aisle merges into the lane that's supposed to be for trucks to take to the back lot. I turn on my ignition once more, and follow.

He takes me through the confusing maze of trucks snaked into their spaces. I wonder if he's looking for a space at the back of this lot, but no. We're heading to the exit. Past the idling haulers we both go, onto the ramp, merging with the highway traffic. The next exit is just ahead; his right blinker turns on.

A moment later, mine mirrors his.

I don't know this neighborhood. I'm following him off the highway, down the service drive that runs parallel. It's pitch-black here in spots. There are no streetlights. For the first time, I wonder if I'm crazy—crazy to be following a man I haven't even seen, crazy to be driving somewhere he could rob me, assault me. The dude could be just some guy who wanted to go home, who'd think I was stalking him when I got out of my car. This whole night could've been a crazy convergence of coincidence and mixed signals.

And yet I'm so sure of what I'm doing, of what all those cues meant. I know for a fact to what this is leading. I just know.

His left blinker is blinding, when it suddenly fills the windscreen in front of me. We both slow down, and make the turn onto a badly-paved road that leads to an industrial-looking building. Its parking lot is surrounded by a chain-link fence. The place looks like a factory. As we both slowly crawl across the asphalt, I can see that whatever it used to be has been converted into a well-known fitness club chain. Bright and safe as the interior of the building looks far away, the parking lot is as dark as the neighborhood around.

The driver pulls to a stop at the back of the lot. A tree-pruning company has parked its trucks there for the night. Next to them, the pickup truck looks totally in place. I pull my own black car a spot over, and turn off my lights.

I see his hand fumbling for the lock when I make my way from my car to his. I pull open the passenger door, and climb in.

"Hey," I say.

"Hola," he replies.

It's the first time I've gotten to see him. He's fucking beautiful. No, seriously, it's crazy how beautiful he is. The odds of me lucking out like this are infinitesimal. The boy's Latin, dark-haired. His features are fine, his body lean beneath baggy clothing. There's a trace of a mustache on his upper lip, a bit of scruff on his cheeks, but he's either too young or too naturally smooth to produce more. His eyes are looking at me hungrily. His hands are rubbing his crotch. He's much younger than thirty. At a glance, I'd guess no more than twenty-four or twenty-five, if that.

I reach out and rub between his legs. His hands rush to touch me. He knows just where to put his fingers. Under the cords I'm wearing my dick is stiff. I can tell my shorts are sticky from the prolonged build-up we've enjoyed, over the last twenty minutes. His face is close to mine; his breath smells of sweet lemon candy. When we kiss, he groans. His head tilts back. I can hear him murmuring something in Spanish into my ear as he leans over further to try to undo my pants. Frustrated, he pops open his own fly and pulls his white painters' pants to the ground, around his ankles. I can see about six inches of hooded meat standing at attention, rigid and pulsing with the quick beat of his heart.

He's a tiny man. His passenger seat is pulled up all the way, and the seat back is bolt upright. I'm all limbs and length. I can't undo my top button in this kind of space. "Does your seat. . . ?"

He already knows what I'm asking. His hand darts between my legs to the space between my feet, and the seat eases away from the dash. I find the seat back release and lower myself. Together we manage to get my pants down and my dick loose. Then his mouth is on my meat. He sucks like he's sucked dick all his life. He sucks like he's been denied, until now. I keep a look out into the dark parking lot, but no one is near. No one's even coming in or out of the gym right now. He cranes his neck and tries to position himself so that he's between my legs, but there's not enough room.

He comes up for air. "Do you fuck the ass?" He's got a heavy accent. There's a certain hesitance to his words as he speaks, as if there's a moment or two of lag between the thought in his mind and the words he's dredging up in a language that's not his own. When I nod, he says, "The truck." He nods at the landscaping trucks beside his own. "Go behind."

Then, in a shot, he's pulled up his pants and is out the driver's side door.

Hot dog, I think to myself.

One of the trucks carries equipment. The other is a limb shredder. There's a pile of leaves that's calf-deep behind them, and we're standing in it. They can't all be from the trees above—there are too many leaves left on the branches there. The smell of damp and autumn mold is rich and pungent. It lingers, like some kind of inescapable seasonal cologne. He drops his pants again and wraps his hand around his rock-hard dick. "Show me your body," I whisper.

Immediately he pulls up his shirt. In the darkness he's little more than a luminous pale curve, slender at the waist, full below it. His stomach was perfectly flat. His chest is beautiful and lightly muscular. I gape, unable to believe my good fortune. I simply don't have this kind of luck, this jackpot from a random draw.

"Turn around," I tell him, after he's fumbled with the button of my cords and loosed me from their bindings.

His ass is surprisingly hairy, considering how smooth the rest of his body is. I run my hands over the cheeks. He groans, and pushes them back to me. "You like the fuck?" he whispers.

I let my fingers probe into his hole. That's all the answer he needs. He groans, and whispers more words in Spanish. It's a clean-smelling hole, I quickly find out. I want it.

He backs up against me. My shaft is pillowed between his butt cheeks. The boy only comes up to my nipples, if that. His T-shirt is still bunched up around his armpits; I wrap my hands around his naked chest and hold him tight. He responds amorously, turning his head to kiss me. His teeth pull at my lower lip; he cries out as my cock head pushes against his hole. With no lube yet, there's a lot of resistance, but his hand grabs at the back of my head. His fingers entwine with my hair, tugging at it. When my hands move down to his cock, I can feel his balls retracting.

It's too late to stop what's happening. He comes violently. The leaves thrash at our feet as he jerks and shakes. He cries out, his moan muffled by the autumn blanket below us, and the still-heavy canopy of leafed branches above. The back of my fingers become sticky from one of the jets of semen erupting from his dick. He hasn't even finished shooting when he's whispering out, "Sorry! Sorry!" He seems to mean it. He didn't want it to end that quickly.

My hands quiet him. I hold him firmly, like an unsettled child. I pull out the tip of my dick from his hole and keep my left hand on the small of his back. A few strokes of my right hand is all it takes. My own orgasm is more silent. My breathing increases. I seem to heave and roll, like a ship on an unquiet sea. My load lands on his ass, on both cheeks. As the blood returns to my head, I rub my cock over the wetness.

We stand there for a moment in the leaves. My first thought, as the sexual haze fades, is of ticks.

He's already pulling up his pants, leaving my seed on his skin as he snaps the waistband of his shorts over his hips. Up come the baggy white trousers. He throws his arms around me in an unexpected gesture of affection and gratitude. Then he plants a hand on my chest, followed by a raised index finger, before he disappears.

I understand. He's telling me to wait a moment before I emerge from the shadows as well. When I finally do, I can see him in his truck, talking to someone on his phone. Its little lights are the pinpoint stars his silhouette obscures, as I glide silently back to my own car, doused in autumn's spicy perfume.

Then I drive home.