Ridge Road, Chapter 1 · Hank’s Rules
The Tulsa yard at four-forty in the morning smelled like diesel and wet gravel, and Sam Ortega had been standing in it for twenty minutes because he’d been told five and didn’t trust himself not to be late. His new boots pinched at the heel. He’d zipped a navy quarter-zip up to his chin over clean jeans, the same thing he used to wear to the office on casual Fridays, and he kept rubbing his thumb over the pale stripe on his ring finger where the band used to be.
The green Peterbilt was already running at the end of the second row, its long hood pointed at the gate and DOYLE TRANSPORT, TULSA OK on the door in plain white letters.
The man who climbed down from the cab was bigger than Sam had pictured from the phone call. He came down the steps backward the way the CDL instructors taught you, three points of contact, and when he turned around he filled the space between the truck and the next trailer. He rubbed a hand down a grey beard cut short and square, and when he hitched his jeans his gut pushed at the snaps of a tan Carhartt jacket. He’d shoved the sleeves up. The forearms under them were thick as fence posts. He looked Sam over once, starting at the boots.
“You’re Ortega.”
“Sam. Yeah. Hi.” Sam put out his hand. “I got here early. I wasn’t sure which row.”
Hank Doyle shook it. His palm was dry and hard and it swallowed Sam’s hand up to the wrist. He didn’t let go right away. He turned Sam’s hand over and looked at the pale stripe on the ring finger, then let it drop.
“Walt said you were an office guy.”
“Insurance claims, ten years.” Sam heard himself keep going. “I know how that sounds. I passed everything first try, though, and I’m not going to quit on you in Amarillo or wherever it is people quit.”
Hank let him finish. Then he said, “Salina, usually,” and walked toward the trailer.
Across the yard the depot office had one window lit. A lean bald man stood in it, a coffee cup parked under his white mustache, and when Hank lifted two fingers without looking, the man lifted the cup back. Sam figured that was Walt Brennick, the guy who’d given him Hank’s number and then said on the phone, in a tone Sam still couldn’t read, He’s gonna run you ragged, son. You let him.
They did the walkaround together. Hank didn’t explain anything. He pointed and Sam checked, crouching by each tire with a flashlight while Hank stood over him. When Sam missed a cracked clearance light on the trailer, Hank tapped it with a knuckle and said nothing, which was worse than being yelled at, and Sam wrote it on the pre-trip sheet with his ears burning.
The cab was clean, a Stanley thermos in the cup holder and reading glasses folded on the logbook tablet, and behind the seats a heavy grey canvas curtain hung across the sleeper. Hank pulled it aside so Sam could see a real mattress with the top bunk folded up above it. It smelled like coffee and cedar and, faintly, like a man.
“Bottom bunk’s yours when you’re off,” Hank said. “I’ll take the top when we swap. Sit down.”
Sam sat. Hank stayed standing, bent at the neck under the roof.
“I’m going to say this once,” he said. “First hour of every shift, nobody talks. I don’t care if it’s you driving or me. No smoking in my truck, ever. Radio’s mine and the CB’s mine. When I say we stop, we stop, and when I say we go, you’re already buckled.” He paused, and his eyes went to the curtain and back. “That curtain stays shut when you’re off. What you do back there is your business. What happens up front is mine. You don’t lie to me about being tired. If you’re tired you say it and we deal with it. And nobody touches this truck but you and me. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Say them back.”
Sam said them back. He got the order wrong on two and three, and Hank corrected him in a flat voice and made him start over, and the second time it came out clean. Something warm and stupid moved low in Sam’s stomach at the little nod Hank gave him. In nine years of marriage nobody had nodded at him like that, and now a stranger in a Carhartt jacket had him reciting truck rules like a new hire on his first morning, and his dick was paying attention. He shifted in the seat and looked out the windshield.
“You drive first,” Hank said, and waited while Sam slid over behind the wheel, then dropped into the passenger seat, and the cab got a lot smaller with Hank in it. “I’ll watch.”
The first hour was silence, like the rules said. Sam took them out the gate onto the Cimarron Turnpike with the sky going grey in the mirrors, and every time he went for a gear he could feel Hank’s attention settle on his wrist. Twice he ground a shift. Hank didn’t say a word, just breathed out slow through his nose, and the second time Sam said “Sorry” out loud before he could stop himself. Hank looked at the dash clock. Forty-one minutes in. He didn’t say anything about it, but Sam knew he’d broken rule one before breakfast on his very first day, and that sat on his chest all the way to I-35.
When the hour was up, Hank poured coffee into the thermos lid and held it where Sam could reach it.
“You’re riding the clutch,” he said. “Float it. Listen to her. And you talk when you’re nervous.”
“Yeah. My ex-wife said that too.”
“She was right.” Hank drank from the cup after him without wiping it. “Go ahead and talk now if you need to. I’ll tell you when to quit.”
So Sam talked. He told him about sitting in his car in the Williams Tower garage for forty minutes one morning in March and knowing he couldn’t go up, and about the divorce, which had been polite and awful, and the empty apartment off Harvard. Hank listened with his big thumb rubbing slow along the seam of his jeans where they stretched over his thigh. North of Wichita, when Sam said he’d never done one thing in his life just because he wanted to, Hank turned his head and looked at him for so long that Sam checked his mirrors twice just to have something to do.
“Take the next exit,” Hank said. “Fuel and swap.”
At the Love’s in Park City, Hank topped the tanks and took the wheel. Sam’s legs were shaking from three hours of white-knuckle concentration, and Hank noticed. “Bunk. Sleep. You’re up again at Russell,” he said, and held the curtain back, and let it fall shut behind him.
Sam couldn’t sleep. That was the whole problem.
The mattress was better than the one in his apartment, and the sleeper was dim and warm and rocked with the road in a way that should have put him out in a minute. But the curtain was only canvas. Through it he could hear the driver’s seat creak every time Hank shifted his weight, and under the drone of the engine he could hear Hank breathing, slow and heavy, the way a big man breathes. The pillow smelled like him. Sam lay on his back with his arm over his eyes and breathed it in and thought about that thumb on the seam of those jeans, and about Say them back, and about the nod.
He was hard. He’d been half hard since Wichita, if he was honest.
What you do back there is your business. Hank had said that. It was a rule. Technically he was following the rules.
He got his jeans open as quietly as he could. The zipper sounded like a gunshot to him, but the engine was louder, and he waited, and nothing came from the other side of the curtain. He pushed his briefs down under his balls and wrapped his hand around his cock and had to bite the inside of his cheek, because he was so much more worked up than he’d realized. He hadn’t touched himself in weeks. Now he couldn’t stop. He stroked slow and careful, the mattress rocking him up into his own fist, precome already slicking his palm, and he thought about Hank’s hand turning his over in the yard and holding it there.
A little sound got out of him, just a breath with some voice in it.
The truck kept rolling. Then Hank’s voice came through the canvas, low and even, pitched to carry exactly as far as the bunk and no farther.
“You’re not sleeping.”
Sam froze with his hand around his cock. His face went hot all the way down his neck.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, I thought—”
“Rule six,” Hank said. “Don’t lie to me.”
Sam lay there with his heart hammering. The signal clicked. The truck drifted a lane and drifted back.
“I’m not sleeping,” he said.
“No. What are you doing?”
He opened his mouth and nothing came out.
“Sam.” It was the first time Hank had used his first name. “What are you doing back there?”
“I’m jerking off.” His voice cracked on it. “Jesus. I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
“Did I tell you to stop?”
The silence after that went on and on. He could hear his own pulse in his ears. His cock was still hard in his hand, harder if anything, and it jumped when Hank said stop, and he knew that if Hank could see him he’d see that too.
“No,” Sam said.
“Then don’t.” The seat creaked. “Slow down, though. You’re rushing it. I can hear you rushing it.”
Sam let out a breath that was almost a sob and did what he was told. He made himself go all the way up and all the way down, feeling the skin drag over the head and the wet smear under his thumb, and his hips came up off the mattress on their own.
“That’s better,” Hank said. “You got your jeans all the way off?”
“No. Just open.”
“Get them off. Shirt up. I want you to feel the air on you.”
Sam shoved the jeans down around his boots and dragged the quarter-zip and the T-shirt under it up over his belly and his chest. His soft stomach prickled in the cool air and his nipples went tight. He was lying in a stranger’s bed with his clothes shoved out of the way while that stranger drove eighty thousand pounds up I-135 and told him how to touch himself, and Sam couldn’t remember ever being this hard.
“Talk to me,” Hank said. “You liked talking so much. Tell me what you’re doing.”
“I’m stroking it. Slow, like you said.” He licked his lips. “It’s dripping. I’m getting it all over my hand. I’m using it.”
“Good. You thinking about somebody?”
“Yes.”
“Your ex-wife?”
“No.” Sam laughed, a wrecked little laugh. “God, no.”
“Who, then.”
He shut his eyes. “You. Since the yard. Since you made me say the rules back. It was just a list, it was so fucking stupid, and I got hard in your passenger seat.”
The quiet went on for a mile. Then Hank said, very low, “I know. I saw.”
Sam moaned out loud. He couldn’t help it. His hand tightened and sped up and Hank said “Uh-uh. Slow,” in exactly the voice he’d used about the clutch, and Sam slowed down, whimpering.
“Play with your balls,” Hank said. “Other hand. Tug on them. You like that?”
“Yeah. Fuck, yeah. Oh, fuck, that’s good.”
“You’re a noisy one. Didn’t figure that from the office shirt.” There was the faintest roughness in Hank’s voice now, like gravel under the tires. “Nobody’s heard you like this in a long time, huh?”
“Never. Nobody ever.”
“Well, I’m hearing it. Every sound. So give me more.”
Sam gave him more. He stopped trying to be quiet at all. He said Hank’s name and please and I’m so close, I can’t take it, Hank, I’m gonna come, and Hank talked him along it like he was talking a truck down a grade, easy and steady, never hurrying him. Squeeze the head. Thumb right under it, there you go. Pull on those balls. Don’t you come yet. You come when I say. Sam’s thighs were shaking and sweat ran down his ribs. He got so close he had to let go and grab the edge of the mattress with both hands, gasping, his cock slapping wet against his belly, and he heard Hank laugh very softly, and that almost did it on its own.
“Put it back in your hand,” Hank said. “Go on. Fast now, as fast as you want. Come on, Sam. Let me hear it.”
He came so hard it hit his chin. He cried out, loud, a raw noise that filled the sleeper, and he kept stroking through it because nobody had told him to stop, until the aftershocks made him flinch and curl up on his side, and then he rolled back and lay there with come cooling on his belly and chest, panting at the underside of the top bunk.
On the other side of the curtain the turn signal clicked on, then off. Hank’s breathing was heavier than it had been.
“There’s paper towels in the cabinet by your head,” Hank said. “Clean up. Then sleep. I mean it this time.”
Sam slept like he’d been hit with a shovel.
He woke because the engine note had changed. They were stopped, air brakes sighing, and gold light was coming in around the edge of the curtain. He’d slept through Russell. He yanked his jeans up in a panic and stuck his head out and found Hank in the driver’s seat with his reading glasses on, doing logs on the tablet.
“You let me sleep.”
“You needed it. We’ve been sitting in Hays since noon.” Hank pulled the glasses off like they’d insulted him. “Eat and shower. Then you drive to Limon while I sleep.” He looked at Sam in the low evening light, at the bedhead and the rumpled quarter-zip, and his eyes stayed a while on Sam’s mouth. “Grab your kit.”
The woman at the fuel desk gave Hank one shower code off his points card. He didn’t ask for a second. He walked Sam down the hall to shower five and punched in the code and held the door, and Sam walked in ahead of him, and Hank came in behind him and locked it.
It was a small tiled room with a loud fan and a bench bolted to the wall. Hank set his bag down and looked at Sam, in no hurry at all.
“We can each go in turn,” he said. “I’ll wait in the hall. That’s fine too.”
“I don’t want you to wait in the hall.”
“Then say what you want.”
Sam swallowed. “I want to see you.”
Hank nodded once, like that was a reasonable answer to a work question, and started to undress. He hung the Carhartt on the hook and pulled off the flannel and then the white T-shirt, and Sam stood there with his kit bag hanging from his hand and forgot to breathe. Every layer that came off made him bigger. The T-shirt peeled up over a heavy belly and a chest furred grey, the hair running down the middle of his stomach in a dark trail, big dark nipples showing through all that grey, and when he reached to hang the shirt Sam saw his left arm was freckled from twenty years of driver’s-side sun. He sat on the bench to unlace his worn Red Wings and his gut folded over his belt, and when he stood and dropped his jeans and boxers together, his cock hung thick and heavy between his thighs, uncut, already filling.
“Your turn,” Hank said.
Sam undressed with hands that didn’t quite work, and when he finally got the pinching boots off he nearly groaned out loud. He could see himself in the scratched mirror over the sink, pale belly and the grey coming in at his temples and in the hair on his chest, and he could see Hank behind him watching all of it.
“Well, now,” Hank said. “Insurance man’s got a nice ass on him.”
Sam laughed and it came out shaky. Hank reached into the stall, turned the water on hot, and pulled him in by the wrist.
It was tight in there. The water hit Hank’s shoulders and sheeted down his chest, and Sam had to press close to get any of it, and then they were pressed together belly to belly with Hank’s beard scraping his forehead and Hank’s cock swelling hot against his hip. Hank took the bar of soap and washed Sam like he was checking him for damage. He ran his big palms down Sam’s ribs and soaped his belly in slow circles, then reached down and took Sam’s cock and balls in one soapy hand and just held them, heavy, like he was weighing them.
“This what you had in your fist back there?” he said into Sam’s ear.
“Yes.”
“Sounded like you were having a hell of a time.”
“I was. You were.” Sam’s forehead dropped to Hank’s shoulder. Hank started to stroke him, soap-slick and slow, twisting over the head, and Sam’s knees nearly went. “Oh, fuck. Hank. Fuck, your hand is so big. You’re gonna make me come again already.”
“No, I’m not. Put yours on me. Go on. You’ve been looking at it since I got my shorts off.”
Sam wrapped his hand around Hank’s cock and gasped at how heavy and hot it was, and at the way the thick foreskin rolled back under his palm until the fat head pushed out wet. He couldn’t close his fingers all the way around it. Hank grunted deep in his chest and pushed his hips forward into Sam’s fist.
“That’s it,” Hank said. “Both of us. Nice and easy.”
They stood under the water and jerked each other, foreheads together, breathing into each other’s mouths without kissing. Hank’s free hand was spread across the small of Sam’s back holding him in close, and every time Sam’s grip faltered that hand pressed harder and Sam’s grip came back. Hank talked the whole time, low and filthy, right against his ear. You were so goddamn loud in my bunk. Truck in the next lane could’ve heard you begging. I had to grab my dick through my jeans to keep from pulling over on the shoulder and climbing back there. Sam whimpered and stroked him faster, and Hank said, Yeah, like that, good boy, and Sam made a sound that embarrassed him.
“You like that,” Hank said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. Say it again.”
“Good boy. You’re doing so good for me.”
Sam sank to his knees on the wet tile.
He looked up once, water in his eyes, to make sure. Hank’s face above him was flushed under the grey beard and his mouth was open. He put one hand on the tile wall and the other on top of Sam’s head, not pushing, just resting it there.
“Go ahead,” Hank said, rough. “If you want it, go ahead.”
Sam wanted it. He took the head in his mouth and pushed the foreskin back with his lips, and it tasted of soap and, under the soap, of Hank, and Hank said Oh, Jesus above him in a voice Sam hadn’t heard him use yet. It had been years since he’d done this, one drunk night he’d never told his wife about, and he was clumsy at first, too much teeth. Hank’s thumb stroked his temple.
“Easy. Lips over your teeth. Get it wet. Get it nice and sloppy. There you go. Oh, that’s good. That’s real good, Sam.”
He got better fast, the way he’d said he would. He took more of it, as much as he could, and gagged when the head hit the back of his throat and pulled off coughing, spit hanging from his lip.
“Jesus, you’re huge,” he said, hoarse. “I can’t get it all in.”
“Then take what you can. I’m not going anywhere.”
He went down again, one hand wrapped around the base where his mouth couldn’t reach and the other braced in the thick hair on Hank’s thigh, slurping, not caring how it sounded under the fan. Hank’s belly rose and fell over him. He was sucking a big grey-bearded man’s cock in a truck-stop shower in Hays, Kansas, on his knees, and he was so hard it ached, so he reached down and started jerking himself again without being told.
“Would you look at that,” Hank said. “Touching yourself with my dick in your mouth. You were made for this, weren’t you. Ten years in an office and all you ever needed was to get down on your knees for somebody and suck cock.”
Sam moaned around him, loud, and Hank’s hips jerked. The hand on his head closed in his hair, not hard.
“I’m close,” Hank said. “You hear me? I’m gonna come. Pull off if you don’t want it.”
Sam didn’t pull off. He looked up at Hank and sucked harder, and Hank said his name, and then Hank was coming in his mouth, thick and bitter and a lot of it, grunting with each pulse like something heavy being lifted. Sam swallowed what he could and the rest ran down his chin into the water, and a second later he came himself, spilling over his own fist onto the tile between Hank’s feet, crying out with his mouth still full.
Hank pulled him up off the floor by his arms. He held him under the water with both arms around him while Sam shook, Sam’s face pressed into the wet grey hair on Hank’s chest, and for a long minute neither of them said anything at all.
“Okay,” Hank said finally, into his hair. “Okay. Wash up. Your shift starts in forty minutes.”
They didn’t talk about it at dinner, and Sam couldn’t stop looking at Hank’s hands. Once, reaching past him for the ketchup, Hank put his palm flat on the small of Sam’s back and left it there a second, then took it away.
At eight-thirty Sam pulled out of Hays heading west on I-70 with the sun gone and the prairie turned black on both sides. Hank stood between the seats before he went back, bent under the roof, looking down at him.
“First hour,” Hank said. “Nobody talks.”
“I know.”
“You broke that one this morning.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just remember I keep count.” He reached for the curtain. “Limon. Wake me if you get tired. That’s not a suggestion.”
The curtain fell shut. Sam drove, floating the gears the way Hank had told him. Behind the canvas he heard the bunk take Hank’s weight, boots hitting the floor, then a long breath going out. Nobody said a word for an hour, and his whole body hummed through every minute of it.
Somewhere past WaKeeney, Hank’s phone lit up in the cup holder where he’d left it charging. Sam didn’t mean to look. It was just there, bright in the dark cab, right below the gauges. The message was from Walt.
How’s the new one. You tell him yet why the last three walked off in Salina? Or you waiting till you got him past Denver where he can’t get home?
The screen went dark again. Behind the curtain Hank’s breathing had gone slow and even, the breathing of a man sound asleep, or of a man who wanted Sam to think so.