Ridge Road, Chapter 10 · Road Closed

The leasing office on Harvard opened at eight, and Sam was standing at the glass door at seven fifty-two with a manila envelope under his arm and the engine of the Camry ticking behind him.

Bev unlocked it in her slippers. She had been the manager the whole year he’d lived there and had never once called him anything but Mr. Ortega. She took the envelope, slid the papers out, and read the sticky note on top, which still said DO NOT RENEW in Hank’s block capitals.

“That’s not your writing,” she said.

“No, ma’am.”

She looked at him over her glasses for a second longer than she needed to, then turned the form around and tapped the box for a forwarding address. Sam wrote the Lewis house out in full, street and number, and it was the first time he had put it on paper anywhere official. His hand was steady. He’d thought it might not be.

“Keys by the thirtieth,” Bev said. “Leave them in the drop box if I’m not here. You were a quiet tenant. I’ll say that for you.”

“I’ll have to work on that,” Sam said, and she laughed, short and surprised, and he went back out to the car feeling like he’d gotten away with something.

---

Hank was on the porch when he pulled into the Lewis driveway, a duffel at his feet and his travel mug in his fist, squinting north as if he could already see weather. Sam parked the Camry nose to the garage, where it was going to sit for however long this took, and locked it.

“Done?” Hank said.

“Done. She asked whose handwriting it was.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“Nothing. She worked it out.” Sam took the steps two at a time and went past him into the house.

The back bedroom still smelled like the two of them. The cedar box sat on the dresser with the lid shut, where Walt had told them to keep it, and Sam put a hand flat on the lid on his way past without thinking about why. He packed fast, because Hank hated waiting on a man with a bag, rolling his jeans around his thermals and yanking the charger out of the wall. He put the Walmart box of rubbers from the nightstand and the Walgreens tube into the side pocket of his duffel, and made a note on his phone to grab a second tube at a truck stop if they sat somewhere longer than two days. Then he zipped it and didn’t look at it again.

When he came back out, Mrs. Pruitt was crossing the street in a quilted coat with her hands in her pockets. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked at the duffels.

“North?” she said.

“Denver, then Wyoming,” Hank said. “Weather’s coming in Wednesday.”

“Weather’s always coming in Wednesday.” She looked at Sam. “Sam, you leave me the spare key. I’ll take in the mail and I’ll turn the porch light on at dark so nobody thinks the house is empty.”

“It’s on a timer,” Hank said.

“The timer’s been wrong since the time change and you know it.” She held out her hand. Sam worked the spare off the hook inside the door and put it in her palm, and she closed her fingers on it and nodded as though something had been witnessed. “Hank. Drive like you’ve got somebody to come home to. You do now.”

She crossed back over without waiting for an answer. Hank watched her go with his jaw working.

“Twenty years,” he said. “Twenty years that woman’s been winning arguments on my porch.”

---

They hooked the trailer at the Tulsa yard at nine. It was a dry van, forty thousand pounds of boxed restaurant equipment, half to a receiver in Henderson outside Denver and the rest on to Rock Springs. Sam did the walk-around and the tug test while Hank went inside for the paperwork, and when he came out Walt was behind him, cane first, coming down the two concrete steps from the dispatch office one at a time.

Walt stopped beside the trailer and looked at the sky to the north, the way everyone in the yard seemed to be doing that morning.

“Ortega,” he said.

“Walt.”

“I want it on the record that I didn’t book this one.” Walt tipped his chin at the paperwork in Hank’s hand. “It came up on the board at nine last night, the automatic kind. I saw it. I’d have given it to somebody without a house to get back to. Doyle took it off the board himself before I got my coffee.”

“Paid well,” Hank said.

“It pays well because nobody sane wants I-80 on a Wednesday in a freezing-rain advisory.” Walt shifted his weight onto the cane. “You know Elk Mountain closes. You know it closes for days.”

“I know.”

Walt looked at Sam, then back at Hank. Something in his mustache moved that might have been a smile or might have been the cold. “Fine. You heard me Sunday. If you’re not at my table at five, I get a text by noon. Both of you. I’m not sitting there making up a wreck on the Laramie grade.”

“We’ll text,” Sam said.

“Text, not call. Doyle calls and says three words and I have to guess the rest.” Walt turned to go, then turned back. “And eat something hot. Motel coffee isn’t food.”

He went back up the steps one at a time. Hank lifted two fingers at the window after the door shut, and a second later, behind the glass, Walt’s cup came up.

---

Sam took the first shift. The first hour nobody talked, the way the first hour always went, and Sam didn’t mind it any more. He’d started to like it. Hank sat in the passenger seat with his reading glasses on and the load paperwork on his knee and didn’t sleep. Somewhere north of the Kansas line he reached across without looking and turned the heat up one notch, because Sam’s hands were cold on the wheel and Hank had noticed that before Sam had.

They swapped drivers at a fuel stop in Salina, and on the way back to the interstate Hank took the north side road without being asked and rolled past the Sunflower slow. Dolores was in the side window refilling the ketchup bottles. She looked up at the green Pete, looked a second longer at Sam in the passenger seat, and lifted the bottle at them like a toast. Hank raised a hand off the wheel. Neither of them said anything about it until the on-ramp.

“She’s going to tell the whole counter,” Sam said.

“Let her,” Hank said. “Gives them something better than the weather.”

Sam slept through Limon, which felt like a waste, and woke up in the bunk in the dark with the truck running steady under him and Hank humming something tuneless up front. He lay there for a while and listened. He’d never heard Hank hum before.

Henderson took the first half of the load at nine on Tuesday morning. The dock foreman signed with a pen that didn’t work and then with Sam’s, and Sam watched Hank stand in the cold with his hands in his jacket and count every pallet off twice, the way he always did, as if somebody might try to sell him one back. They were back on I-25 north by noon with the sky gone the flat white of a dinner plate. At Cheyenne they turned west, and that was where the radio started. The CB carried it first, a string of drivers on channel nineteen talking about Elk Mountain, then the weather band, then a recorded WYDOT voice saying freezing rain was arriving ahead of schedule.

By the time they climbed toward Laramie it was already coming down. Sam was driving. He felt it before he saw it, a looseness in the steering, the trailer behind them suddenly lighter and more opinionated. The windshield glazed in ten seconds. The wipers dragged.

“Easy,” Hank said. He didn’t raise his voice. “Off the throttle. Don’t brake. Let her slow herself.”

Sam let her slow. The tail lights ahead of them had stacked up into a red smear. A highway patrol car sat across the westbound lanes past the Laramie exits with its lights going, and a sign on a trailer behind it said I-80 CLOSED WESTBOUND in orange letters that flickered in the sleet.

“Take the exit,” Hank said. “We’re done.”

---

The High Plains Motor Lodge sat on the east edge of Laramie with a gravel truck lot behind it that was already half full of rigs nosed in like cattle at a fence. Sam found a spot at the end of a row and set the brakes, and Hank went in to get a room while Sam plugged in the block heater and chocked the wheels in ice that crunched like sugar under his boots.

The woman at the desk was called Lorraine, according to the name tag. She had a space heater at her feet and a radio tuned to the road report, and when Sam came in stamping ice off his boots she was handing Hank a key on a plastic diamond.

“Last king,” she said. “After you it’s doubles with the bad heater or the floor of my office.”

“We’ll take the king,” Hank said.

“You already took it.” She looked at Sam, then at Hank, and didn’t say anything else about it. “Ice machine’s broke, but I doubt you’ll miss it.”

The room was on the ground floor at the back, with a window onto the truck lot and a wall heater under it that ticked and clanked when Hank turned it up. The bed was enormous. It had a brown spread with a pattern of something that might once have been pine cones, and a headboard bolted to the wall, and when Sam sat down on the end of it the mattress gave under him the way the narrow sleeper bunk never had.

He took his phone out and texted Walt with fingers still stiff from the lot.

Laramie. I-80 shut west of town. Motel. Not a wreck.

The answer came before he’d put the phone down.

Radar’s been red since four. I know. Looks like Sunday’s off. I’ll freeze the chili. Eat something hot.

Sam showed it to Hank. Hank read it, grunted, and set his own phone face down on the dresser.

“He was watching the tracker,” Hank said.

“He always watches the tracker.”

“I know it.” Hank pulled his Carhartt off and hung it over the back of the one chair. He stood at the window a minute and watched the ice build on the mirrors of the rigs out there. Then he pulled the curtain shut, all the way, and turned around.

“Nowhere to be,” he said. “First time since August.”

“First time since I met you,” Sam said.

Hank came over to the end of the bed and stood in front of him, close enough that Sam’s knees were against his thighs. He put one hand on Sam’s jaw and tipped his face up. His thumb was cold.

“Word’s wait,” he said. “Same as always. Tell me yes or tell me later.”

“Yes.” Sam put both hands on Hank’s belt. “Now. I drove us up that grade with my heart in my mouth. I want something else in my mouth.”

Hank’s laugh was mostly breath. “Go on, then.”

Sam undid the belt and the button and pushed Hank’s jeans down off his hips, and Hank’s cock came out heavy and half hard against the grey fur under his belly. It smelled of diesel and a long day. Sam took it in his hand and licked the underside slowly, from his balls all the way to the tip, and felt it fill and lift against his tongue. He took the head into his mouth and sucked, slow, and Hank made a low sound and rested one big hand on the top of Sam’s head with no weight in it at all.

“That’s it,” Hank said. “Slow. We’ve got all week.”

Sam took his time. He worked Hank deeper by degrees, his lips stretched wide around the thickness, his hand wrapped around what he couldn’t fit. He pulled off to breathe and lick the slit and went back down. Hank’s thighs were trembling against his knees. When Sam looked up, Hank was watching him with his mouth open and his glasses still hooked in the collar of his flannel, swaying with every breath.

“Christ, Sam,” Hank said. “You keep that up, I’ll go off before I’ve had you.”

Sam let him slip out of his mouth, wet and shining. “Then have me.”

“Stand up.”

Sam stood. Hank kissed him first, slow, his beard rough on Sam’s chin, his tongue tasting of motel coffee and something sweeter underneath. He kissed him until Sam’s hands were fisted in the front of his flannel and Sam was rocking against his thigh without meaning to. Then he stripped him like he was undoing a tarp, steady and practical, and went down on one knee to tug the jeans off over his socks, until Sam was naked in the warm, ugly room with the heater clanking. Hank’s hands went over him, broad and rough, down his sides and over the softness of his belly and round to grip his ass. He bent and bit the curve of Sam’s shoulder, not hard, and then the side of his throat, and Sam’s cock jumped against Hank’s jeans.

“Tell me what you want,” Hank said against his skin.

“You. From behind. Hard, after a while. I want to feel you all the way up while I can’t see you, and I want to hear you.”

“You’ll hear me.” Hank’s hand slid down and squeezed him once, slow, base to head, and let go. “That’s all you get there. Tonight you come on the bed, not in my hand.”

“Then keep your hand off it.”

“Turn around,” Hank said. “Bend over the end of the bed. Feet on the floor.”

Sam turned around. He bent forward, his hips against the edge of the mattress, and lowered himself onto his forearms on the pine-cone spread. Hank grabbed a pillow from the head of the bed and pushed it under Sam’s hips, so that his ass tilted up and his cock lay against the cool pillowcase. Then Sam heard the Walgreens tube uncap behind him.

“We’ve never done it like this,” Sam said into the bedspread.

“No,” Hank said. “That’s why.”

The first finger was slick and cold and went in slowly, and Sam let out a long breath. Hank worked him open with patience, one finger and then two, twisting and stroking, his other hand flat and warm at the small of Sam’s back. He found the spot and rubbed it until Sam’s feet scrabbled on the motel carpet, then backed off and did it again.

“Hank.”

“I know.”

“Hank, I’m ready.”

“You’re close,” Hank said. “Not ready. One more.”

The third finger made Sam groan out loud. He pushed back against Hank’s hand without meaning to, and Hank let him, letting Sam fuck himself on his fingers for a few strokes while he watched.

“There,” Hank said, low and rough. “Now you’re ready.”

He pulled his fingers out. Sam heard him moving behind him, getting himself ready, the wet sound of more lube, and then the blunt head of Hank’s cock pressed against him, hot and slick.

“Breathe out,” Hank said.

Sam breathed out, and Hank pushed in.

It was different from this angle. Deeper at once, and the stretch went up into him in a way that made him gasp and grip the bedspread in both fists. Hank stopped halfway with his hands on Sam’s hips and stood there, breathing hard.

“Talk to me.”

“Big,” Sam said. “Big, and it’s good. Keep going.”

Hank kept going. He pressed in slowly until his thighs were against the backs of Sam’s thighs and his belly was resting warm and heavy on Sam’s ass, and he stayed there, all the way in, while Sam shook.

“You took all of it,” Hank said. “Standing up in a motel in Wyoming with the road shut. God, Sam.”

“Move,” Sam said. “Please.”

Hank moved. He started slow, long pulls nearly all the way out and long slow pushes back in, and every push drove Sam’s cock along the pillowcase under him. Sam heard himself moaning on every stroke and didn’t try to stop. The heater clanked. Somewhere out in the lot an air brake hissed and a man laughed. Hank’s hands tightened on his hips.

“Louder,” Hank said. “Nobody here knows us. Nobody here cares.”

“Fuck me,” Sam said, louder, and Hank did.

He leaned down over Sam’s back for a while without stopping, his chest hair rough on Sam’s shoulder blades, his breath hot on Sam’s ear. He kissed the space between Sam’s shoulder blades and the place behind his ear and kept moving the whole time, slow and deep and unhurried, as if he had decided that this was the only job left in Wyoming.

“Every time I pull back,” he said in Sam’s ear, “you lift up after me. You know you do that?”

“I know. I can’t stop.”

“Don’t stop.” Hank straightened up, took a fresh grip on his hips, and found a rhythm that rocked the whole bed against the bolted headboard. The sound of skin on skin filled the room, wet and steady, and Hank’s breath came out of him in grunts that Sam could feel through the hands on his hips. Every forward stroke pushed Sam into the pillow, and every pull back dragged him along it, and the friction on his cock was slow and maddening and exactly enough.

“Good like this?” Hank said.

“I love it. God, you’re deep. You’re so deep like this. I’m going to feel this every mile from here on.”

“I can see all of it from here.” Hank’s voice had dropped into the low, filthy register Sam had first heard in the sleeper behind the Sunflower. “I can see you opening up for me every time I pull out. You grab on to me like you’re scared I won’t come back.”

“Come back,” Sam said. “Come back. Harder.”

Hank leaned forward and planted one hand flat on the bed beside Sam’s shoulder and drove into him harder, short and heavy now, his belly slapping against Sam’s ass. Sam cried out. His legs were starting to shake. Hank must have felt it, because he slowed right down and stopped with just the head inside, and Sam groaned in protest.

“Still with me?” Hank said. “You need wait, you say wait.”

“I don’t need wait. I need you to move.”

“Say it again.”

“Yes. Yes, Hank. Fuck me till I can’t stand.”

Hank pushed all the way back in in one long stroke, and Sam’s knees nearly went. Hank’s free arm came round under his chest and held him up, and then Hank was fucking him in earnest, deep and steady, holding him in place against the bed with his whole weight behind every thrust.

“You feel so good,” Hank said into his back. “Hot as hell, and all mine. I’ve been thinking about this since Cheyenne. Watching you drive. Watching your hands on my wheel.”

“Your wheel,” Sam said, half laughing, half gasping.

“My wheel.” Hank thrust in deep and ground there. “And you bent over a motel bed with my cock in you, shouting the wallpaper down.”

Sam shouted the wallpaper down. He couldn’t help it. “Don’t stop,” he begged, “don’t stop, Hank, that’s it, right there, keep hitting it,” and Hank kept hitting it, grunting with every stroke, the bed knocking, the pillow under Sam’s hips soaked through with him, until Sam couldn’t tell where the thrusting ended and the shaking began. The pressure built up low in him and spread, every slow drag of his cock on the pillowcase winding it tighter, every deep stroke from Hank pushing it higher.

“Hank, I’m going to come. I’m going to come just like this.”

“Then do it,” Hank said through his teeth. “Don’t touch it. Come on that pillow with me in you.”

Sam came. It hit him so hard the room tilted, his whole body clamping down around Hank’s cock, his own spilling hot and slick into the pillowcase under him in long pulses while he made a long broken noise into the bedspread. Hank swore and held him through it, still moving, slower now, until Sam’s hole was fluttering helplessly around him.

“Hank,” Sam said, hoarse. “Don’t hold back on my account. I want yours.”

Hank fucked him through the last of it, ten more strokes, hard, then pushed in as deep as he could go and held there, shaking. He came with a long low groan into Sam’s shoulder blade, his hands locked on Sam’s hips, his weight bearing down, and they stayed locked together like that, breathing, while the heater ran.

The heater clanked twice and went quiet.

Hank eased out slowly, and Sam made a small, wounded noise at the loss. Hank dealt with what needed dealing with in the bathroom and came back with a warm wet washcloth and cleaned him up with more care than Sam had expected, then pulled the ruined pillow out from under him and dropped it on the floor.

“Lorraine’s going to love us,” Sam said into the spread.

“Lorraine’s seen worse.” Hank lay down on the huge bed and pulled Sam up beside him, so they were both stretched out lengthways for the first time, their heads on the two remaining pillows. Hank’s arm went under Sam’s neck. His beard scratched Sam’s temple.

“All right?” Hank said.

“All right.” Sam laced their fingers together on Hank’s chest. “It’s a big bed.”

“It’s a stupid big bed.” Hank looked at the ceiling. “I’ve slept in this town four times in twenty years. Every time in the cab. I never once took a room.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t have a reason to stop.” Hank turned his head and pressed his mouth to Sam’s hair. “Sweetheart, I’ve got one now.”

---

They slept, and when Sam woke it was dark outside and the ice was still ticking against the window. Hank was sitting on the edge of the bed in his undershirt with the TV on low, the weather channel lighting his face blue. A map of Wyoming was pink and white from one edge to the other.

“Freezing rain through tomorrow,” Hank said without looking round. “Then it turns to snow. Real snow. WYDOT says Elk Mountain stays shut through the weekend, maybe longer.”

Sam sat up and leaned on his back. “So we’re here.”

“We’re here. I paid Lorraine through Monday.” Hank’s hand found Sam’s knee. “Text Walt again. Tell him Sunday’s definitely off. Tell him we’re eating something hot.”

Sam picked up his phone. Before he could type, the handheld CB Hank had brought in from the cab crackled on the dresser, someone on channel nineteen talking to the lot in general, a slow Missouri voice asking if anyone had a spare set of chains.

Then the voice stopped, and started again, closer to the mic.

“Hang on. That green Pete at the end of the row. That Doyle Transport?” A pause, a laugh with no fun in it. “Doyle. It’s Teddy Marsh. You remember me. I lasted a month.”

Hank went very still. Sam watched him look at the radio and not reach for it.

“I’m in one-fourteen,” the voice said. “Three doors down. Road’s shut, Doyle. You got nowhere to go.”