Coming Home

By ColoradoT. Sky

            She fully expected him to be late. It was never intentional, but it was customary as unforeseen events and situations seemed to conspire to detain him in his perennial travels. She was unconcerned as she made a simple meal at sundown, preparing enough for two and humming as she smiled at the thought of him.

            He was a leather moth, describing erratic courses through endless nights, but she was the flame to which he invariably returned. The heat of her flame focused deep within her and touched the fuse of a tremor which rippled through her body to the ends of every nerve. She smiled again and the rain began as she ate. He would be there soon, but not soon enough.

He was two hundred miles away and coming on strong. He had been watching the approaching thunderheads when the blue lights appeared in his mirror. The cop detained him just long enough for the rain to begin and by the time he was back in the hammer lane, he was drenched to the soul.

The icy rain was raw and stinging. Such an early spring thunderstorm, though rare, was not unheard of; this was the last spiteful vestige of winter, biting deep into his bones and gnawing at every one he had ever broken. He ignored it, thinking instead of the moist warmth now only a few hours away. He shifted and passed a bus, its diesel growl singing him on, fueling his desire and determination.

She washed her dishes, checked that the storm had not yet toppled the phone lines, sat, stood, paced, read and didn't read, and finally sauntered off to take a shower. He banked down a long offramp, hearing the thunders of his engine and the storm and his own blood pounding in his brain.

            She luxuriated in the blood-hot shower, breathing deeply the steam as it reminded her of the moist heat which he threw like a furnace, steam almost visible and richly redolent with the heady blood-sweat-iron-fuel smell of him. The water splashed, warm and stinging, creeping into the secret places which she longed for him to find, warming her as she waited for him to warm her.

He stopped for fuel and the perky pubescent attendant offered him coffee on the house. He paid for his fuel, emptied the cup, thanked her with a smile and a wink at the thought of someone else and dove back into the storm.

She, dried and naked, aimlessly paced the darkened house, turning toward the drive with every rumble of thunder, thinking that this one, maybe this one, but it was only the storm.

He thundered on. Pelted with rain, straining to see through his clouded goggles, blinded in the occasional instants when the lightning would turn the world momentarily motionless with fat globules of rain hung in surreal stroboscopy, then only darkness, blindness, and the feel of the road.

At midnight she went to bed. Not to sleep, but only because she had nothing to do but wait and no place she hadn't already waited. She cocooned within the deep down comforter, shifting occasionally to another cooler place, then shifting back and telling herself that the heat she felt was his.

He thundered down another ramp, leaving the highway. Not long now, he thought. The back roads were more flooded, but deserted.  The road was his for however he could use it.

She snuggled in solitary warmth, nestled at the crossroads where reverie, sleep and death abide, where imagination runs and nightmares ride. She heard the rumble of the storm and for her it was his engine. He banked down the long drive approaching the house, his lamps casting latticed false lightning across the ceiling of her room.

She groaned, she purred. She heard the rumble of his engine and thought it was the storm.

He rolled his machine beneath its eave and walked to the house, the creak of the doorhinge his only greeting. She rolled, moaning, as the measured tread of his heavy boots echoed every third beat of her heart. She kicked off the covers as if she knew. She sprawled inviting, demanding, reaching.

Lightning filled the room, flashing from the travelsodden planes and edges of him, a frigid endrenched and darkened figure filling her doorway. She moaned, eyes closed and lips parted, sighing his name as her lungs, her head, her soul filled with the blood-sweat-iron-fuel smell of him.

            She came gently awake with his breath soft in her ear.                  

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