Vacation

If I packed for vacation, my wife would know I was going.  I have to pretend like everything is normal.

I leave the house with my computer bag, a few sandwiches tucked into the side pocket for lunch.  I dress as casually as work will allow, give my wife a kiss as she leaves the shower, I pat the head of my dog, who is laying on the ouch.  She doesn’t lift her head for me as I pet her, and is asleep again before I open the front door.  I take a deep breath of home, and each step after is taken in a straight line away.

The highways to the airport are much the same as the highways to work, but they feel larger, more important.  The crash barriers grow up and around me like fingers threatening to pull my car back and down.  I speed.  The faster I go, the less angry the world seems about where I’m going.  It’s that simple.  The cars around me seem unaware.  I feel like I am sneaking among them, all these people on their way to days like I had yesterday and for weeks before that.  

The feeling does not leave me until I get close enough to the airport.  Near the airport, I am surrounded by other people who woke up this morning intending to go somewhere else.  Some of them are going for business, but have hidden dark hopes of what might happen.  Some are going on vacation, and have plans for the same sorts of dark things.  I imagine the college girl next to me is going to South America, and will convince herself she belongs.  She will be looking for a South American boyfriend, the sort of boy that will be with her for the two weeks she is there, who is dark, whose accent is thick, whose English is good enough for her to imagine him as supremely intelligent and artistic. They will have sex on the beach, perhaps, or perhaps will go to the village where his family lives and no white people have been before, and they will have sex there I imagine she has this planned out.  She will convince herself that he loves her, that she loves him.  Good for her.

Vacations are bits of magic in our lives.  Vacations are places where we act like the person we wish we were with the life we wish we had.  We often need to be somewhere with buildings that look different and languages that aren’t ours before our bodies really let that sink in.  That is, I imagine, why airports have that sort of feeling they have.  Those planes really can take us somewhere, you know?

I guess I don’t really know.  I hate planes, and rarely ride them.  I come to the airport for the parking ramps.  Today, I am heading to Ramp C, which has the nicest views, the best vending machines, and the worst bathrooms.  Today I’m taking a vacation.

The key to a parking vacation is to get as high in the ramp as you can.  I suppose I should say that the key to a parking vacation at an airport is to get as high in the ramp as you can.  Normal parking ramps, in downtowns and large malls and such, are too high-traffic, and cars parked too far up too early attract too much attention.  At an airport, you simply look like you’ve been parked there for days, or that you may just be waiting for a brother-in-law to arrive from Phoenix.
So, I get as high as I can in Ramp C, which doesn’t have a roof level, but does have some natural light (Ramp A has solid walls, which makes for a crap vacation, if you ask me).  Up near the top, there are few cars around, so very little to look at while I wait.  I’m always early.  I take the time to finish my coffee, to lean back in my seat, and to look hard at each inch of the ramp I can see as if it is a brand new and wonderful thing.

There is a fire extinguisher in a red case.  The bottom right corner is rusted completely through.  I decide that I would bet $60.00, and not more, that the fire extinguisher inside does not work.  I look hard at the fire extinguisher like it is something wholly new and exciting to me.  I try to appreciate it as a thing of beauty and intrigue.  I am on vacation, so it works.  

I am waiting for something, but I am on vacation, so waiting is relaxing and not boring.  I do not have to wait long though, before the large black SUV finds its way to the parking space next to mine.

I look hard at the woman who gets out to make sure I’ve never seen her before.  She is wearing an expensive-looking skirt and a cheap-looking top.  She has taken time with her hair, but not her makeup.  She is on vacation.  I have no idea why I was waiting for her.  I have no idea how she found me.

I get out to meet her, and we stand close enough that the nervous energy between us is visible in the same way that, on vacation, static and hunger and drunkenness are visible.  She pulls me into the back seat of her SUV without talking and begins to kiss me with her leg wrapped over mine.  We kiss slowly.  Exploring.  She kisses like my first girlfriend, with her mouth open and her tongue swirling in ways that suggest her mouth’s talents are wasted on just kissing.  Our fingers follow our lips, but with more hesitation.  In the back seat of a car, touching feels more intimate than kissing.  We’re both unsure if we’re in love or in danger.

I touch her over her shirt, finding bumps of bra I think are nipples until she buttons down her top for me.  There is nothing in the entire world like new nipples.  Every woman’s nipples are her story, are a secret she carries around just inches and miles from constant reveal.  Every woman’s nipples are a discovery when touched for the first time.  There is nothing so like a vacation like nipples, pulled from under a bra, pinched between thumb and forefinger, twisted gently like beach waves, the crest of pressure at the point of turn back and forth.  There is nothing in the entire world like nipples on vacation.

My mouth creates a path down her jaw and down her neck and down her chest.  My hand tries to find its own path from knee to thigh to up to up to up from thigh, but the path is blocked.  She doesn’t want me to touch her, not yet, not there.  She doesn’t want me to touch her, but she wants to be touched.  She puts her hand to the bottom of her skirt and slides it up just enough to touch up and up and up, and as I keep my hand on her thigh, rubbing and pressing, her fingers find her.  I can’t tell if she’s touching over underwear or not wearing any, but as her fingers slide further up and up, it seems impossible that there is any fabric in their way.  

I want so badly to touch her, but she’s been clear.  I focus on her nipples and all the old tired tricks I do with my mouth for her will be new and exciting.  She bites her bottom lip and I do the thing with my teeth and I’m pretty sure she likes it.  It would seem awkward now to ask a stranger if they like how running your teeth and tongue against their nipple.  I do not ask.

She slides forward, her knees press dimples into the back of the driver’s seat.  Her hand is moving fast under her skirt and her lips press against me with the fury of the fucking we both wish we were comfortable enough to do.  My hands are on her, a breast in each, following the suggestions the movements of her hips are screaming to me.  She likes nipple pinching more than twisting, and a pinch between fingers while rubbing the tip with my thumb seems to have the intended effect.

When she moans into my bottom lip, sucked between her teeth, I remember that I’m not just on vacation to get someone else off, or to help them get off, or whatever it is that we’re doing.  I take a hand from her and try to move it to myself, but find the path to my own cock blocked again by her hand.  She grabs me by the wrist and moves me back to her nipple.  She didn’t come on vacation to leave one nipple free to the wind.  I am arguing in my head about arguing amidst the kissing, but her hand finds my cock over my pants and starts to pull at the button of my pants.  

I doubt that a new cock carries with it the magic and mystery that nipples do, but she is game.  She is excited, creative even, with her fingertips and the trailing up and down, the wrapping around.  I can feel her get wetter from the way her tongue starts to move between my lips.  I can feel her start to orgasm from her breath, from the way she is jacking me off.  She starts moaning to screaming and the noise of her orgasm bounces around each and every concrete edge of the parking structure.  She came hard in the back seat of her car.  A vacation orgasm carries with it absolutely nothing.  Vacation orgasms are just wonderful times to be alive.

She had hers, so I am concerned mainly with mine, but she is buttoning her shirt back up and I am now just concerned.  She smiles at me in a “don’t worry” sort of way, as if we’d been communicating for long enough years we didn’t need words to say such things.  Funny how quick you can get to know someone when it’s the only thing you have to do that day.

She pulls me on top of her, straddling her, and continues to jack me off.  The kissing part of the day is over, and we are, both of us, in the business of a handjob.  She’s working as hard to make me come as I am to stall the ejaculation.  Her hands move like they know what I want, but do things I’ve never had anyone try before.  She jacks me off like no one ever told her you don’t have to work hard on guys.
I understand the cheap top.  It is meant to be disposable.

I perform admirably, doing as is expected of a man having his penis stroked repeatedly.  I make a fantastic mess all over her chest.  She unbuttons the top again, completely this time, and opens the door enough to throw it on the ground below.  She follows after, closing the door behind her and immediately opening the front.  She slides into the driver sheet, taking her keyring from the cup holders and turning the ignition.  All vacations must end.

I don’t even have my keys out of my pocket before she drives away, her bare shoulders and bra visible through the side window.  I do not watch her car as it enters the spiral ramp down and down and down.

For lunch, the final act of vacation, I take myself out for a burger and a beer.  I eat and drink slowly, replaying the morning in my head.  I wonder who the woman is, I wonder what she’s thinking now.  I remember her body, her breasts.  I remember and remember her orgasm.  I think it’s time to go home.

I walk through the door, and my wife is home from work too.  She’s pouring herself another glass of wine.  She’s still wearing the skirt from vacation, and the worn t-shirt she has added compliments it nicely.