Chapter 8: Long cold winter
It was shaping up to be a long, cold winter. They come along once in a while, even in the Pacific Northwest. It’s always a cold winter East o’ Mountains, as locals style it. Sometimes it slops over into the usually mild climate between the Japanese Current and the crest of the Cascade Mountains.
My colleague and I were sitting on a plane at SeaTac watching sleet rattle against the windows when the pilot came on to announce our inland destination was closed due to a blizzard. Damn! A jet ate the 300 miles there quickly and I had a good-looking blonde expecting me. Our agency had moved from confrontation to negotiation with the liquor-selling tribes, but our meeting wasn’t until tomorrow. I had anticipated a long evening with the blonde.
The meetings we had scheduled were crucial to an on-going negotiation. When the pilot estimated the time runways over there might open, Beagle snorted: Hell we could drive it before then. Still get a night’s sleep. (Beagle wasn’t my nickname for him. I picked it up from a paranoid journalist who believed all state phones constantly tapped and created code names for officials he asked about. I guess he trusted me because I was an ex-newsman.) We decided to deplane. My Honda Accord got over thirty miles per gallon and the state would pay mileage.
Beagle was the most unflappable man I ever worked with. He calmly got our bags extricated from the hold while I called my blonde. Call me when you get here, she said. It’ll be late I said. Call and I’ll come to you. An incentive to wring out the fast little four-cylinder if ever there was one.
We were halfway across the state with the speedometer at 90 when my high beams caught a scramble under an overpass ahead. Two troopers out of their cars gossiping, jumping for their open doors. “Shit,” I said, and powered down so fast Beagle thought it would have been a hoot to pull in behind them. Unflappable I said. But cops get nervous when you’re behind them. I coasted by, onto the shoulder. One of them walked down. Beagle pulled his Attorney General’s ID. (Legal Beagle, get it? The reporter’s code wasn’t exactly Da Vinci-class.) “Tell ’em who we are and what we’re doing tomorrow.”
A perk of being part of the power structure: the trooper had no desire to explain up his chain of command interfering with official state business. Said we probably would not see another patrol car for a hundred miles. Keep an eye out for black ice, have a safe run. I drove into the tail of the airport-closing storm, and slowed. But the midnight eastbound freeway was empty; no pileups, no cars spinning out on the ice. The sure-footed Honda never bobbled.
We checked in and separated to our rooms. I was famished. The blonde answered on the first ring and said she’d meet me at an all-night restaurant. I was eating when she got there, hair a little rumpled, muffled in warm winter clothes, almost no makeup. She looked fine to me. No, she wasn’t hungry. Finish up and let’s get to your room. So delightfully direct, definitely worth the high-speed run.
I’ve always been a night owl and the food restored me. I stopped her yawns with a kiss as we disrobed. The room was warm and she was warmer. She warmed that whole winter for me. Said you must be tired from all that driving, and urged me onto my back. Mounted and rode me. She moved slowly and dreamily, leaning into my hands. Cupping her breasts, looking up at her lovely unmade-up face, age showed plainly in fine lines and little wrinkles. Below her neck her body was trim and tight as if time delayed moving south. From some random corner of my brain came a memory Benjamin Franklin said women age from the face down, and men put off by facial wrinkles miss exquisite sex with still-young bodies. Words to that effect. Ol’ Ben knew his stuff.
She began to shudder and increased the tempo, forcing me deep. Her third or maybe fourth convulsion triggered me. We finished together in a very satisfying way. She collapsed on my chest, my arms went around her and we rested quietly, still attached by my softening cock. It was all so peaceful and calm while winter raged outside. I thought what a wonder it was to have found this woman who said she’d meet me whenever I got to town — and mean it.
Eventually I disengaged, eased her over on her back and drifted down to her Mons, nibbling licks. “What — are — you — doing — to — me?”
“This?” I tongued her engorged clit. “Or this?” I slipped two fingers beneath my tongue and into her. That wonderful groan. “I’m making love to you, is what.”
She came, muscles in her inner thighs trembling around my head, hips lifting. I was ready to keep going but she pushed on my forehead with the heels of her hands. “You’re supposed to be tired!”
“You revived me.”
“Well you just did me in! Some of us have to get up and go to work, you know.”
So I relented and held her and thanked her for braving the storm. She rolled her eyes: “Big sacrifice — you’re the one drove clear across the state. Call me tomorrow when you’re done doing whatever it is you do.” Definitely my blonde luck, as I thought of her. As she dressed I worried about black ice. She patted my cheek: “I live here, remember?” East o’ Mountains condescension for a denizen of the gentler coast climate.
The next day Beagle and I made progress in negotiations we wouldn’t have if we let the weather prevent us. Had leisure time to shop a vast store with low prices and a huge inventory. Bill Ruger’s signature .22 pistol that made him rich was on sale. I bought one. Beagle added to his collection with a tiny replica of a famous early pocket pistol. We added ammo to burn along the way home. Pistol-buying was simple then, and we were unconstrained by airline rules. He added a pint of rye for the trip, channeling 1940s private eyes. But I was the one with the blonde Marlowe would have liked. I kept that to myself.
The storm had blown itself out, and the weather turned clear and cold: low teens at midday. Damn near zero after dark when she and I got back together. I told Beagle I was sleep-deprived and would turn in early to be ready for the drive home.
She arrived in her daylight put-together look, under a long heavy wool coat. My brief fantasy she would open the coat and reveal herself nude burst like a bubble while I laughed at myself. No huge loss. She already had proved how readily her clothes came off. In less time than it takes to tell we were naked together reprising our wee-hours lovemaking.
She still had to get up and go to work, but we had four hours to her midnight target for an early night. We used the time quietly and calmly like long-time lovers. She told me she was coming to the Westside to visit relatives for Christmas. Want to meet in Seattle? This woman slaked a thirst no rye could touch.
The weather remained clear for the drive home. Beagle and I stopped off at remote rural turnouts to burn some rimfire in our new guns. He lowered the rye level. I stayed with coffee. I was driving, and I’d had my blonde fix.
