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Brake Pads

Bill Hemmig

    Dude across the waiting area slouched low in his chair idly tapping on his smart phone is in faded jeans and a no-longer-really-white tee shirt and his knees are spread wide and he never looks up and all that’s kind of hot.
    I’m at the Volkswagen dealership waiting for the 45,000-mile service on my Jetta to finish up. I want to think they’re back there working on his 1969 VW Bus but nobody would bring a ’69 Bus to the dealership for work but I go with it anyway. I squint through the top half of my glasses to spot a ring and there is one but these days a wedding band doesn’t guarantee heterosexuality not that it ever did.
    Seems my age give or take. Full head of potato-brown hair might have seen a comb this morning. Sturdy, untroubled hands. Poker face, not interested, not bored, I get no idea what’s going on with the phone. Almost too casual, too chill, too just there to be gay but that tells you nothing these days either.
    He’s single in actual fact, a free agent but he’s so smoking hot that he wears the ring to keep the unimaginative from hitting on him, women in particular.
    Dude is in fact quietly brilliant, a maverick philosophy professor who does fine woodworking as a hobby and drives around in a ’69 VW Bus, moss green, with seven identical Jerry Garcia bobble heads lined up on the dashboard, facing out. He never dresses up. He writes dense and hallucinatory books marrying Thoreau and Foucault that awful people in celebrity-chef restaurants pretend to have read but that I in fact have read.
    I’m waiting to get my own ’69 back, the lavender Beetle with the whole score of Don Giovanni’s Già la Mensa è Preparata from the last scene painted around it clockwise in mirror-image black and the fresh long-stemmed red rose that I secure to the front grill every three days exactly.
    He looks up and I’m checking out his dusty Doc Martens.
    I look up and his smart phone grazes his package.
    I reach his face and he’s looking past me but what about just before.
    He heaves himself up and looks for the men’s room and finds it and just walks right there and in.
    I think there’s a message. I don’t think at all. My laptop and shoulder bag and my volume of David Sedaris–correction, Kerouac–will be just fine here for a few minutes. I follow as a predator.
    Inside the lights are unsparing and he’s just stationed there against the sink counter all alone and those brown, brown eyes lock with mine and they express nothing, nothing but flat acknowledgement of me as a fact and I can feel my own are full of confirmation and one hand meets his left pec and the other snares the back of his head and his hands pull me in and we’re deep in each other’s mouths, feeding.
    My service consultant is heading my way and I stare at my laptop wishing him onto a different customer just now and he walks right past me to another customer.
    No talk but dude’s body tells mine that he’s usually top but he’ll make an exception in my case and against my usual nature I tear open his jeans and I take him from behind against the counter and my teeth sink into his shoulder as we lock eyes in the mirror and we do not make a sound and he shares himself and I take everything he gives me, the perfect chill, the quiet, maverick brilliance, the attitudeless attitude, the effortless just being and those things are released from deep within me and I become those things and those things become me, a better me.
    The service consultant comes back around and tells me that the new brake pads are on the Jetta. I text my husband that I’ll be heading home shortly and to start water for pasta.
    It ends and we leave the men’s room with the floor wrecked and we go back to our waiting seats and we will never see each other again and I am released, I am permanently changed, I am me plus him.
    Dude stops to scratch his ear with his phone and then he resumes tapping.



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