THE INSPECTION

Ubicación: A-7 — Spain

Zona / Ruta: A-7

País: Spain

Tipo de lugar: Rest Area

Protagonistas: Worker, Mechanic

Horario: Morning

Idioma: English

I took the client's Merc out of the workshop around two. Brake check, nothing fancy, but the boss wanted a long run to make sure. "Tremendo, take it down the motorway and back." Cheers mate, like I've got nowt better to do. The A7 was quiet for a Thursday. Proper warm, and me still in my work jacket — blue, seen better days — checked shirt, grey cargo trousers, the usual clobber. Didn't think I'd end up parked in a service area with me kegs half down. But that came later, didn't it. Pulled into Les Borges services. Parked up in the lorry bay — proper shade there, not like the car park where you bake like a pasty. Got out, crouched down, checked the discs — sorted — and got back in. Engine off. Quiet. Roasting. And I don't know if it were the heat, or the truckers I could see in the mirror moving slow between their cabs, or just that it'd been a bloody long week — but my head started going places. Specific places. Vivid places. Nowt to do with brake pads. I leaned back. Undid the top button of me cargos. Just to get comfortable, like. Yeah. Thirty seconds later my hand was where it had no business being and I had a full production playing in my head. Two blokes. Truck cab. No plot required. What I didn't clock — and this is what's still got me — is that I'd had an audience for the past five minutes. Young lad. Mid-twenties, short hair, one of them fitted t-shirts. Leaning on the bonnet of the car next to mine, on his phone. Or so I thought. Because when I looked up and caught him, he didn't look away. Didn't flinch. Just smiled. I should've wound the window up. That's what I should've done. Instead I opened the passenger door. He got in like I'd offered him a brew. Dead calm, no rush, knew exactly what he was about. Shut the door. Looked at me. And said, with an accent that weren't from round here — French, maybe, or Italian, didn't much matter —: "You needed some help, yeah?" What happened in the next forty minutes in that Merc, parked in the shade of a Polish lorry, I'm not going to rush through. I'm going to tell it proper. We started slow, which is how you start when you don't know each other from Adam but understand each other perfectly. His hands were working hands — not office hands, proper ones — and he knew what to do with them. I was forty-two, built like a Sunday roast, and in no hurry to get back to the workshop. We kept most of it on. In a parked Merc you haven't got room for theatrics — forces you close, forces the friction, forces a bit of creativity with the geometry. His thighs against mine. His neck in my hands. His mouth doing things the car's brakes didn't deserve but I very much did. White boxer shorts ended up on the dashboard. Can't fully account for how. Every bit of it got attention. He was methodical, as your northern Europeans tend to be. I was more freestyle. We complemented each other nicely. The finish came the way it should — no great warning, just the full weight of a long week and forty minutes of solid effort arriving all at once. Proper tension release, that. The Merc went quiet. So did we, for a minute. Then he buttoned up, gave my thigh a pat — "Bonne route" — and got out as easy as he'd got in. I started the engine, pulled out of the services, headed back up the A7. Brakes were spot on, by the way.