What Stays in the Cab

Ubicación: Puerto de Pajares — Spain

Zona / Ruta: Puerto de Pajares

País: Spain

Tipo de lugar: Parking, Truck

Protagonistas: Truck Driver

Horario: Night

Idioma: English

There are things you don't tell in the bar. I never told this one, and if I'm telling it now it's because the cab already knows it, and it can't find out twice.

After the kiss we stayed still, forehead to forehead, like two trucks that have clipped mirrors while manoeuvring and neither knows whether to get out and fill in the report. He was breathing hard through his nose. I wasn't breathing at all.

"Tens a certeza?" he said softly.

At fifty-four I'm not sure of anything, not even what the weather will do on Pajares. But I took his face in both hands, and it filled them completely, and I answered with another kiss. That one wasn't slow.

The grey hoodie came off over his head, hood and all, and underneath was what I'd imagined in the bar and a bit more: the chest of a lad who works, warm skin, a line of dark hair running down his belly. He put his hand on my shirt, on my chest, and left it there, like someone checking the engine's still running.

"Estás quente."

"That's the coffee with a splash."

He laughed with his mouth against my neck, and I felt that overflowing laugh of his all over my skin.

He undid my shirt himself, button by button, no hurry, looking at me as if he were about to discover something. What he discovered was a belly built on thirty years of service-station sandwiches and grey hair on my chest. I was expecting a face. What he gave it was his open hand, and then his mouth. Some men look at your body the way you'd look at an old truck. Tiago looked at it like one that still pulls.

The bunk in my cab is made for one man, alone and tired, not for two with an appetite. We each banged our heads on the cabinets overhead before we found a way, and we got the giggles, and the giggles helped more than anything. Getting your trousers off in there is a job for a contortionist; the boots, best not to mention. When we were finally skin to skin under the plaid blanket, he was trembling a little. It wasn't the cold.

The windscreen curtain stayed open. Neither of us remembered to draw it, what with the nerves and everything that came after, and there was no need anyway: in that fog there was nobody outside, and even if there had been, there was nothing to hide. The orange lights kept blinking and the fog pressed against the glass, which was starting to steam up on the inside, and not because of the cold.

I'm not going to tell all of it. Some things you don't tell, not even in a story. But I'll say that lad knew what he wanted and wasn't shy about asking for it, in that half-language of his that mixed Portuguese and Spanish and that, at certain hours, comes down to nothing but breath. That he reached for me with hands that smelled of petrol-station soap and that to me tasted like heaven. That at some point I grabbed the edge of the cabinet overhead the way you grab the wheel on an icy pass, and he said something in my ear that I didn't understand and didn't need to.

And that I, who for years had touched nothing but a steering wheel, suddenly remembered what it was like to have another body on top of mine: the weight, the heat, the smell. I remembered, and I was almost sorry I'd forgotten it for so long.

Afterwards we lay there, squeezed into the bunk, his head on my shoulder and his leg over mine. On the dashboard, the phone lit up: it was charging. Neither of us moved to look.

"Em casa ninguém sabe," he said after a while, looking at the ceiling.

"In mine there's nobody who could know anything," I answered.

We said nothing more. No need. The cab already knew, and the cab doesn't talk.

He fell asleep before me. He breathed the way lads breathe, without fear. I lay awake listening to the radio, still playing its old songs, and hoping the snowplough would stay stuck till March.

Just after seven the fog began to lift. Tiago got dressed in the dark, banging into the cabinet again and laughing quietly so as not to wake me, though I was wide awake. Before he climbed down, he put his hand on my face, the same way I'd put mine on his.

"Até a próxima, Xuaco."

And he went down into the lot with his hood up, towards his reefer from Viana, like someone coming back from a coffee.

The charger stayed plugged in on the dashboard. It's still there.