Truckers # 1 - Eight Inch Beer Can

MM 18+ | They each held a sweat-beaded bottle of beer in one hand, but their other hands were occupied...

The air inside the cab of my truck felt like it had been recycled a thousand times, thick with the smell of stale coffee. Outside, the world was a wash of midnight blue and the harsh, orange glare of sodium lamps. The truck stop was a graveyard of slumbering giants, rows upon rows of long-haul rigs idling with a low-frequency hum. My bladder was screaming, a sharp, insistent pressure that made it impossible to catch even twenty minutes of shut-eye.

Pushing the door open, the night air hit me like a bucket of ice water, cutting through the humid warmth of my cabin. I jumped down, my boots crunching on the oil-stained gravel. The lot was mostly empty of people, just the steel carapaces of the trucks and the distant rush of the interstate a mile away. I didn’t feel like trekking all the way across the lot to the main building just to use a fluorescent-lit bathroom that probably smelled like cheap cleaning products and stale cigarettes. I skirted around the back of my trailer, looking for a shadow deep enough to provide some cover.

The gap between a sleek black but weathered Freightliner seemed perfect. I stepped into the darkness, the smell of diesel and baked, damp earth filling my nose. I was just about to reach for my zipper when I heard it - a heavy, wet sound, punctuated by a low, guttural huff of breath. It wasn’t the sound of an engine or a compressor. It was human.