New Horizon – Part 1

Freedom was fresh and bracing. The sky was blue. Not a cloud. The morning sun had not yet tempered the coolness of the night before. A new horizon.

My reverie was shattered by the sound of a car horn. There she was, the driver, ringlets of gold, and a cigarette held tightly by thin crimson lips. Her hands held the steering wheel and her eyes squinted as she peered at me through the smoke of the cigarette. She wasn’t smiling. Just peering with impatient eyes. They were black – the eyes. Limpid pools of dark angst and abandon. She knew the power of those eyes and held her stare. I dropped my gaze, picked up the almost empty valise – prison issue just like the sack of a suit I had been jumbled with – and shuffled towards the car, a blue Studebaker purring in anticipation of the expert caresses that would guide us out of here.

She leaned across the front seat to open the passenger door revealing two firm breasts held by a bodice of black lace. Her perfume was expensive. “You’re late”, I said. “Had to check the hotel room was ok”, she lied. She always lied. Lies for her were like breathing. The car pulled out onto the road, and was soon gliding at 60 over the blacktop. I looked out the window. New wheat and old houses. The same houses. The more things change the more the stay the same, my father used to say. “You haven’t changed”, I said, leering at her legs. The form of her perfect body was tightly held in a clinging dress which rode down her thighs to reveal more than was seemly. “It’s only been two years.” “Yeah. Two years. Felt more like twenty. And no visits from you, babe.” She shifted her arse in the seat and threw her cigarette out the car window. “I had to lay low. You know how it is.” “Sure”, I said with less than the required conviction, “a two your stretch isn’t much, but only if you’re not taking a rap. Where’s Johnny?” She turned and looked at me warily, “Waiting at the Club”. “Humph.”

We rode the highway in silence now. After two years, nothing more to say. Only the ache that wanted her as badly as ever. She avoided my gaze.