Free Waiting for You by Shey Stahl

thinking, I yanked
my tank top over my head and tossed it beside me. Not that great of idea
considering I only had my bra on but I was sweating and Dylan’s car had no air
conditioning. It was my only option.
    Dylan looked over at me
and then averted his eyes back to the road. There was something about the way
he looked at me that made me feel drunk though I had nothing to drink.
    Steading the steering
wheel with his knee, he pulled his t-shirt over his head and tossed it next to
him on the seat. It rested next to mine. All I could smell was his rich
intoxicating scent of lemon, lilac and oak again. I was seconds away from
whimpering when I took in his chiseled form. He looked like a male model, only
covered in tattoos.
    For being eighteen,
Dylan had a nice body and then you add the tattoos covering his upper body,
this straight-laced mutineer was intrigued.
    Dylan tipped his head
to the side, glancing over at me and I could feel his weighted gaze and low
voice. “You keep this shit up and we’ll be naked before we hit Sacramento.”
    “So be it then.” I smiled
back at him. “I’m hot.”
    “Yeah, you are,” he
mumbled looking to his left away from me.
    Nothing was said for
about two miles when Dylan groaned, as he ran his right hand down his face,
before finding the steering wheel again. “You gotta put your fucking shirt back on.”
    I kind of laughed but
was more excited that he couldn’t concentrate. “You put yours’ back on or get
air conditioning.”
    Dylan gave me a look
that said not happening on both demands.
    “Hey,” I said trying to
clarify myself, “you’re nearly naked too and I’m not really comfortable either.
In fact, it’s distracting.”
    “Just put your shirt
on.”
    “Put yours on.”
    Neither one of us was
budging on it so we gave up and settled on ignoring each other.
    With the occasional
glance at one another, we sat there, both defiantly stubborn, Dylan without his
shirt on and me without mine.
    After we stopped at a
small roadside diner, Roger’s Frosty in Cottonwood, California, we started
talking about what we wanted out of this trip.
    “I want you to put your
shirt back on,” Dylan had said to me and then followed that with, “what do you
want to do?”
    I knew what he was
referring to and it had nothing to do with the shirt. He wanted to know why I came
with him and what I wanted out of this trip, if it was even a trip. My mind
still hadn’t settled on what this really was between us or where we were
heading.
    What did I want? I
wanted him to keep his shirt off that’s for sure.
    More than anything, I
wanted to feel alive. I wanted to feel and appreciate a passion for something
that I loved. For most of my life, I felt like a puppet on strings and I wanted
that feeling gone. I had done what everyone else wanted me to do and now I
didn’t know how to act. Like a puppet cut from its strings, I didn’t know how
to be on my own but I knew I wanted to feel alive and in just these last two
days, Dylan had done that for me. There was something about him, maybe his
personality; that told me he had passion for something and a magic that I
couldn’t place. In turn, like a sparkling diamond, I was captivated by him.
    If you had asked me at
three what I wanted to be, I would have said baseball player. I still love
sports, especially baseball. But being a three-year-old baseball player didn’t
fly with my parents. If you had asked me at five what I wanted to be, I would
have said princess. That also didn’t fly with my parents. My dad said that
being a princess is an image that’s not worth pursuing. At five, I had
absolutely no idea what that meant but decided that I suddenly didn’t want to
be a princess any longer.
    See a pattern?
    If you had asked me at
ten what I wanted to be, I would have said the president of the United States.
As you can see, that was the time my parents were a deciding factor. I stopped
being asked what I wanted and started being told. Or was I ever