A passing boat made waves and rocked me awake. I lifted myself up on to my elbows to see if it was light yet outside the small, oval port windows. Emily, the soft-spoken and quick-to-blush surveyor on the crew, sprawled in a mess of bare limbs on my right, her brown hair flowing over her bare shoulder and down her back. I leaned over slowly, carefully, and placed a light, lingering kiss on the shiny round of her bare shoulder before stretching my neck and gazing over my other shoulder to my left.

  There, the traffic tech Madison, all blonde and fit and sporty, wrapped herself around tiny Riley, our crew’s Asian safety tech, Madison’s face pushed into the back of Riley’s black bob-cut hair. I leaned over their way and stroked Madison’s blonde locks from her neck, exposed her there, and kissed her.

  She stretched some and inhaled deeply, but she wasn’t waking up yet, not fully. But her movements made Riley twist around inside her arms hugging her and she looked over Madison’s shoulder to find me there behind her.

  Awakened, she carefully extracted her tiny body from Madison’s arms and legs and padded out the bedroom tucked into the bow of the boat and I heard her go into the head.

  I pulled myself up to lean against the headboard, my body now a river between the two high, smooth ridges formed by Emily’s and Madison’s hips, both of them on their sides facing away from me, and I crossed my arms behind my head as recollections of the previous night started to form up in my mind.

  Riley came back in the room, and in her typical matter-of-fact and officious, efficient manner, she pulled the bottom of the sheet we shared and crawled up over my body from below. I expected her to poke her head out around my chest and maybe settle in for some morning hugs and kisses, but instead, I felt her hand, cool and soft, wrap around my shaft, and then her lips, hot and pursed, push down over the head of my cock. She had this thing she loved to do to me, pressing her lips together, making it feel like she was resisting me, before letting my cock burst into her mouth, whereupon she’d sink down on it as though succumbing to me.

  I inhaled — she surprised me this time with her tongue down and back up the underside of my shaft, and now all cool from the wet of her saliva, I was struck by the wet warmth of her mouth. Riley more than the other two had been transformed by our experiments together, as they liked to call our bouts in bed. Watching her checking up around the work site, all clipboard and red hardhat, you’d never guess the minx she was in bed. Maybe she hadn’t been one before — maybe Madison, Emily, and I turned her into one.

  She emerged out the top of the sheet with her chin on my chest, but no further, before I felt her pussy, hot and slick, slide down over the head of my cock. So that’s why she was making me hard with her mouth in the morning . . .

  She sat up on me, the sheet, pulled, sliding down the bed to reveal Madison’s and Emily’s nude sleeping bodies beside us, and she curled her small hands into my shoulders and cut into my skin there with her nails. Her stomach jutting out and her chest pushing up, she rocked her head back and dropped her mouth wide open at the low ceiling. Her thighs went hard gripping around my hips. She pushed herself more deeply, more snuggly down on me, and I looked down my body to see my cock, fully engorged, emerge from her gripping, sliding pussy lips, soaking from her before she plowed herself down on me again.

  I pulled my arms out from behind my head and reached out to feel her tits in my palms, and she inhaled with a sharp breath through her clenching teeth and pressed her own hands down over the backs of my hands. Together we massaged her breasts and she rose on her knees and fell down hard onto my lap and cried with high-pitched and tiny chirps.

  Both Emily and Madison were awakened now by Riley’s motions and cries, and they both rolled onto their backs and pushed tightly against my sides. They said nothing, but they watched her ride me — and lose herself. I dropped my hands from her heaving chest and found both of Madison’s and Emily’s pussies with my fingers and their bodies contorted, they began to gasp just like Riley had been, and the whole bed seemed to heave and swell like a mid-ocean storm over the horizon.

  Riley held back her orgasm with ferocious tenacity, her whole body quaking like someone holding a plank for too long, and she stopped breathing so much you wondered if she was going to pass out. It was more than Madison or Emily could take, and they squirmed on my fingers and stretched back in their necks. One set off the other and a chain reaction took us all on a ride through the cosmos. Riley must have tripped over first, because her pussy began to contract violently around my cock deep inside her, and that made me lift nearly completely off the bed, shooting myself inside her like a geyser. That was too much for both Madison and Emily, and they started to flop and cry and gasp too, before they gripped their pussies and rolled away from me.

  A moment later, we were all snickering again, except Riley, who was embarrassed. We got ready for work in our yesterday’s clothes, and they all had their hardhats on waiting for me, who was last.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and only then, emerging up into the wheelhouse of that old trawler, did I remember about Bennie and the revelation he was exposed to the previous night.

  Everything that matters is underground — unseen. The aquifers, the resources, the infrastructure — all underground, out of sight and out of mind. All the stuff that makes life on top possible, it’s all down there, hidden and largely unknown.

  Bennie cranked the creaking door of his old car shut and nodded and murmured “Mornin’” to me like it was any other morning, that next morning. Even I was left for a moment wondering if what had happened the previous night even did happen.

  But when Emily, Riley, and Madison got to work, there was no doubt. They avoided eye contact even more than Bennie did, but for completely different reasons, of course. They also smirked and bit their lips and murmured quietly to each other in passing. They all seemed on the verge of bursting out laughing. I couldn’t get a read on the situation. I should have noticed at the time that they pulled into the crew parking strip one after the other at exactly the same time. But I didn’t.

  It was Friday morning, and like most Friday mornings, the whole road crew was slow to get going. It didn’t help that it was dark and raining and our trench was muddy and the chill in the gusts of wind cut to the bone. Emily headed out to survey the next part of our dig-and-cover as conscientiously and focused as ever. Riley was out doing her monthly inventory of safety equipment and noting their use, ticking boxes on her checklist, and checking it twice, just as stern and thorough as ever. Madison was out drawing out the day’s traffic flow diagrams for her crew of traffic controllers on her pad just as concise and authoritative as ever. It was a day like any of a thousand other days — on the surface. If you looked at it from afar. If you didn’t know what happened the previous night and early that morning, if you didn’t dig down into it.

  But if you knew what was going on under the surface between me and those three girls, you’d know there could be no other day quite like it. The things those girls did with and to each other, and with me, the previous night marked us all. It changed us. It was like one of those deep tectonic-shifting earthquakes where everything up top — the rivers and lakes and hills and gulleys — might look exactly the same at first, but underground, a whole new complex of strata has been installed that will alter the future up top inexorably. Just not obviously, and just not right away. We were utterly different people by that next morning at work. How could we not be, with what went on below decks on my boat the previous night?

  “Morning, Con,” Emily said to me with a nod, not even bringing her eyes up to mine. That was at least more than Riley gave me, though, who said nothing, but only flicked her wrist with a nonchalant wave. She did give me a slight lift of her chin, though. Madison, usually the most expressive of them all, didn’t even manage to do that.

  The outgoing one became shy, the serious one became fun, and the shy one became expressive. There’s digging up what’s underground, and then there’s turning everything upside down. I was worried about the long-term ramifications of what we did. Of what we allowed to happen between us. Of what we had fallen into down there.

  They were acting strange, but I was no model of expressive joviality that morning, either. I hung my head and pushed up my shoulders, and it wasn’t just from the cold and rain that morning. I was happy to close the glass doors on the cab of my backhoe and focus my mind on the deep and narrow trench Emily marked out for us with her orange paint across the old pavement. There was a lot to think about from last night. There was even more to try to commit to life-long memory. I felt pretty sure that that sort of thing doesn’t happen very often in a man’s life, no matter how blessed he might be.

  At coffee break, I slouched into the site trailer. Bennie was already in there, in the can. But so also was Madison, Riley, and Emily. It never felt smaller than it did that moment. I had to close the door behind me for the wind and rain, but I didn’t want to. The last time we were cramped up together in such a small space, terrible and unspeakable things happened.

  All three of the girls twisted and turned, unable to put their eyes anywhere safe. They couldn’t leave, either, having already started with the coffee maker and all of them holding their empty cups and pods. I was surprised and reassured about one thing, at least, though. Whatever happened the previous night, they seemed to be okay enough with it at least to the point of remaining in eac

h other’s company the next morning, without running and screaming. They weren’t talking, maybe, not in front of anyone else, at least, but nor were they running and hiding from each other. In fact, they seemed to be ready to sneak off together to hammer things out in private. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or bad. How does one say “Thank you for last night!” politely and discreetly when it’s not one girl, but three of them?

  “Are you going to be home tonight?” Riley suddenly said to me half in private, and she sipped the fresh coffee she held in both her hands, her deep, dark eyes, wide and dilated, lifting to mine from under her bangs of short jet-black hair. The way she said it, it was less a question than a strong suggestion. And she wasn’t evidently alone in the sentiment. In the moment I took to consider my answer, Madison and Emily spun around and laid their eyes on mine with the same strong suggestion in them that Riley held in hers. It was obvious to me then that Riley had been elected to ask the question, and that it was pre-discussed between all of them.

  When you sleep with a person from work, there is always that awkward “next morning,” when you are forced into each other’s space again in that altogether different context, and before you know whether it was all an “accident” or was in fact something that might build — and whether you want that or not, either. That’s a minefield enough to step through on an uncertain and subdued Friday morning. But play in bed all night with three girls from work at the same time? There is no map for that. There is no guide. It’s like digging a trench laced with pipes and cables and conduits and seeing no marks on the surface to tell you where and how deep, but sinking the teeth of the shovel through the pavement anyway.

  Just then, Bennie stepped out of the can, still doing up his pants and letting his coat fall down over his waist. “Gang’s all here,” he said, and he snorted and grinned in the way someone shocked and nervous would. “Calhouns then, tonight?” he said, and he slapped my back. “Game night, don’t forget.”

  I still held Riley’s big, dark and round eyes with mine, and she flared them back at me and tilted her head sideways and pursed her lips.

  “Probably spending the night on the boat,” I said. “Got some things to look after.”

  He glanced around at Madison, Emily, and Riley before he brought his own tilted-head gaze back to me. “Dude,” he said. “Game night!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Gonna have to take a pass on this one,” I said. I didn’t know why he insisted on pretending he was oblivious to the tension in the trailer. He saw with his own eyes what was going on below decks on the boat the previous night. Of course the four people involved in it might need to debrief from something like that the next day! Lines had been crossed. New territory had been explored. We needed, obviously, to first of all establish if all of it was a mistake or an accident, or if, god forbid, it meant something more that would then have to be addressed. What if it was something some or all of us wanted again? I mean, how do you even start that conversation?

  I didn’t know a lot about those girls, but I was pretty sure the three of them, naked in bed with one guy, was a first-time incident all around for them, too. It certainly was for me, and I was like a zombie trying to fight off images of it flitting back into my mind.

  “That your final answer?” Bennie said, and he glanced over his shoulder at the three girls staring at me, one in her white hardhat, one in her blue hardhat, the third one in her red hardhat, and he glared his eyes back at me and narrowed them.

  It was messy, I would be the first one to admit that. It was dirty, no question about it. It was certainly not something you go around advertising to friends and family. Even the four of us who did it were having trouble facing it. Like a lot of things that happen underground, you want to bury it and leave it there, cover it over, smoothen the surface out, and pretend it never happened and doesn’t exist. It was in that moment in the trailer when it felt like I finally understood the creed of the surface-dwellers: Bury it!

  Bennie was certainly a card-carrying member of the above-ground camp. For him, the holes we dug and filled back in were places into which you throw coffee cups and sandwich wrappers. They were holes to piss in. He was most satisfied with a job well done at the covering-up portion of a typical day’s procedure.

  Me, I liked covering in the holes too, but for a whole different set of reasons. It was a matter of dignity, it was a restoration of order, it was God’s work, to bury what we had uncovered. But not because we should ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but rather to preserve it, to remain mindful of it, and to ensure its protection. I never said anything about it, but Bennie never noticed, either, when I took time to retrieve the garbage he’d throw in those holes of ours. It’s a show of respect, isn’t it, it’s a matter of dignity.

  “They’re coming over,” I said to Bennie, and I gestured with my chin to Madison, Riley, and Emily. “We need to talk,” I said more quietly.

  He saw what he saw. He couldn’t say his usual thing — “Never gonna get laid if you don’t get out there!” or “You can’t meet girls buried down in the hold of a boat!” — but he did give me his usual roll of the eyes and shake of the head, and he went out the trailer and down the steps and back out into the mud. If the door didn’t have a gas hinge, he’d have slammed it.

  “Good boy,” Riley said in a hushed tone as she strode past me and out the door, also. She grinned as well.

  As did Emily, who added a bit lip to her wide-eyed glance at me. Madison snorted and looked down as though bashful, and went out the trailer behind the other two. I saw them walk together, boots and socks and jeans and Mac-jacks and hardhats, obviously murmuring to each other before they simultaneously split like the frayed ends of a woven cable, and headed off each to their own tasks.

  I stayed behind alone in the trailer and thankful for it, too, and made myself my coffee. When I came out, the day had brightened somewhat and the rain had stopped. I saw Riley gesturing with her arm swinging widely around as she was talking to the site supervisor, and I saw her smile and laugh with him, too — an unprecedented thing to see on the work-site, serious Riley smiling and laughing. I saw the supervisor nodding at her, too, and listening to her. This also was an unprecedented thing to see. Riley struggled with being ignored, as safety coordinators often are. Not that morning, though.

  I made my way back to my backhoe, but came across Emily, but not alone as usual with her surveying equipment off by herself peering through her eyepieces. Instead, she was engaged in a group discussion with none other than the suits: the finance guys and the developers and the project managers and other’s I didn’t even know who. I gazed over my shoulder at the group as I gave it a wide berth, as worker drones like me are wont to do when the suits in white hats show up.

  Those guys, they lack the intellectual capacity to feel the extension of the body through a machine, to savor the connection to Earth and tectonic processes that getting dirty lets you feel. They’re oblivious to the sublime one-ness experienced from fixing things, for doing things for oneself, to want to understand how mechanical devices work, and not just how to hold them or press their buttons, but to know what coils are doing to magnets inside, what piston rings do, why a vibrating bit should cut a hole in a rock. They blithely walk over hand-built trails, unaware of the fungal networks underground that join all the roots up in a sparking and lively food and communications networks, but they think they’ve “forest bathed” and love nature all the same.

  Emily, however, looked, I thought, like she could take them on with one hand behind her back. She looked good, too, like she could straddle the two worlds, the real one and the simulated ones the suits inhabited with their digital financing and CAD designing. They were listening to her. Like Riley, it was unusual to see that, and I screwed up my face and wondered about it.

  I climbed up in the cab of the backhoe and searched over both my shoulders for Madison. The part of the dig next up was going to put the back end of my backhoe out into the street for my turn-around with each shovel-full, and I was going to need flaggers on both sides of my rig. This was something Madison typically insisted on being directly involved with. But I couldn’t see her. The two flaggers she assigned to me, though, were waving at me and giving me thumbs up — they were ready. I finally spotted Madison, off to the side in the front of her pick-up and not running things, just watching. She also gave me a thumbs up. I squinted at her. She was the ultimate micro-manager. But suddenly, now, she was trusting her crew and taking a back seat. It was odd, no doubt about it. Leading from behind, I think they call it. I’d never seen it before, not from her.

 

1 2 3