Please Watch the Road

"Please watch the road."

My wife hates when I text and drive. Or eat and drive. Or shave and drive.

"Sorry, Bill keeps texting about work."

She hates when I multitask. I don't have the heart to tell her that I have certain cognitive advantages that she doesn't seem to enjoy. Chief among them, an ability to do things while driving.

"Just watch the road is all I ask."

That's not all she asks of me. That barely cracks the book on stuff she expects.

I want your cock in my mouth.

That was a Bill text. My heart just jumped a whole octave. Bill is actually Brenda at work, head of HR for Wynn Pulp and Paper. She recently onboarded me. That’s not a euphemism for sex, but it could be. She was very adamant about me finishing my compliance videos, but I kept putting them off. Turned out that she had a thing for being ignored. She’d slept with half the guys in the office. The playful email followups were just the start, now Brenda’s the type of gal who texts things like:

I want to tickle your balls until you spackle my mouth like a hole in the wall.

I glance at the traffic in front of me and fumble my phone into the crack between the center console and the seat – unchartered territory that no vacuum can reach. My hand won't fit either, but I try anyway.

"Please watch the road."

It sounds like I married an alert on my car’s console. I grab a flyer some car wash company left on my windshield and fold it into a phone getting tool. It’s wedged under the tracks that hold my seat and won't budge. I can see it light up with another text from Bill.

"Let me help you," says my wife.

"Leave it," I say.

"I'm going to take off my seatbelt for a second," she says.

“Fine,” I say.

She gets on all fours and turns around to beat the angle on this console seat crevasse and I think about cranking the wheel into the highway divider and sending her crashing through the windshield. I would likely survive it with my seatbelt on. She would not. At best, she’d be so badly maimed that society would forgive me for leaving her.

She wiggles and giggles as she tries to get it.

I look for a place to crash.

"I can't reach it," she says.

She gives up and puts her seatbelt back on.

Life finds a way.

"Look in the glove box. I think there's a pencil I could use."

My wife opens the glovebox and I remember that sometimes I cut bikini pictures out of her mail order catalogues and save them for emergencies. I jerked off while driving once because every guy has and now I can't stop. I watch her rummage around in that glovebox as I push down on the accelerator.

"No pencil," she says.

"Who's Bill?" asks my son from the backseat. He's holding my phone. I turn around and we crash eyes. He has all his father’s power, but I don’t blink.

"Watch the road!" says my wife.

I will not.

He reads my texts and I wonder if he speaks filth. “Who’s Bill?” More words flash in my mind’s eye like ink blots. Cock. Mouth. Jizzum.

The tires will later confirm that I drove off the road and hit a fruit stand. When the squeal of tires stops, I smell strawberries mixed with airbag dust.

I look back at my son’s empty seat.

Then I look back at the road through the hole in our windshield.

The question still stands. So I answer.

"You know, Bill Buttons, from work. Heavy set guy. Really into karate."

My wife screams as I look around for my phone.