Skip was half on, half off the short bunk, with one foot leveraged high to one side on a grab handle in the top center of the back wall of the cab, his back arched on two hard pillows, his hands open wide over the driver’s naked buttocks, fingers digging into flesh, moaning in long, building moans matching the long slides of the hard ramrod inside him. The driver, clad only in cowboy hat, red bandana neck scarf, tooled-leather boots, and a broad grin, was crouched over the bunk between the fourteen-year-old hitchhiking boy’s legs, giving him what the boy had been begging for all the way from Rapid City, where the South Dakota landscape had gotten so monotonous that the boy, running away from home to seek adventure and to be free to be what he wanted, could only think about why he’d bummed this ride and had started moaning for them to stop and get into the back.

The boy started to quiver and writhe, and the driver laughed and stepped up his thrusting, quicker, deeper, all the way out, and then the long slide back in and holding there, as Skip gasped and murmured his surrender. The driver only had to wrap his fist around the boy’s cock and pump slowly three times and put his thumb over the piss slit of the angry red bulb before white, slick cum was flowing around his thumb and down the lad’s engorged dick.

With a little cry and a long moan, all of the tension and cum flowed out of the boy’s shaft. He’d done it before with men—with the handyman on his family’s Gillette, Wyoming, ranch, but it had never been this intense before. This was it; this was what he’d been after. But it scared him to death. What if the huge cock shredded him? The driver drove on. Still deep, rotating his hips, making the youth rise to him, encircling him with his arms, holding him close, burying his face into the driver’s hard chest, asking him now for it never to end—but, shit, wondering what damage it might be doing.

“See, wha’d I tell you? Lookee over there.”

“Where?” Donnie asked, moving his eyes to where Kevin was motioning, out beyond the dirty glass in the front wall of the truck stop café in the complex where all the guys stopped to gas and feed up when they were driving through Murdo, South Dakota, on I-90 on a long haul from Rapid City to Sioux Falls. The truck stop was where Donnie and Kevin and a couple of their junior-high fourteen-year-old friends who had discovered a shared interest to be different—to want to be with men—hung out to ogle manly truck drivers.

“Him? He’s the guy with that fancy rig out there?” Donnie asked, his voice incredulous. And his judgment not all that suspect. Walking toward them from the big, shiny burgundy rig with the extra-deep sleeper behind the cab was a rangy-looking cowboy. And not a new one either—probably no younger than his early forties. He wasn’t too tall and certainly wasn’t too fat. In fact, he looked a little gaunt, all angles, and leathery tan, and wrinkles. Much like most of the rig drivers up here in the badlands of the upper West—well-worn jeans, a faded plaid flannel shirt, tooled-leather boots, a weather-beaten black ten-gallon hat, and a red bandana around his neck. But he walked tall, and his step was jaunty.

And, as Skip, the fourteen-year-old hitchhiker, now knew, this trucker had a long, thick cock, and he knew what to do with it in the close quarters of a big truck sleeper cab.

“Yep, him,” Kevin answered.

Walking ahead of him, gingerly, was a boy who looked a little disheveled and a lot disoriented. Donnie and Keven watched the boy walk around to the side of the truck stop restaurant, take out a cellphone and talk into it. He looked like he might cry at any moment. He was about the same age as Donnie and Kevin, but he wasn’t from their school. Donnie and Kevin knew everyone their age—actually they knew everyone of any age in Murdo. It was a small, nowhere, town in the middle of more nowhere.

“I think I saw him come out of the truck cab ahead of the cowboy,” Kevin said.

“Who?”

“That boy there. What’cha think they were doing in the cab?”

Donnie gave a little grin. “We can imagine, can’t we?”

“We don’t have to image, I don’t think,” Kevin said. “He’s the truck driver I had been told about—that we talked about here the other day. One of those truck drivers on long hauls who service guys on their routes.”

“And you say you can always tell when he’s goin’ through?” Donnie asked.

“Yep. It’s them young guys over there, just as I told you. They show up when he’s set to go through. They come and look at him and fantasize.”

“Like we do too?”

“Yep.”

Donnie and Kevin swiveled to take in the three young guys sitting together at a table set down not far from the doorway, between the café and convenience store section. Definitely out of place here. Not truckers by any means. Too young and preppy and “from money” looking. College guys just pulling over for a cup of coffee, Donnie had surmised. But then he’d agreed with Kevin that this wasn’t the place that three college guys would pull over to on this stretch of road. There were fast food joints nearby—not to mention a Starbucks nearly across the road.

“Them guys?” Donnie repeated.

“Yep. I’ve noticed it before. This is the third time this year,” Kevin said, turning away from the boys and watching the rig driver approach the café. “He don’t come in here that often—I see him maybe once a month, maybe not as often. I stock shelves here for my uncle, so I’m in here more than I’m not. But I noticed the last three times. Two, three guys like that come in here and order coffee and watch the door, and not long after, his rig drives up and here he comes just a struttin’ in the door, pretty as you please.”

“Gotta be drugs,” Donnie said.

“Yep, that’s what I figured too at first,” Kevin said, very pleased with himself—and with Donnie too. “But I’ve heard he does more—that he sniffs around young guys, the younger the better. That he services them.”

“God, I wish,” Donnie said, letting his breath out slowly and changing the stance of his legs because of a sudden tightening in his jeans.

“Mr. Devins doesn’t do you well enough?” Kevin asked.

“Sure, but you know what the thought of rangy truck drivers does for me. It does it for you too. That’s why we spend so much time in here watchin’ them coming and going.”

The rig driver had reached the door and entered the café and, after taking one long look at the young guys at the front table, turned and brushed past Kevin and Donnie’s table on the way to one nearer the back.

“Afternoon, Kevin,” he muttered as he passed the table. He raised the tip of his hat, although he didn’t actually look straight at either Kevin or Donnie, and he didn’t slow down his walk. There was no hint he was going to ask if they wanted him to sit at their table.

“Same to you, Ralph,” Kevin answered.

Donnie started to say something, but Kevin shushed him, waiting for the rig driver to get to another table and settle. When he looked up, he was looking at the young men up front—and they were looking at him. Then the boy they’d seen getting out of Ralph’s rig, moving slowly and a little bowlegged, entered the café, looked around, and settled at a table close to the window after buying a Coke and bag of potato chips. He sat, his back to everyone else in the café part of the truck stop, and watched the trucks coming and going in the lot outside.

“You know him—the truck driver?” Donnie asked in a lowered voice. “You called him Ralph.”

“Yep, we’ve met in passin’,” Kevin said. “I’d heard some other truckers snigger and refer to him as the Road Romeo once, and I didn’t know what that meant. So I asked him. He said they must have been makin’ a joke about his love for truckin’, but then he told me his name was Ralph.”