Read Online Connected Hearts - Four Lesbian Romance Stories by Jae, Joan Arling, Rj Nolan - Free Book Online Page B

broken pipe in the steering hydraulics, Tiny had never let me down.
    Hauling freight across Europe, you get to places. Paris, Marseilles, Rome, Athens, Hamburg, Madrid ... you name it, I’ve been there. Well, sort of.
    Take Paris, for example. Louvre, Centre Pompidou, Montmartre―non. But the Périphérique, decidedly. Getting stuck there in the mother of traffic jams, I couldn’t help wondering how all the people not sitting high above the exhaust gases kept breathing. Then the Champs Élysées―two hours for a few hundred yards. My destination had been “Moris Forwarders, Paris”. Nice, isn’t it? I’d thought I’d look up the exact address in a telephone book, but not a single telephone booth sported one. “Excuse moi, monsieur, je cherche la transport Moris?” In France, you’re better off speaking poor French than excellent anything, but it took me a while to understand that I was not being warned against fires, “les feux” being traffic lights instead.
    Hamburg was supposed to be a nice place, too; if anybody’s interested, I can show them where to get a decent meal within its port area.
    Not that I had reason to complain. Heeding a good advice, I had gotten every license I could, so I was qualified for all types of freight. That made it possible for me to pick the jobs that paid best, and with a bit of luck I might be able to retire at around forty-five. It was not the incredible income; it was the lack of time to spend it. I might not even have to use the reserves I was saving to eventually replace Tiny. Perhaps it would last ten more years?
    Meanwhile, I worried about diesel prices. And EU regulations―it looked like they were about to want a degree in mathematics from truck drivers. It used to be eight hours at the wheel a day (with a one hour break), but these days it was forty-eight hours a week, no more than nine hours a day (ten, twice, if you balanced that within the same week), with no fewer than eleven hours between shifts, except you could shift hours from one week to another, provided that ... Even the police did not have a full understanding of the regulations, and in any country except Germany they didn’t give a shit about it. Just like they didn’t measure whether the apples on sale on a market had the minimum size demanded by the EU. Or perhaps they did, in Germany.
    One issue had been taken care of when somebody introduced me to the wonders of the Internet. You see, I was an addict. Whenever I called it a day, I could not go to sleep without something to read. If I could get nothing better, yesterday’s newspaper, even if it had been used to wrap fish, would do. But even the ample sleeping space behind my seat did not allow me to carry a library, so after that eye-opening introduction to the ‘net, I got myself one of those new netbooks and subscribed to a satellite-based connection service. I shortly found so many stories and novels for anyone to read that I began to wonder how the printing business stayed alive. Ah, Xenafiction, Academy of Bards, E-Scribblers, Project Gutenberg (the Dead Poets’ Society, but they did have lots of O. Henry stories) ...
    However, one problem solved created another. My fascination with many of the stories, which were just a tap on the mouse pad away, highlighted the fact that I was essentially alone. Went with the job. There was nobody willing to share my bed, lavish me with their love, and drive me crazy with their touch. Well, sometimes a fellow trucker tried to hit it off with me, but I’d given up on dating boys back in school. I didn’t associate with males. I’d never given much thought to my own orientation, but when it came down to it, I always imagined being with a woman. However, you could count the opportunities I’d had on the fingers of one hand. Even if you worked in a sawmill. I had a few toys to take care of the occasional need, but they were a poor substitute for the elusive real thing.
    Yet another reason to hate what I did.