The Hitchhiker
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

I know that you take your chances when you stand on the highway shoulder with your thumb in the air. It was just that I had no money, and no real place to go. It seemed like the best way out of a home that didn’t care for me was to just walk to the edge of town and stand on the side of the road and make the sign. If somebody woud stop for me I was ready to go as far as they were, and then keep going.

But you always think, or I did anyway, what if the guy is a serial killer? You hear about it, and sometimes they are the ones you don’t expect – the ones who look like nice guys. I suppose that I could have resolved to wave away the creeps, but I more or less had decided that if you can’t judge a book by its cover, don’t try. Take people as you find them and make the assumption they are good. The first few rides I got seemed to confirm it. Those rides had taken me far enough from home to make it even harder to turn back, if that is what I had wanted.

Perhaps if I had not decided that (assume the good in people) I would have stepped back down after I first laid eyes on Garth Johnson. He did not look like a creep, but he was big and seemed to have a look of violence about him. Still, living on the assumption I pulled myself up into his cab and expressed my thanks.

I could feel him staring at me even as I looked straight ahead so I started to talk. It seemed like the thing to do, and I later learned that it is. I asked him about his rig because I guessed that long haul truckers might like to talk about such things. It was just the tractor unit, as he called it. He had no load behind him but he would be picking up a trailer in the morning.

He didn’t even ask where I was going. That had to be a bad sign. All I knew was that somewhere along the line we seemed to have got off the main road and onto a lesser one, but it seemed that we were still headed in the same direction, so I accepted that it was “a truckers’ shortcut”.

It was a big unit. He had a bunk bed in the back. He said that it was comfortable if I wanted to lie down, but I told him that I like to watch the road and see the miles go by. He shrugged and we drove on. He then said that he would have to pull over as he could hear something loose in the back – “dragging a brake hose” or something like that.

But he never got out. He just turned to me and told me to climb back into the bunk. I could hear the central locking thud like it was a hammer crashing into my back. It seemed like I was in trouble. I just did as I was told. He told me to take off my pants. I pleaded with him not to hurt me.

“I won’t hurt you, but you will hurt yourself if you struggle,” he said, with a cold calm that chilled me. “My advice is to let it happen. Tensing your body will just cause pain.”

He had some lubrication of some kind which he slapped on my butthole and worked it in with two or three fingers. I had never felt anything go in there before that moment. The fingers of a stranger. I did not even know his name, and his fingers were up my ass.

I assumed that he would roll me over and fuck me like a bitch, but he lifted my butt up and fucked me face to face, saying stuff like - “that’s a good little sissy boy, open up for Daddy”. It was horrifying. You hear people who face things like this simply try to take themselves away from it by imaging they are somewhere else. But there was no way to do that. His huge erect cock was inside me, pumping away. There was no escaping this. No dream was possible. This was the filth of reality. It made me wonder why I had left my home behind. Nothing could have been worse.

I guess I was whimpering, and there were tears as well, although whether from pain or humiliation would be hard to say. But then there was an odd feeling that struck me. Maybe part of it was that I could see that his face was being transformed by pleasure, but there was also something purely physical inside me – a sexual sensation that was totally unexpected. Surely only gay guys can feel this?

I found myself gasping the same time as he did, and despite the fact that my own penis was not erect, it released a small spurt of jism onto my naked belly.

I had been raped. I had been sodomized. But I just lay there as he wiped his cock with a paper towel, pulled up his pants and swung himself back into the driver’s seat. He fired up the engine. As he drove off, he threw my pants out the window having first emptied the contents of the pockets onto the passenger seat.

“There are some clothes better suited under the bed,” he said. “In the red box”.

“Are you going to let me go?” I asked. My first thought was that rapists who can be identified kill their victims. I had seen him. But would I go to the police? I was starting to wonder whether I shouldn’t just put this down to experience. It was already fading in my memory, on purpose. I thought that I could block it out, but the truth is that the hardest thing to forget was the pleasure in the midst of the pain and degradation,

“I will take you to the truck stop by the state line,” he said. “It is easy to get a pick up from there. There will be a bunch of truckers, but also roller skates coming through if you can’t take a joke.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was clear that while I sat on the bunk with a sore butt he was carrying on as if nothing had happened.

But I was naked below the waist, and even my tee-shirt felt suddenly dirty, so I reached down for the red box.

It had nothing but women’s clothes in it – medium size, which I guessed were just the right size for me. There were panties, and a couple of dresses that you might call “slutty”. There were even shoes with heels. But the strangest thing was a bra with fake breasts and a fastening in front. It looked like the kind of thing that a drag queen might wear to give the appearance of a feminine bust.

“What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” I said.

“Wear it,” he said. “And you will have to shave your legs and put something in your hair. Keep looking.”

There was a small box with a hair brush, colored hair clips and cosmetics, and a bag with a razor and female shaving foam. It seemed as if he was offering me a way out, subject to conditions. Perhaps if I pretended to be this “sissy boy” he had fucked only minutes before, he could advance a defence of consent. If he could do that successfully then he did not have to kill me. His offer to let me go at the truck stop seemed suddenly real, and worth accepting. So I went to work on my legs, even as the truck occasionally lurched on rough roading.

“Will you let me go at this stop ahead?” I asked him. I was dressed as a girl and had moved back to the passenger seat to brush and clip back my hair on one side, and to try to apply lipstick

“I will, but it will be dressed as you are, so you are going to find that thumb of yours will work 10 times better,” he said. “But dressed like that you are going to need a name to suit. What is that going to be?”

“You decide,” I said.

“I have always liked Annie, but it has been a long time since I ever encountered somebody with that name,” he said. You seem to me to be an Annie.”

Maybe there was something about the way he said it, but he left me with the impression that the name had some history for him, and that giving it to me was some special favor. But all of this was amidst my fear and humiliation having just experienced being anally raped. I should have seen him as the animal that could do such a thing, but suddenly he seemed human, with a distant past – maybe even a childhood.

“You are certainly pretty enough,” he said. “You could be prettier. You should be prettier. Perhaps I will ask Roxy to give you a quick makeover when we get to “Stop 67”. That would be nice.”

“Stop 67” was the name of the place. A roadhouse bar and diner on the far end of a huge carpark with trucks lined up. It was about an hour further on from where he had stopped to brutalize me. Because he indicated that this was the place that I would be left to seek my next ride, I looked forward to getting to this place. But somehow when I arrived it seemed less welcoming.

Still, when he stopped he got out of the cab and went around to my side to help me down, in my dress and heels. He lifted me to the ground by my waist, showing his strength and my weakness in a single movement.

He helped me across the gravel and onto a path towards the bar, but he slipped around to the back and pulled me through a service entrance.

“Can Roxy come back here for a minute?” he called through a door ahead of me. “We need her beauty skills back here.”

Roxy duly appeared, a woman in her fifties with bleached hair and in a short dress straining to contain her. But she had a kind face that was well maintained and made up, and her hair was well cared for.

“She is a looker, Garth,” she said, nodding in my direction. “Let me loose on those eyebrows and I can freshen her up nicely.”

“I am a man,” I said. It seemed like a stupid thing to say. I was dressed as a girl and it seemed that only an hour before I had met this woman I had experienced having the man in me fucked out completely. It was just that as she led me away I felt that I needed to protest, even if quietly.

I guess I just sat there glumly enduring the tweezers that tugged at my brows and chin, further extinguished an sense of masculinity. She brushed my hair and did my makeup, and she tidied me a little before thrusting me back towards Garth waiting by the back door.

But before she did, she whispered a few words – “You could do worse than Garth Johnson, but whatever happens, you keep your chin up. You are beautiful, and that is your shield.”

I suppose the need for a shield warned me that I was about to step into a battle, but I already knew that. It was clear that Garth Johnson was ready to push me out into a truckers’ bar dressed like a whore. At the very least I could expect cat calls and teasing, but there might be abuse too. But this woman Roxy was telling me that my best defense was to walk into it with my head held high. So that it was I was ready to do.

Garth was standing there sniggering, but as I raised my head and straightened the hem of my dress, I could see a visible change in his attitude. It was as if he saw somebody else in me – as if a raised chin made me a different person. It can do that, as I now know.

He seemed almost reluctant to lead me into the bar, going around to the front and holding my hand as I was directed onto the bare floor between the door and the men at the bar counter.

The collection of men staring at me was terrifying. The faces of the truckers were in all shapes and sizes but they all appeared ugly to me. Garth was handsome by comparison. But it was the look in the eyes that scared me the most – they looked at me the way that I imagine wolves would look at a baby deer. I felt like that in their presence, on my slender legs made unsteady by the heels, eyes wide, trembling.

Garth lifted my hand. He said – “Give them a twirl, Sweetie.”

I awkwardly did a slow turn on the spot. I felt a tear of fear run down one cheek.

“Tell me that this is not the prettiest little sissy we have ever had in this bar!” shouted Garth. “Now if you want an introduction, you’d better get me a beer!” He let go of my hand to accept the bottle offered, leaving me to stand there, feeling naked and vulnerable. It seemed like the whole room was leering at me, but nobody was moving forward while Garth was emptying the beer bottle into his gullet.

I found myself moving towards him – the man who had raped me that very afternoon.

“I will do whatever you ask, Garth, but please promise me you’ll take me back when they are done with me.” I am not even sure why I said it. I just felt that of all the monsters in the room he was the one I knew and who knew me. The thought of simply be tossed out after having all these men treat me like dirt was too much to bear. If there is a plank in a shipwreck even the filthiest nail studded plank will do.

But I meant what I said. He was a brute, but he was my brute, and after I had been soiled by everything that was to follow, what next? Would I be tossed out the door of this place and into the gravel? Would I have the strength to walk away? Could I go to the police dressed as I was and tell them that all these men were rapists and liars?

“Promise me you’ll take me back.” I said it again, as another tear rolled down the other cheek.

He looked at me, this Garth Johnson, and I saw the sneer fade from his top lip. I saw something new in his face. I can’t really describe it, but all I can say that it took a weight off me, and I did not know why.

“Tell me she has the tightest little bussy,” said one on the men, moving in to take a closer look at me.

“Back off,” said Garth. “You can look, but don’t touch. She is mine. She is not for sharing. Sorry boys. Not this time.”

I just grabbed his arm and squeezed it. I looked up into his face and saw him smile down at me.

That is the way it has been ever since. We live on the road, Garth and I. He is a brute but he is my brute, and I am his pretty little sissy. I don’t care what you think. I try to think of it as love.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2023
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