Rough Nights With The Roughneck: Part 1

“Time’s up!” The professor barked. 

“No! I still have half the test left,” thought Jamie as the TA grabbed her paper. This day couldn’t get any worse. 

Jamie lingered as students piled out of the room, obsessing over the trickiest questions on the exam. What sound does a cat make? 

2+2= __? 

Color WITHIN the lines. 

She was starting to regret her decision to become a business major. While buried in her laptop searching Google for the correct answers, it occurred to her that she was the only person left in HELD. Checking the time, she threw on her jacket and ducked out the door into the cold College Station air.

The walk to lot 32 was long and hard. The sun must have set hours ago, for the moon had crawled a good way up into the sky; only a sliver of moonlight illuminated Jamie’s walk down Ross Street. Though freezing, she felt no rush to get home. Her roommates were out at a party somewhere, and even if they did come back before dawn they would undoubtedly have frat boys carrying them to their rooms. Jamie loathed the idea of trying to sleep to a cacophony of moans and bed squeaks. She longed to counter those sounds with some of her own, but her bed remained empty. Her Tinder likes were filled with doughy old men, practically bald Corps guys and Mark Welsh III.

She was so absorbed in her thoughts she didn’t notice the dark figure trailing her. It wasn’t until she stopped at the roughneck statue that she realized something was wrong. 

The statue was gone! It was just an empty pole. The sexy engineer with his long, hard chain seemed to have been removed from his pedestal.  What was going on?

Suddenly she felt it. A cold metal chain slithered around her neck, the metal sending a tingle down her back and pressing in on her skin — not tight enough to choke her, but just enough to make her heart race — and pulled her back into a pair of bulging metallic arms. 

“Looking for something?” growled a deep voice. 

Jamie forced her head to turn, her stomach swirling around with fear and anticipation. Her face was only inches from his. The smell of petroleum, sweat and silver paint made her head spin. 

He leaned in, their lips inches apart. She met his tarnished bronze eyes with her own, putting her hands around his rough neck. She parted her lips, his metallic musk heavy in her nostrils.

Footsteps. Behind her. Jamie whirled around.

A man in slacks and a white shirt was standing by the empty pedestal. The moonlight glinted off a black name tag pinned to his breast.

“You know, Mormons are really into poly stuff,” he said with a devilish smirk.

Before she could respond, the roughneck whipped his chain across the floor next to the Mormon. Metal struck out on concrete and the pervert scampered off.  Nauseated by the thought of being witnessed here, Jamie turned back to the roughneck. 

“Now, where were we …”

To be continued.