I Was Stranded and Five Strangers Rescued Me

The engine coughed twice before dying completely. I managed to pull the car onto the shoulder just as the dashboard lights flickered and went out, and there I was, in the middle of a country road with not a single headlight in sight. I took my phone out of my bag, hoping to call someone. Zero battery. I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and took a deep breath.

It was after two in the morning. I set the warning triangles behind the car and turned on the hazard lights, that orange blinking that seemed to scream my loneliness out into the dark fields. I climbed back inside, closed the hood, and hugged my knees in the seat. Calm down, Lorena. Someone will pass by.

Almost twenty minutes passed before I made out some lights in the rearview mirror. A white van slowed down and stopped a few yards behind me. The relief lasted only as long as it took me to remember that on a road like this, at that hour, a woman doesn’t know whether what’s coming is help or trouble. I lowered the window just a finger’s width.

The man who came up was probably about forty, broad-shouldered, with a couple of extra kilos that suited him well and a short beard flecked with gray. He wore a workshop logo embroidered on his jacket.

“Is everything okay?” he asked, bending down to my level.

“The engine shut off and won’t start. And my phone died,” I admitted.

“Let me take a look.” He jerked his thumb toward the van. “We’re coming back from the shop, we’re mechanics. You’ve got a bit of luck.”

He opened the hood and leaned over the engine with a flashlight. Another man got out of the van to light the way for him: younger, slim, with an easy smile that held my gaze a second too long. It wasn’t a threatening smile. It was something else, something I recognized right away because it had been a long time since anyone had looked at me like that.

“My name’s Tomás,” the bearded one said, poking his head up. “That nosy one is Hugo. And you?”

“Lorena.”

“Lorena, bad news. This isn’t starting tonight, not a chance. Fuel pump.” He closed the hood and wiped his hands on a rag. “We can tow it to the shop, it’s fifteen minutes away. There’s light there, coffee, and a couch to wait on until morning. Or we leave it here. Your call.”

***

I looked at the van. Through the side window I could make out the silhouettes of three more men, watching me. Any sensible woman would have hesitated. And I did hesitate. But I also felt something I hadn’t expected: a warm surge rising through my belly, a prickling of risk I hadn’t felt in years. I’d spent too long being sensible. Too long driving alone to empty houses.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go to the shop.”

Tomás hooked my car to the van with the kind of speed that betrayed his trade, and invited me to sit up front. But I, I’m not entirely sure why, opened the side door and sat in back, between them. Hugo shifted over to make room for me and his thigh pressed against mine. I didn’t move away.

“These are Darío, Lucas, and Marco,” he said, pointing to the other three.

Darío was short and bald, with lively eyes that never stopped laughing. Lucas, on the other hand, was the quietest, tall and broad-handed. Marco, the oldest of them all, had gray hair and a goatee that gave him the air of a ship captain. Five men and me, packed into the van while the road paraded past black on the other side of the glass.

“And what’s a woman like you doing out alone at this hour?” Hugo asked, still smiling like that.

“I was coming back from dinner with some friends. Bored,” I answered, and held his gaze. “Very bored.”

The silence that followed was the kind that says everything. Hugo’s hand settled on my knee, slowly, giving me all the time in the world to pull away. I didn’t. He moved it a little higher, over the hem of my skirt, and I parted my legs just a little. It was my answer, and they all understood it.

“Lorena,” Tomás murmured from the front seat, looking at me through the rearview mirror, “if at any point you want me to stop the van and let you out, we say so and that’s that. All right?”

“All right,” I said. And then, with a courage I didn’t know I had: “but I don’t want to get out.”

***

The shop smelled of oil and cold metal. Tomás turned on only one row of lights, the ones in the back, where there was an old sofa and a table with a hot plate. I set my bag on the table and, before I could turn around, I felt Hugo’s hands on my waist and his breath on the nape of my neck.

“Sure?” he asked in my ear.

In answer, I turned my head and kissed him. It was a long, hungry kiss, the kind that leaves no room for doubt. His fingers found the buttons of my blouse and undid them one by one while the others came closer, forming a circle around me with me at the absolute center.

Tomás moved behind me when the blouse fell to the floor. His hands, rough from work, covered my breasts over my bra, and then he unclasped it with a skill that drew a weak laugh from me.

“Practice,” he murmured against my shoulder, and bit the skin right where the neck turns into the back.

A shiver ran through me from head to toe. Hugo knelt in front of me and tugged my skirt and stockings down in one patient pull, kissing my thighs as the fabric came lower. When his mouth finally reached where I was already wet, I had to brace myself on Lucas’s shoulders so I wouldn’t lose my balance.

“Slowly,” I asked, even though I didn’t want it slow at all.

Hugo didn’t listen, and I was grateful for it. His tongue traced circles, slow and then fast, alternating, while Tomás pinched my nipples from behind and Darío offered me his mouth to kiss. It was too much and exactly enough at the same time. The moans came out of me without permission, bouncing off the sheet-metal walls of the shop.

“This woman knows what she wants,” Marco said, watching me with his hands crossed, waiting his turn with a patience that made me more nervous than the others’ impatience.

“What I want,” I gasped, “is all of you.”

***

They took me to the sofa. I lay down and, for an instant, looked up at them from below: five men so different, stripping without hurry, watching me as if I were the only thing that mattered in the world that early morning. And I was. I propped myself on my elbows and took the initiative.

I drew Hugo to my mouth first, because his smile had disarmed me from the start. I took him in fully, slowly, listening to his breath break. My hands searched for the men at my sides, Darío and Lucas, and I stroked them to the rhythm set by my own hips, which were already moving on their own, looking for something to fill them.

Tomás knelt between my legs.

“Look at me,” he said.

I looked at him. He drove into me with a firm thrust and my cry mixed with his groan of pleasure. He was thick, filling every corner, and he started moving in a rhythm that made my back arch. The others didn’t stay still: a mouth on each breast, hands everywhere, lips tracing my neck, my belly, the insides of my thighs. I lost track of where one man ended and the next began.

“I can’t hold back anymore,” Tomás growled, and he came with a tremor I felt throbbing inside me.

Hardly had he pulled out when Marco gently turned me until I was on all fours. The captain with the gray hair turned out to be the most generous of them all: he entered me slowly, attentive to every reaction, and only when I begged him to be harder did he speed up. Meanwhile, Darío moved into position in front of me and I offered him my mouth, and Lucas and Hugo waited at my sides, ready for my hands.

Pleasure began to gather in my belly like a tide. I felt Marco’s gray hair brushing my back, everyone’s hands claiming me, and I knew I was close. When it came, it came all at once, a wave that shook me from head to toe and made me bury my face in the cushion to smother my scream.

“That’s it,” Lucas murmured, stroking my hair with a tenderness that contrasted with everything else.

***

Then it was his turn. Lucas, the quiet one, sat me astride his hips and let me set the pace. I liked having control for a moment, rocking slowly while I looked him in the eyes and felt his jaw tighten as he held back. From behind, Darío whispered if he could, and when I nodded he did it patiently, spitting, easing his way in little by little until the double motion turned me into pure sensation.

“Incredible,” Darío panted, gripping my hips. “This woman is incredible.”

I wasn’t answering with words anymore, only with moans that grew deeper and deeper. Hugo appeared in my field of vision and I opened my mouth for him delightedly, until he took command and set his own pace. Five men and me, fitted together like parts of a mechanism that existed only for my pleasure.

One by one they reached the end. Lucas beneath me, with a muffled groan; Darío behind, sinking his fingers into my skin; Hugo, Marco. I felt the heat of each of them spread across my back, my neck, my hair, and far from feeling used, I felt, for the first time in years, desired in an absolute way.

I let myself fall onto my side on the sofa, exhausted and smiling. Tomás covered me with his jacket and Hugo handed me a bottle of water. No one was in a hurry to get dressed. Marco put the hot plate on and the smell of coffee mixed with the oil of the shop.

“Your car will be ready by noon,” Tomás said, sitting beside me. “We have the pump in stock.”

“No rush,” I answered, and I was surprised by how much I meant it.

Dawn broke while the six of us drank coffee in silence, me wrapped in someone else’s jacket, them half dressed, all of us with that strange calm that follows a storm. When they finally dropped me off in my repaired car, with the sun already high, Hugo leaned in through the window with the same smile as the night before.

“Just in case you get stranded again,” he said, and left me a shop card in my lap.

I started the engine and watched them shrink in the rearview mirror. My rescuers, I thought, and laughed alone on the empty road. I tucked the card into the glove compartment. You never know when the engine’s going to fail again. And honestly, I was beginning to hope it would fail again soon.