Reach for the Sky

I stood nearly naked in a large empty warehouse while strangers bustled around me, tossing pieces of riding gear at me and telling me to put them on. I must have taken off and put on at least three pairs of ride pants and four different Thor riding bras before the fashionista stylist told me that I was dressed suitably for the first pose. They sat me on a quad in the most ridiculous positions, ways I would never have to sit on a bike if I were to ride it, and continually complained about the bruises and cuts I had all over my body, as if I should place myself in bubble wrap for the sake of my sponsor’s photo shoots.

Jolene and Travis both sat and watched as I posed and pouted, laughing their asses off when I could spare them a dirty glare.

“You guys suck.” I murmured, as the fashionistas stripped me down to my underwear once more and dressed me back up in a different set of ride gear for another series of poses with a helmet, and then again into a pair of skinny jeans, a white t-shirt and a strange, plaid-looking, oversized sweatshirt which I could see Travis coveting even from across the room. After another set of plainclothes shooting, they put me in a pair of knee-high motocross socks, cutoff jean shorts and a black sports bra, my last shot of the day.

“So you get to keep the clothes this time, Scott.” I grimaced at the Stylist’s slaughtering of my name (there was no greater insult to me than to call me Scott), but was pleasantly surprised.

“For real? All of them?” Sure enough, after the photographer got the shots, the stylist handed me a backpack filled with the clothing and shoes I had just worn, matched sets of gear had been completed. “Oh man, thanks so much! I’ve never gotten swag before!” Jolene smiled at me, as if to say “what a rookie.”

Travis had come to drive me as Jolene and I had separate shoots, and Jolene had to go get a new bike she had ordered which had arrived in town earlier that day. So Jo took the big red King Ranch I had encountered the day before, and I let Travis drive my baby, the charcoal gray F250 four-wheel-drive. It was a frightening situation.

“Cutting weight, huh?” One of his large hands curled around the steering wheel, one reached over the center console to hold mine.

“Yeah. Just slow down a little.” I sighed as he flew around a corner with the big truck, nearly throwing the back end into a slide. “I wrecked my other cut bike so I need to get a new one down to weight before the X Fighter‘s.”

“You’re definitely going to do it?” Travis asked, comfortably driving down a hillside at sixty miles per hour - well above the speed limit.

“I think I might as well - if I turn it down, then what, you know? It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing for normal people who aren’t you,” I laughed as I set my sock-covered feet on the dashboard, piling the plaid-looking jacket on my lap in a vain attempt to hide my legs and stomach from the cold at the same time. “So you want to help me plan out my run?” He laughed as we began to descend the final hill before his house - the hill he and his friends had been big-wheeling down the day I arrived. That was nearly three months ago.

“Geeze, I have to help you cut weight and plan your run? And you want to beat me out on the track every time we’re on it, and you nearly kill me in my own truck?” His hand batted about my head playfully as he teased. After a few quiet moments during which I fought with a jacket and shoes, I jumped out of the truck to open the garage door. Travis drove right in, and I pulled the door shut behind him.

He met me by the bed of my truck, his hungry hands relieved me of the plaid jacket while my fumbling, bumbling hands failed at working the zipper pull at the front of his brown Thor jacket. I had better luck with the bright red DG shirt he wore. It wasn’t fair - he easily had me down to the sports bra I had worn for the shoot and I had to fight against his height and my general inability to undress anyone but myself. Finally, I felt the bare skin of his rough-hewn abs beneath calloused fingertips, and strained upward to touch my lips to his after a brief struggle.

“Brat,” I breathed, finally wrapping my arms around his neck and pressing my chest to his; one of Travis's hands pressed against my lower back, the other traced small circles on my hip before it slid up to search beneath the sports bra as if I had a chest to speak of. He didn’t respond to my insult, instead chose to push my fragile body against the closed tailgate of my own truck, a leg between mine for support. I groaned his name as his hands slipped beneath the waistline of the cutoff shorts, and opened my eyes to look into his.

“Travis,” It was a pained whisper, his eyes snapped open and met mine.

“What?” His tone nearly matched mine, as he slowly pulled his hand out from my pants and rested it on my hip.

“It’s your dad.” Robert Pastrana stood with his burly arms crossed in front of a thick chest, the picture of the marine he once was. Travis's head slowly turned as if he were auditioning for a part in the Exorcist, and then all hell broke loose as we both scrambled for the t-shirt and jackets that had been tossed into the bed of the truck behind us; he helped me into his oversized t-shirt before he zipped his own jacket around his bare chest.

“Travis,” His father’s call was menacing. Travis kissed my cheek before he turned and walked toward his dad, who threw an arm over his shoulder and began to walk with him in the opposite direction - as if he were twelve instead of twenty-one.

Instead of just kicking my feet and waiting for the pair to stop discussing me (I could hear about a third of what they were saying due to the echo in the garage), I proceeded to where my motocross quad waited for me, sitting beside the workbench I had put it beside before Jolene and I left for the photo shoot. I began to consider what I could remove and what needed to stay; the first thing I did was mark the front fenders with a silver sharpie (they were black) as to where I would saw them off. Then I got out a screwdriver and a wrench and began unbolting everything I could think of, every plastic part, everything I could replace with aluminum or lighter parts and began to list them down on a sheet of paper.

“Hey Scottie?” Travis’s call was tentative, I finished removing the right nerf bar (foot protection which I felt was necessary since the time I managed to run over my own ankle during a motocross race) before I set down my tools and took the walk of shame over to where Travis and his dad stood.

“Hi Mr. Pastrana,” I offered a hand, which he took in his iron grasp.

“Nice, firm handshake. Good mechanic. Doesn’t wait around for anyone.” He sounded as if he were taking notes about me. Travis looped his arm around my waist as if he were trying to both comfort me and protect me from his father at the same time.

“So, uh, thanks for watching my dog and teaching him how to get the hotdogs out of the fridge. We can’t even keep them in the house any more,” I joked, and for a moment, I thought I was a dead woman when Robert’s face remained blank.

“How many times do I have to tell you girl, call me Robert!” He punched me in the shoulder in a manner reminiscent of his son and smiled broadly. “So you and little Scottie here are going together?” Oh my, they were old fashioned.

“Yeah dad, we’re ‘going together.’” Travis laughed at his father, before he added, “But right now we’re supposed to be working on her motocross bike, so…”

“Well then let’s get to it!” Travis’s dad seemed almost overly hyped to help; he and Travis lifted the engine out together so I could disassemble it.

“Alright, well I’m going to need to call on some parts and see if Jolene can bring some of them back with her.” I snatched my cell phone off the workbench and dialed the number of the bike shop in town that sponsored us. Most of what I needed was already in stock and was boxed up and set next to Jolene’s new dirt bike so she could bring it back with her, but a few parts needed to be ordered - so the bike probably wouldn’t be ride-able for a little while.

“Travis, can we go flip things now? Pleaseeeeee?” Robert began laughing outright while Travis popped me in the shoulder. “Yeowch! I dislocated that the other day, be careful!”

“Wimpy,”

“Am not!”

“Are to!”

“I’ll race you!”

“You’ll loose!”

“Yeah right!”

“You two fight like an old married couple already!” Travis’s dad sat down on the torn-up motocross bike next to him as Travis and I scrambled for our gear - we raced to get dressed and then raced to our bikes and then raced out the garage door just as Jolene opened it. Pastrana managed to shoot out the gap before I could, because four wheels are much wider than two. He beat me to the track, but I took him on the outside corner of the first turn (because I didn’t want to run over his outstretched leg); my lead decreased over the rhythm section, which was more of his thing, but cornering was mine and I managed to pull out way ahead of him until he jumped over my head on the tabletop jump.

“Holy Shit boy, you could have killed me!” I thumped his chest protector with my helmet when we came to a stop after the fifth lap around the Motocross Track from Hell. “Want to run the Hare Scramble?”

“No, ‘cause you can beat me in that!” With a grin, I strapped my helmet on again and took off; a third Rider, obviously Jolene testing her new bike, joined us as we lapped the motocross track one last time before taking off over the last corner as if it were a jump into the woods.

I managed to beat the pair and was dinking around on the motocross track by the time Travis shot out of the woods followed by Jolene at quite an interval.

“Damn, teach me how to do that Sweet Cheeks!”