(This is older stuff that'll probably get reworked later on, but it gets Mags on the scene, and, fuck, she's gotta get there sometime doesn't she?)

Fifteen.

Mags Verbosa was sitting at a bus stop when that fat fuck cabbie decelerated his Lincoln down from a buck-fifty to zero in the space of about twelve feet and kicked me out the back door before I’d even managed to get myself all the way untangled from the seatbelt. She was sitting on a wooden bench in the shade of a corrugated steel lean-to, reading a paperback and looking just as pretty as a picture. As pretty as any picture; as all the pictures that ever were or ever will be or were ever even imagined. I got that in my first sweeping look around.

She glanced up momentarily when the Lincoln peeled out, then back to her book without so much as blinking my way. I got up off the blacktop and pried some pebbles out of my palms and stood on the road, panting, swinging my head this way and that, looking for what I don’t know. I think I was just doing what people in movies do when they get ejected from the backseats of unreal cars. You look around, try to find something to focus on, something that makes sense so you can get on to the next plot point.

Which would be Mags Verbosa, The Pretty Girl. Of course. Who would have all the answers, of course. And just happened to be waiting for me in the middle of the desert.

“S’cuse me…”

She didn’t look up from her book. “There’s a big goddamned truck due through here in about three seconds, so you’d probably better get off the road.” Her voice, of course, sounded like bells. And I should have been entranced and enchanted, of course, and stuck fast to the spot with stars in my eyes and bluebirds going tweet tweet tweet around my head, but I’d been through enough bullshit in the previous couple of days to know when good advice was being tossed my way, so I got off the road.

And yes, thank you, it was one big goddamned truck that cruised past just as I stepped from the highway to the sandy shoulder, a truck with all the physical attributes of a small skyscraper except that it was riding on a few dozen monster truck tires and doing an easy two hundred miles an hour. The vacuum in its wake sucked up all the available oxygen for about a second-and-a-half and then hit me with at least a ton of high-velocity road grit, sand and sun-bleached candy wrappers. I ended up face-first in front of the bus stop with my nose just about touching one of Mags Verbosa’s black suede high heels, certain that all my clothes and most of my skin had just been blasted away into the hot desert air. I got my chin up enough to look down the road and saw the truck disintegrating into the distance, a bright red speck on the horizon throwing smoke and sand in its wake.

“That kill you or what?” Bells from on high. I tilted my head to the right, following the voice. And I did mean to address the voice, but got caught up in the view of Mags’ legs, which are, by design, the most perfect legs ever. I forgot about the voice and tried to look up her skirt.

“Hello…” Mags Verbosa’s black hair and wide blue eyes slid over the arc of her knees. “Dead, alive…do you have an opinion?” The smallest, cutest, loveliest smile-lines ever appeared next to her eyes. I gave up on the skirt and tried to skooch back so I could see her smile.

She reached down and put her hand over my eyes. “Relax for a second and tell me whether or not I should call the coroner.”

Darkness helped. Her skin was cool in the heat, but not cold. Just right. Perfect. “Alive, I think.”

“Well, it’s good that you’ve got some feelings on the matter.”

“I think I’m in shock.”

“I doubt it. Most guys act like this around me.”

“I mean from the truck. All the sand and shit.”

“Ah.”

“Although, yeah, you’re…”

“Please don’t. I’ve heard them all. Seriously. All of them.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Neh.”

The tone was enough to just shut me up and make me lay with my cheek in the sand and simply breathe for a while. And feel Mags Verbosa’s hand over my eyes, which made me think of her hand on my cheek, my chest, sliding down over my stomach, slipping into my jeans…

“Seriously, just chill or you’re gonna end up humping the sand.”

It was embarrassing, but I got over it once she told me about herself. I guess when you’re Mags Verbosa, the distillation of every straight male fantasy on the planet, it’s pretty easy to tell when you’re giving somebody a monster hardon.