Play me hard (will be edited)

Chapter 1 . The bus

Autobahn, Germany

The rain poured down in buckets and the countryside passed by almost too fast for her to notice anything of it. She raised her head from the crossword she was doing to look out the window. Just a blur. That's what it was. Just a blur.

The windshield wipers worked their way across the huge front window of the enormous bus as it chugged along its way down the endless highway. They had been going for at least four hours now, and the rain had been pouring almost the whole time, except for about ten minutes, two hours ago.

Sam, she called herself Sam, as everybody else in her, ever so little, circle of friends called her, and she was twenty-five years old, but her name was Samantha Travis, or to be more exact, Samantha Maiden Travis. That middle-name was something else. That was something her hippie, rock'n'roll parents had thought of in a moment of total drug related euphoria...and she was forever doomed to have a name after a rock and roll group she couldn't care less about.

The road ahead was like it was endless, not even a town for at least 100 kilometers or so. She sighed dejected and turned her eyes back down on her crossword. The paper laid neatly in her lap and she every now and then added a letter to it, sighing for each and every one of them. Could life be more dull and boring?

A month ago she'd been back in Richmond, working her ass off for the local farmer on the outskirts of town, branding his cattle and breaking his horses. Doing more than she was supposed to do in the first place. But she'd liked it, really she had...to start with. But as the days got longer, and the nights got shorter and the pay got lesser, she had finally grasped that she was in fact, getting 'screwed' in every sense of the word, by the farmer.

And to her total surprise, she realized, when she aired this to him, he countered with making a pass at her.

So totally flabbergasted, she  just stood there, looking quite awkward, the thought of yelling at him or do something  close to it, had been out of her reach to grasp. She'd felt so silly and so utterly stupid, so the only thing to actually do was to leave, then and there.

That was a month ago. Now she sat in this enormous bus, a few seats back from the driver, doing her crossword.

Further back sat the ugly bunch, as she called them, the band. The Rabble.

How had she come to this? Just how?

Thinking back, she could not recall who's 'fault' it was, hers or her friend's.

At a party given to her brother two months ago, a friend of his and hers had just out of the blue, said that a friend's friend needed a favor. There was a job. But not just any job. They needed somebody that could work hard, lift heavy, take insults, do overtime and not complain.

And her brother  just simply smiled and said. "Sam's great for the job...she works harder than the devil himself, can take a word or two in the wrong direction...and she never complains."

As he had said that, he never even got the chance to add : " Need I say more ", before the guy had shaken her hand and told her to meet him the next day at the mall downtown.

And now she sat here, in a bus, in the pouring rain, on an endless highway, doing crosswords. And the ugly bunch sat just four rows back, drinking Jack Daniels and making fun of women in general.

She disliked them a lot. Well, to be more precise, she sort of hated them...really she did.

Crawling down in her seat, she pulled her cap down lower, making it almost covering her face as she peered sideways out the window.