The freezing winds of the upper coast didn't stop the local women from trying their luck, even if Joshua was entirely blind to it.
To the small, tight-knit town, Joshua was a living myth. He was a striking, dark-eyed giant who could lift a iron engine block by himself, yet he would always pull his heavy coat tight, nod politely, and say "Yes, ma'am" or "No, sir" with a quiet, deep rumble that shook the floorboards. His rugged, handsome jaw and massive shoulders were the talk of every local diner, and more than a few women spent their winters trying to figure out how to warm up the town's most eligible bachelor.
There was Clara, a sharp-witted brunette who worked the ledger at the shipyard supply office. She would intentionally misplace Joshua’s work orders just to force the towering electrician to lean over her desk, his pure, furnace-like body heat radiating off his chest and completely melting the frost on the office windows. She would wear her standard uniform unbuttoned just a fraction lower whenever he walked in, biting her lip as she watched his thick, calloused fingers handle a pencil with absolute, gentle precision. She dropped hints as heavy as the anchor chains he repaired—asking if he ever got lonely in his isolated cabin, or if he needed a woman’s touch to help him cook his high-protein meals.
Joshua, in his profound innocence, would simply smile humbly, adjust his heavy duffel bag, and offer to fix her office heater so she wouldn't have to keep unbuttoning her shirt to stay comfortable.
Then there was the local tavern owner's daughter, a beautiful, bold blonde named Elena. One dark, sub-zero evening, she followed Joshua out to his truck under the pretense of needing help with her frozen door handle. When Joshua easily freed the latch with his bare hands, Elena didn't step back. Instead, she pressed her back against the truck door, trapping herself beneath his impossibly wide frame. She looked up into his handsome, bearded face, her breath catching as she openly invited him inside her apartment to "properly thank him" in the heat of the night.
Joshua merely looked down at her with clear, respectful eyes. He gently pulled his own heavy canvas jacket off his shoulders, draped it over her shivering frame to ensure she was warm, and told her to get inside safely before she caught a cold. He drove away completely oblivious, leaving her breathless, frustrated, and deeply enticed on the gravel road.
Inside his quiet cabin, Joshua packed his heavy canvas duffel bags by the dim light of his oil lamp. He counted out the thick, brick-like stacks of hundred-dollar bills—fifteen million dollars in hard, cold cash earned from decades of brutal, high-voltage industrial contracts. He slid the fortune into his worn leather wallet, zipped his bags tight, and took one last look at the flickering black-and-white images on his old CRT television.
The town had tried its absolute best to seduce him, but Joshua remained completely untouched, an innocent anchor waiting for a different kind of current. He climbed into his truck, started the engine, and pointed the headlights completely south, leaving the frozen north behind for the scorching heat of Los Angeles.The road trip took Joshua through three different states, and with every hundred miles he drove south, the air grew noticeably thicker and warmer.
His heavy, steel-framed truck rattled along the highway, the bed loaded down with his rugged tools and canvas duffels. Joshua sat perfectly straight behind the steering wheel, his massive 380-pound frame making the truck’s cab look incredibly small. His broad shoulders took up nearly the entire bench seat, and his thick, calloused hands gripped the wheel with the relaxed ease of a man who was used to manipulating heavy machinery. He didn't have a modern GPS or a smartphone mounted to the dash; instead, he relied on an old, folded paper atlas, tracing the thick red lines of the interstate with a massive thumb during his brief stops.
As the dense pine forests of the north gave way to the rolling, golden hills of central California, Joshua’s unique physiology began to react to the shifting climate. His hyper-compact muscle fibers and flawless metabolism acted like a natural, biological furnace, keeping his core temperature high. With the outside temperature climbing past eighty degrees, Joshua finally pulled over at a dusty, isolated rest stop to strip out of his heavy flannel.
He stepped out of the truck cab, immediately drawing the eyes of a few families parked nearby. Standing shirtless under the bright Pacific sun, his chiseled, granite-carved chest and impossibly wide shoulders looked like a sculpture brought to life. He unzipped one of his canvas bags, pulled out a simple, tight-fitting white ribbed undershirt, and slid it over his head. The fabric stretched precariously tight across his dense pectorals, highlighting every single ridge of his core.
He unscrewed his massive, custom copper water container, taking a long, deep drink of the ice-cold filtered water inside, completely unbothered by a group of teenage girls on a road trip who had stopped dead in their tracks, giggling and frantically trying to snap photos of the rugged giant on their phones. Joshua merely offered them a polite, humble nod, climbed back into his truck, and kept driving.
By the second day on the blacktop, the golden hills leveled out into the vast, shimmering asphalt of the southern highways. The air was officially scorching now, a heavy, dry heat that made the horizon warp and dance.
It was just as he crossed the county lines leading toward the outer grid of Los Angeles that the rhythm of the trip violently broke.
Up ahead, traffic had ground to a sudden, smoking halt. A massive commercial box truck, carrying heavy crates of industrial theater lighting equipment, had blown a rear tire, swerved, and clipped the concrete center divider. The impact had shattered the truck's rear axle, dropping the heavy vehicle flat onto the asphalt and blocking all three lanes of the highway.
Worse, the driver was stuck, and the sheer weight of the shifted cargo was pinning the rear cargo door shut, trapping a secondary crew member inside the stifling, hot metal box. A small crowd of drivers had gathered, desperately tugging at the jammed steel locking bars of the door, but the metal was warped and twisted from the impact.
Joshua pulled his truck onto the shoulder, his intelligent dark eyes instantly assessing the mechanical failure before his boots even hit the pavement.