“Not even in your twenties?” I asked.
“Not then or in my thirties,” he insisted. “And I thought it was only women who peaked in their forties,” he joked.
He made me come twice more that night, that first night we got intimate, wild as wild can be. Of course, it left us hungry for more. And we gave each other more, every weekend. Once a month, we’d go to the Quality Inn in Pennsylvania. Three weeks out of the month, I’d come to Baltimore and spend the weekend in his townhouse. Even though Nathan never repeated his “double-jack” performance, the sex remained primo in the weeks that followed. We didn’t spend the whole time in bed. We’d see movies, attend the symphony (Nathan gave me an appreciation for classical music that I never had growing up) and take walks along the NCRR trail, an old railroad bed turned into recreational use. When I got a promotion at work, he made a big deal out of it by taking me to one of the city’s finer restaurants. So I knew he liked me for more than just my bod, something he reinforced one night at a party that he and his cycling buddies threw about twice a year.
The party was at one of the rider’s houses. I didn’t ride myself, but I admired the good shape that these mostly middle-age folks kept themselves in. They all were college-educated, something else I admired, if not envied. They were nice people, too. They made me feel welcome. Well, all but one of them did. Phyllis Denu was her name, an attractive woman around Nathan’s age who looked years younger. She had butt-length, light-brown hair and brown eyes. She looked like an aging hippy to me, what with her long hair parted in the middle and the ankle-length, colorful skirt and sandals she wore. She was a commercial artist by trade. She also had this highfalutin attitude.
But that didn’t bother me until she got personal. About five of us were standing in the kitchen, sipping our wine, making small talk, laughing. All was going well until Phyllis asked me what I did. “I’m a secretary,” I said. “But what I really wanted to do was work in the medial field. Perhaps even become a doctor.”
Phyllis nodded, rolled her eyes and took a sip of wine. Then she said, “Sounds to me like you wasted your life.”
I wasn’t alone in taking a few moments to process what she said. Our group went silent, stunned by the crassness of her comment. Then Nathan spoke up. “Who the hell are you to judge Amanda that way? She happens to be an excellent corporate secretary with computer skills that I doubt you’ll ever have. But even if she wasn’t, you’ve got no right to judge and condemn, you haughty, pompous idiot. Not Amanda. Not anybody.”
Once again, the room fell silent. Phyllis looked like she’d just been slapped upside her head. Which, in a manner of speaking, she had been. She bolted from the room.
“She deserved that,” one of the women said. The rest nodded in agreement. Believe it or not, I felt kind of sorry for her, yet was grateful to Nathan for sticking up for me.
Phyllis could have made things right with an apology. Instead, she left the party. When we got into the car to leave, I had tears in my eyes. “Thanks so much for defending me,” I said. “I didn’t expect that.”
Nathan chuckled. “Neither did anyone else, especially Miss Pomposity. Maybe she’ll think twice before she says anything like that again. I heard that she’s never been married. Wonder why.”
Minutes passed in silence, minutes where I debated whether to say something I’d wanted to say for a while, but hadn’t for fear that he didn’t feel for me what I felt for him.
Then he spoke up: “Amanda, you should know that my outburst kind of surprised me also. Normally, I let things like that go. You know, sticks and stones. But nobody says insulting things like that to people I care about and gets away without some sort of condemnation. The only thing I regret was calling her a haughty, pompous idiot. She acted like one, but what she said spoke for itself. I didn’t have to call her names.”
“So you really do care about me,” I said, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.
He reached over and put his hand on my leg. “Yes, I care about you.”
“Just checking,” I said. I left out what I really wanted to say, that I more than cared about him, I loved him. But I didn’t for fear that he’d feel pressured. Because I didn’t think he felt for me what I felt for him. He DID care about me, I felt that. But love me? He never said, and Nathan seemed like the kind of guy who didn’t hold back. If he loved me, he would have told me.
Nathan
Looking back, my confrontation with Phyllis was a turning point. What began as mostly a sexual relationship with Amanda, became something more, something deeper, something potentially long-term. Not long after that incident, she took up cycling herself. She hadn’t ridden a bike since turning twelve, she told me. Amanda wasn’t particularly athletic. But she wanted us to get closer and figured that cycling together might help. She bought what they call a hybrid, a machine designed as a cross between a road bike and mountain bike. It had upright handlebars and tires suitable for unpaved trails, but not the thick, knobby tires you find on mountain bikes. She didn’t feel safe in traffic, so we rode trails together, paved trails in deference to my road bike, equipped with the standard skinny tires.
I still rode with my road bike group. Phyllis might have bolted from that party, but not the group. Weeks later, she showed up for a weekday, thirty-mile, late afternoon-early evening ride. I’ll admit, before the incident, I found Phyllis attractive on several levels. She was smart, culturally astute and possessed the sort of athletic female body that turned male heads, athletes especially. But that ugly, insulting thing she said to Amanda knocked her down several notches in my eyes. In the parking lot, we eyed at each other warily, neither of us saying anything. As far as I was concerned, she still owed me and Amanda an apology. Finally, she wheeled her bike over to me, her face a picture of contrite resignation “Look, I’m sorry, Nathan, for what happened,” she said. “I had no right to say what I did. You were right, I acted like a haughty, pompous idiot, if not a bitch. Please covey my apologies to Amanda.”
She sounded sincere, although deep down, I think she still felt that Amanda had wasted her life. I didn’t know Phyllis all that well, but from what she had told me, I knew she was competitive in the workplace. She had to be, because commercial art could be a very competitive field. She worked hard to get where she was, and perhaps she harbored a contempt for people who hadn’t, for whatever reason, realized their own professional dreams.
She stuck out her hand. “So, are we good?”
“Sure,” I said, more to appease than anything. I didn’t like holding grudges. Besides, we were just riding buddies, not buddy buddies.
I left it at that, figured that my relationship with Phyllis, such as it was, would return to what it had always been. After the ride, when we returned to the parking lot and racked our bikes, she approached me again. “Can we talk?” she asked. We were still in our Spandex riding gear, while the other four cyclists in our group were putting on their street clothes over their riding shorts for the drive home.