They met on a party ride, a jocular little impromptu parade wending its way through the city. 

Georgia joined in on a whim. Newly arrived and twenty-five, she was already tired of her colleagues and her gym buddies, bored by the limits of their talk. It seemed like a good way to meet interesting people, and she was proud of her bike; Swiss, a good steal, and flash with a splash of yellow paint. She was proud, too, of her skinned knee and the blueberry-blossom of a bruise on her thigh where she’d fallen a few days before. She’d only skidded on a thick layer of rotting leaves, but if anyone asked she might have spun a swift improvisation about a near-miss with a careless motorist.

Fernan was there. He rode curb, which meant he was tasked with keeping the pack together, stopping cross-traffic and standing down angry motorists. Once, a man climbed out of the driver’s seat and brandished a gun at him. He didn’t flinch.

On closer observation, he seemed to be the only one of the group having no fun at all. Other shepherds of their merry band brought speakers, lashed to the bottle-holders or frames of their rigs, blaring bubblegum pop. Their bikes flashed and jangled with scavenged ornaments, little strings of fairy lights, redundant reflectors. Not so, with Fernan.

His seriousness unsettled her, then annoyed her, and finally intrigued her. Near the end of the route, she caught him accepting a swig from the hip flask handed to him by an older rider on a glimmering Schwinn, and felt more at ease.

The party broke up, dissolving and reforming in the sticky dark of a little dive bar. She confronted him later, pleasantly drunk. Asked after his unpainted, nimble little sweetheart of a ride, and did Fernan ever take her out on the open road? She’d fallen into her bad habit of kicking off a conversation somewhere in the middle, picking up a nonexistent thread of thought and forcing her interlocutor to either engage her on these strange terms or languish in confusion.

He did, as it happened. Often. Maybe he smelled some of the hayseed on her, but it wasn’t long before they were chatting easily about their favorite empty country roads for a long day’s ride, comparing the various virtues of this or that county seat or township pike.

The images their conversation conjured up soothed Georgia inexplicably; so many miles of clean black asphalt, the soft silhouette of farmhouse and barn on the horizon. She determined to make those pictures manifest. They made plans.

Before winter got its teeth in, they made it out for a few brisk, silent morning rides. Scenery flew by, stained in shades of lemon yellow and ochre, brief alizarin flashes.

They never rode abreast. They rarely talked. Sometimes she would try and draw Fernan out, by degrees, but he seldom took the bait. It should have grated, but somehow his silence struck Georgia as a fully neutral proposition instead of any kind of judgment against her. A fact of nature.

She noticed, because Fernan was obliged to wear shorts for these rides, that he had the most beautiful knees. She turned the observation over and over in her mind like a piece of hard candy slowly dissolving on the tongue, waiting for aesthetic appreciation to transmute into physical feeling, into want.

They also discovered,  on subsequent casual meetings, that Fernan’s wife and her husband got on like a house on fire. The alliance was sealed.

Spring came. Until the thaw, Georgia didn’t realize how many things in her life had suffered such severe frost damage. Their old routes no longer offered her the kind of comfort she longed for, and she begged to make a change. Fernan offered a solution.

He had a place, he said. A hunting camp farther up the lakeshore, a six or seven hour ride. It was a country of orchards and open pastures, criss-crossed with empty roads perfectly suited to their purpose, and with several railroads paved over for the use of joggers and cyclists.

The camp in question turned out to be nothing more than an RV in an empty field that they reached by way of Georgia’s old rattling truck.

All the long, silent drive, she had wondered if she hadn’t misread the situation, if they were crossing a line. If Fernan would try to fuck her, and that was why he had brought her all the way out here. She wondered why they hadn’t done it already.

This thought came to her from nowhere in particular, though its character must have meant that it had sat somewhere in her, stored to mature. Stashed away in a cool, dark place, it reminded her of something that might have rotted under less hygienic circumstances. An aged cheese, she thought, with a twist of intestinal unease. Or a Parma ham.

These two currents of thought weren’t taking her anywhere she wanted to go. She wished Fernan would drop a hand to her thigh while they drove. She wished she could find some way to read his mind. The only way to express oneself with any clarity, she thought, was to have thoughts so simple and asinine as to be hardly worth thinking at all.

She came out, eventually. She divorced her husband, eventually. Neither process was simple, or quick.

But she and Fernan still rode together, and didn’t talk about it. They never talked about anything.

At first, it was a relief to go without conversation, when she could sense the question hovering at the tips of the tongues of all her other friends (most of whom she left behind in the general wreckage). From Fernan, there was no such poised curiosity, no eagerness to fuel the secret gossip mill that even the most devoted friends would let circulate amongst themselves, thinking they were being discreet by concealing their interest from the subjects of their idle talk. So long as she didn’t hear about what everyone else knew, maybe they thought they were ultimately being kind.

Fernan’s own intimate life remained a perfect mystery to her, as it always had, until she realized that the responsibility for her ignorance could only lie at her own feet. When had she ever asked Fernan to tell her anything? To bare his soul even a little? Why did she always wait to be asked?

She got good and stoned before their rides together, something she never felt inclined to do before, not needing it. But the benumbed haze that came between herself and the landscape felt like an improvement, letting her forget her little resentments, simply sinking into the relief of forward motion.

One day, he stopped wearing his wedding ring, which was the only indication she had that he’d followed her down her own path of dissolution, that his life was quite as much in shambles as hers.

Talking to Fernan, one had to be economical in their words. Sentences had to pull their weight, with double and triple meanings.

“How did you know?” she asked him. And she meant, how did you know it was over?  And she meant, how did you know to never make a pass at me? And she meant, how did you figure out I was a dyke before I knew it myself?

He fixed her with one of his closed, inscrutable looks. He shrugged.

__________

C.G. Dominguez is a Puerto Rican physician-in-training working and writing in the American Midwest with her wife, her dog, and her black raspberry patch. Her work has or will soon appear in Muleskinner Journal, Rind Literary, Nebulous Magazine, and elsewhere.