Tandem

The climb out of the river valley always took the talk out of people. It didn’t take it out of Teo.

He drifted up on my left where the grade turned mean, chain ticking, and said, “You know the steel bridge on the county line? The one they painted green and called finished?”

“I know it,” I said. My legs had settled into the ugly part of the work. “I surveyed the approaches.”

“Then you’ll understand why I hate it.” He wasn’t breathing hard enough for a man who had just come up the same hill. “They put the expansion joint in the one place a truck can hit it sideways. I stood under it last month with a flashlight and watched it rattle. Like a tooth that should have come out.”

I laughed. It came out bigger than I meant, and my cadence went with it. The bike bobbled. I caught it, still laughing, and had to stand for three strokes to get the rhythm back.

“You’re going to get me dropped,” I said.

“You don’t get dropped,” he said. “You just make the rest of us look like we’re trying.”

Behind us, Marcus’s wheel hummed on the gravel shoulder where the pavement had crumbled. He didn’t call out. He never did on climbs. When I glanced back he was there, steady, visor low, watching the road and, I thought, watching me.

At the bakery we took the curb because the two tables inside were full of people who hadn’t been riding since dawn. Someone passed paper cups. Mine was black and too hot. The cinnamon roll came apart in my hand and left sugar on my glove.

Teo sat on the other side of me with his helmet in his lap. “I’m telling you,” he said, picking up the bridge again as if we’d only paused for a car, “they could have put that joint ten feet east and saved themselves a lawsuit. But nobody asks the person who has to crawl under it.”

“You love crawling under it,” I said. “Don’t pretend.”

He grinned. “I love being right about it.”

I laughed again. The sound carried. I turned my head to share it and found Marcus across the little scatter of bikes, coffee in one hand, roll in the other, looking straight at me.

He wasn’t tight around the mouth. He wasn’t studying Teo like a problem. He looked interested, the way he looks when a bus comes in with a noise he hasn’t heard before and he wants to get under it. His eyes moved from my face to Teo and back, unhurried. Then he took a bite of the roll and didn’t look away.

Heat climbed my neck that had nothing to do with the ride. I drank the coffee. It was bitter and good. When Teo said something else about bolts and rust, I answered him, and I knew Marcus was still watching, and I didn’t make myself smaller for it.

The club broke up in the lot the way it always did. Teo lifted a hand. “Same hill next week,” he said. “Try not to laugh yourself into the ditch.”

“Try not to talk me into it,” I said.

Marcus loaded both bikes without comment. On the drive home he kept one hand on the wheel and the other on my knee, thumb moving once, then still. The radio stayed off. I watched the fields go by and felt the print of that look sitting on me like sun through a windshield.

The garage was cooler than the kitchen. We’d wheeled the bikes in, dropped the kits, and put a record on low because the radio in there only got sermons and ads. Marcus had the rear wheel up on the stand. I had the front. Degreaser, rags, the sharp smell of solvent under the oil.

For a while there was only the work. Link by link. Wipe, turn, wipe. My shoulders loosened. His did too. I could hear it in the way he breathed.

He didn’t look up. “Would you like to sleep with him?”

I laughed, because that was the shape the sentence had, ridiculous against the chain in my hands. Then I looked at his face. He was still bent over the cassette, rag moving, jaw set the way it set when he was saying a thing he had already decided to say.

The laugh died. I put the rag down on the bench.

“Why on earth would you want that?”

He kept working. A full minute, maybe more. The record turned. A bus went by on the road beyond the alley, one of his, by the sound of the brake.

He set the rag aside and straightened. Grease striped his wrist. He met my eyes and didn’t dress it up.

“I like seeing you wanted,” he said. “I trust you. I trust him, far as I know him. And I’ve thought about it for years. Not him, at first. The idea. Then him, this spring, because of the way you laugh on those climbs.”

The garage felt smaller. I picked at a flake of sugar still stuck to my knuckle from the roll and couldn’t get it off.

“What happens the morning after?” I said.

“We get up,” he said. “We make coffee. We go to work. If you want to tell me about it, you tell me. If you don’t, you don’t. I stay your husband. That’s the part I know.”

“What if I like it too much?”

He was quiet again. Honest quiet. “Then we talk about what too much means. I don’t want to lose you to it. I also don’t want you to pretend you didn’t like being looked at, when I can see that you do.”

“And what if you hate it?”

“I might.” He said it plain. “I don’t know. I’ve wanted the idea and I’ve been afraid of the fact. If I hate it, I tell you, and we stop. Same if you do. I’m not asking you to carry me through something I can’t stand. I’m telling you I’d like to try finding out.”

I leaned my hip on the bench. The chain I’d been cleaning hung half done, dripping onto a sheet of newspaper.

“I’ve thought about him,” I said. “On the climbs. More than once. The way he talks, and the way it feels to be the person he’s talking to. I haven’t decided anything. If anything happens, it’s my call. Not a dare. Not a gift I’m handing you.”

“I know whose call it is,” he said.

“Good.”

We stood with the solvent between us. The record crackled into a quiet stretch. I could hear my own pulse in my ears, annoying and loud.

I went around the bench. He didn’t move back. I put my greasy hands out to the sides so I wouldn’t ruin his shirt, and he did the same, palms turned away, ridiculous, both of us, and I kissed him anyway.

He kissed me back. Not careful. His mouth was warm and he tasted like coffee and cinnamon, and I laughed into it because my fingers were dripping and his were too and neither of us would put them down. He brought one wrist up, the cleaner side, and set it against my cheek. I turned into it. My own wrist found his jaw, grease held clear of his skin, and he made a low sound that went straight through me. I got my fingers into his hair at the back, the pads only, and he caught my other wrist and held it there between us, not stopping me, just keeping the mess off both our shirts while he kissed me harder.

When I pulled back we were both breathing like the hill.

“I’m asking him for coffee,” I said. “Just coffee. And I’m telling you everything.”

I picked up my phone from the bench with two knuckles so I wouldn’t slick the screen. Marcus went back to the stand. He took up the rag. The chain in front of him was already clean. He wiped it again. Then he wiped it a third time, slow, while I typed.

Teo. It’s Lena. Coffee this week? Not the club stop. I have something to say, and I’d rather say it sitting down.