Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  At first, it had felt good. Before it got to be way too much, like when you were with a guy who’d never grasped the concept of indirect contact. She wriggled and readjusted, trying to find a more comfortable position, and it only made things worse. By the time she finally rolled into the outskirts of the tiny town of Ithaca and spotted the cafe, she was hopping off the bike with two blocks still to go.

  Travis, of course, climbed back onto his own bike and came looping back to her. “All right?” he asked.

  He was looking worried, like this wasn’t working out the way he’d planned. “Fine!” she said chirpily. “Great. It was a beautiful ride.”

  He looked at her more closely. “Sure? You look a bit stiff. Your seat not comfortable?”

  She thought about telling him exactly what wasn’t comfortable, but she wasn’t supposed to be sharing anatomical details with him, so she said, “I’m fine,” and tried another smile. Like a gracious beauty pageant contestant. Or an electroshock victim. One or the other.

  All she needed was a break. And maybe an injection of local anesthetic.

  The café was tiny, with only six wooden tables, its best feature a wide back patio shaded by a huge maple and overlooking a creek overhung with aspens and weeping willows. It was time for shade, a drink, and a sandwich. And not sitting on a bicycle seat.

  She took a hasty detour to the ladies’ room, doing her best not to wince at the burn from peeing on chafed lady parts, then went out to the washbasin to fix her hair and minimal makeup. At least she didn’t have mascara running down her face today. And it was nice to have a man want to do a fun, adventurous activity with her. As opposed to the fun, adventurous activity they usually proposed.

  Stacy had come in with her, and now, she propped herself against the wall beside the sink for a chat. Looking reasonably perky, so this had been a good idea.

  “Travis is pretty great,” she said. “I mean, no bad-boy vibe or anything, so I don’t see why I had to come, but kinda hot for an older guy. Good arms.”

  He had good thighs, too. He had good everything. But no bad-boy vibe? Maybe because he didn’t feel the need to share it with absolutely every woman he met. Rochelle’d gotten plenty of bad-boy off him, one way and another. But she didn’t share that. “At least he’s wearing regular clothes,” she agreed, feeling more cheerful. “No padded shorts so tight, you could take an exact measurement of his junk. No bright-yellow spandex shirt covered with pretend-sponsor names, and he didn’t spend the whole time pedaling away from us like he was trying to win the Tour de Rural Bike Path. Although I can see why people do those padded shorts now.”

  Stacy smiled with satisfaction. “Your butt sore?”

  Second person to ask her that. “No. And I’m not whining, so don’t get your hopes up.” She tucked her comb back into her backpack and said, “Ready?”

  Travis kept being nice. He bought them lunch and an extremely welcome beer, leaned back in his chair with that relaxed ease that got Rochelle every time, and talked to Stacy as if he wasn’t sorry she’d come along.

  “So pre-med, huh?” he asked her. “I’m impressed. What kind of doctor?”

  “I don’t know.” Stacy took a swallow of beer. “I haven’t decided. I have to get there first. I mean, it’s going fine,” she added hastily.

  “Something giving you trouble?” Travis asked.

  She shrugged. “Not too bad. I’m OK.”

  “Mine was English Composition,” Travis said. “First semester of freshman year. It about did me in right there, before I’d even started. They wanted us to analyze the themes in these novels. How do I know? I just know if it’s a good story or not. And it was usually ‘not.’ I barely squeaked out of that. What’s yours?”

  Stacy’s eyes flew to his face as if she were checking whether she could trust him not to laugh at her. Rochelle knew the feeling. She sat quietly and listened, wondering if a tiny window was finally opening up to her sister’s heart.

  “Statistics,” Stacy finally said. “I mean, lots of things are hard. Sometimes I don’t think I . . .” She stopped and visibly swallowed. “But this professor . . . he doesn’t explain it so I get it. Or I just don’t get it.” She picked up her sandwich and scrutinized it as if it were fascinating, and Rochelle saw that her hand was shaking. “I don’t know. I don’t . . . I don’t get it.”

  “Hmm,” Travis said. “What exactly? What’s tough?”

  “Regression analysis, right now,” Stacy said reluctantly. “I know I should be able to understand it,” she hurried on, her cheeks flushing, “but I keep getting confused. I can do the math. Calculus was fine, and lots of people think that’s harder. But this . . . I don’t get the idea.”

  “OK,” Travis said. Calm as always, soothing some of Rochelle’s own jangles at Stacy’s out-of-proportion distress. “Well, fortunately, here you are, and here I am, and Rochelle isn’t talking to me, because I made her ride too far, not to mention that she knows she still has to get home. So we might as well bore her to death.”

  “I didn’t say—” Rochelle began.

  “Nope,” he said. “You didn’t. I’m reasonably fluent in body language, though.” He pulled a pen out of his pack and grabbed an extra napkin off the table. “Here we go. But we’ll do something that’ll keep Rochelle at least marginally interested, how’s that?”

  “You think?” Rochelle took another sip of her own beer. She was already getting light-headed. Alcohol, warmth, and exercise weren’t the best combination. Witness her tequila-fueled error of judgment with Travis.

  “You’re looking at the relationship of one thing to another kind of thing, right?” Travis was explaining to Stacy like a man who’d never taken a woman right off a dance floor and into his bed. “How much you can rely on one factor predicting the other. Let’s say . . . how likely it is that a professor of a certain age will be a decent guy. Say your hypothesis is that they get better as they get older. So the horizontal axis is age, and the vertical one is, let’s see . . .”

  He grinned at Rochelle and drew two crossing lines, labeling the bottom end of the vertical line “Dickhead” and the top end “Works for Rochelle,” then crosshatching the horizontal line and labeling it with numbers in increments of five, from thirty to sixty.

  “So,” he said, “since this is data Rochelle would have, let’s let her fill it in.”

  She grabbed the napkin, put a dot down near the intersection of the two lines, and labeled it “Wes.” Thirty and a dickhead. And then tracked all the way over to the “sixty” and wrote in, “Dr. Olsen,” nice and high. Right opposite “Works for Rochelle.”

  “Best over-sixty guy out there,” she said. “In the college, that is. And then there’s the rest of them.” She drew nine or ten more dots. “Each representing a known individual. I won’t write names in. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions once you know them better.”

  “Hmm,” Travis said. “Now we do the best-fit line.” He turned the napkin around so it faced Stacy and handed her the pen. “What would that look like?”

  She hesitated, the pen hovering over the graph, then finally drew a horizontal line and looked up at him questioningly.

  He smiled at her like he’d won the lottery. “Yep. That’s it. You’ve got a fairly random scatter there, I’d say.”

  “Right,” Stacy said. “Which means not much slope. No correlation between age and . . .”

  “Level of dickhead,” Travis agreed. “The older ones aren’t better?” he asked Rochelle.

  “Not so much. Mostly, they’re about the same guy they started out being. Nice, or not. Sometimes they get worse. They start thinking they’re superior, just because they get to grade people. The line might actually look like this.” She made an adjustment to her sister’s line. “If I gave it some more thought, got more exact.”

  “It might slope down a little,” Stacy said.

  “But not much,” Rochelle said.

  “Low r value.” Travis looked at Stacy. “Meaning what?”
/>   “One doesn’t predict the other. Low . . . correlation coefficient? Between age and how good a guy he is.” Stacy was looking excited now.

  “There are all levels of professors,” Rochelle agreed. “At any age.”

  Travis glanced at her, then started talking to Stacy again, grabbing another napkin, assigning values and doing math, and the technical part got beyond Rochelle. Stacy was nodding, though, taking the pen and doing her own calculations, so the explanation was obviously working.

  Finally, Stacy sat back with a sigh and said, “Thanks. I think I’ve got it. It’s so easy . . . when you explain it.” She blinked, and Rochelle could swear there were tears trying to make it out.

  “No problem,” Travis said. “You need anything else, just ask. Anytime. I’m pretty good with statistics. As opposed to teaching game design. I wish my students would say what you just did, but maybe it depends on how quick the student is at picking it up, too. I’ll tell myself that.” He looked at Rochelle, then. “And sorry. I tried to keep it entertaining, but there’s only so fascinating I could make that.”

  “Nope,” she said. “I learned something, too. Besides what ‘r squared’ means, and maybe even how you get the p value.”

  “Which you understood.” His eyes were so warm, which was completely unfair.

  “More or less. The major ideas, at least. As long as this isn’t going to be on the test.”

  “Have I ever told you that you’ve got a fairly terrific brain yourself?” he asked her.

  It was the beer, surely, that had her floating away like she was filled with helium, and she couldn’t answer for a moment.

  “So what else did you learn?” he asked.

  She took the pen from him, and when her hand brushed his, she felt the thrill of that bit of contact all the way to her toes. It even made it past some of the numbness in her nether regions. She swiveled the napkin around to face her and drew a new dot, hanging out alone, high on the graph above the “thirty” mark and right across from “Works for Rochelle.” And then she looked at him and labeled it “Travis.”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m thirty-five, actually. You might want to move the point to the right along the horizontal axis.”

  She dropped the pen. “OK. That’s the last time I compliment an engineer.”

  GOING SLOW

  The day was turning out better than Travis had feared when he’d first seen Rochelle walking stiff-legged up the bike path toward the café and had cursed himself as an idiot.

  Dancing, yes. Swimming, fine. Bike riding, no. Lesson learned, but too late now.

  They’d finished lunch, and Stacy was coming back from the ladies’ room. She’d done just fine riding out here. Like that did him any good at all.

  Stacy didn’t sit down, though. And she was crying, but trying to hide it.

  “I have to . . . I’m going,” she said.

  Rochelle had risen to her feet. “Sweetie. What’s wrong?”

  Stacy shook her head violently. “Nothing. Never mind. I have to go.”

  “It’s Shane, right?” Rochelle said. “Come on. Tell me.”

  Stacy looked at Travis, wild-eyed, and he got up himself and said, “I’ll just—”

  Stacy didn’t wait for him to leave. “He . . .” She gulped in a breath. “It’s just that he can’t . . .” Her chin wobbled. “See me. Tonight.”

  She burst into tears at that, Rochelle put her arms around her and made soothing noises, and Travis stood there and thought again about leaving. He had two younger sisters. He knew all about drama. That didn’t mean he enjoyed it.

  “Did he say why?” Rochelle asked, smoothing a hand over Stacy’s hair.

  Another hard shake of the head. “No,” Stacy mumbled against Rochelle’s shirt, then stood up straight and wiped the heels of her hands across her eyes. “He’s busy. He can’t. Never mind. I’m going home. I just . . .” Another chin wobble. “I just want to go home.”

  “Again?” Rochelle said. “What a jerk,” and Travis couldn’t argue with that.

  In a flash, Stacy was scowling at her. “He is not. You’re always against him.” Her voice was rising, becoming shrill. “A guy can be busy, you know! He can have things to do!”

  “Sweetie—” Rochelle began. “No. He can’t. Can he, Travis?”

  “No,” he said bluntly. He’d never understood why women were so hell-bent on fooling themselves. “He can’t. Unless he asked you about tomorrow. Did he ask you?”

  Stacy shook her head wildly again and rushed out of the café so fast, she stumbled over a chair and nearly fell. And then she was on her bike, and gone.

  “Huh,” Travis said as they watched the lonely figure pedaling away in the sunlight. “She’s . . . changeable.”

  “She sure is.” Rochelle looked after her sister with a frown. “She didn’t used to be, at least not as much. I think the pressure of school might really be getting to her. Like she finally told you, even though she’s never told me. The bad boyfriend doesn’t help.”

  “How bad?”

  “Not an abuser. Not physical, anyway, from what I can see, or I’d already have . . .”

  “Borrowed your dad’s shotgun,” he guessed.

  “Who says I’d have to borrow one?”

  He smiled, and she smiled reluctantly back. She sat down again, turned her beer glass in her hand, and sighed. “But he’s got her off balance for sure. Hot and cold, so she doesn’t know what to expect. He can be busy until the cows come home as far as I’m concerned, but . . . what kind of guy doesn’t want to see you on the weekend?”

  “A guy with another girlfriend.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Or just that he’s playing games.”

  “Guys don’t play that kind of game much. The stakes are too high. Giving up a sure thing to win some kind of points? No. If he doesn’t want to be with her on the weekend, he’s with another girl. If we’re talking ‘sex possible with both parties.’”

  “Wow.” She blinked. “You don’t mess around.”

  “Well, no. Not usually. And right now, I should tell you that I’d be happy to ride back and get the truck for you and your bike. Forty-five minutes, another beer while you sit right here, and I’m driving you home.”

  “No. Of course not.” She stood up and shook it off, because that was Rochelle. “I’m good to go.”

  Five miles in, he could see that she wasn’t. Not at all. “So,” he said, coming up beside her, “is it your legs, or the seat?”

  “Oh.” She smiled ruefully. Painfully, too, he could swear. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Well, yeah. Sorry. You’re in good shape, you swam quite a bit last week, you’d ridden your bike up to school that day, and thirteen miles isn’t very far, so . . .” He cut himself off at the look on her face. “I’m digging myself in deeper, aren’t I?”

  “No. It was a nice idea, and good of you to be all right with Stacy coming along. Not your fault.”

  “You’re a generous woman,” he said, and maybe he wasn’t just talking about Stacy. “But then, I already knew that.”

  “Do not even go there,” she said, reading his mind. “Right now, it has zero appeal.”

  “Oh. Not your legs, then.”

  “Nope, and not my butt, either.”

  He suppressed a snort of laughter, and at her glare, said, “Sorry, but you see my problem. If I laugh, I’m an insensitive jerk. If I ask you questions, I’m an insensitive jerk. If I get uncomfortable and shut up, I’m a socially awkward engineer, and I lose that spot on your graph. And, yes, I put it in my pocket. I know you saw. It was a sentimental moment for me. Even though I’m not a professor.”

  “Close enough,” she muttered.

  “OK, I’m going for it. I decided that ‘socially awkward engineer’ is worse. You need a new seat.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I could research it, if you like.”

  “You going to Google ‘bike seat’ and ‘clitoral pressure’?”

  He la
ughed. He couldn’t help it. “All right. I laughed. I’m officially an insensitive jerk. Yes, I’ll look that up. Consider it my penance for putting you through this. I’ll find the right seat for you, and I’ll even change it out. You can’t be the only one. Guys have issues, too. Bike seats are notorious.”

  “I noticed you weren’t wearing padding.”

  “So rare,” he said with a sigh.

  “What?” A tiny smile was peeking out. He was distracting her. Good.

  “That I get the opportunity to discuss our crotches with the one and only woman I’m looking to use them with. Wait,” he protested when she choked back a laugh of her own. “That didn’t come out quite right. It was supposed to be much smoother.”

  “Never mind. If you were trying to turn me on, I’m pretty sure it’ll never be possible again.”

  “So as a going-slow technique, this worked?”

  “Yeah.” She shifted position once more. “Congratulations.”

  WAITING FOR PERFECT

  When Travis had picked her up that morning, Rochelle had thought about what it would be like to kiss him good-bye. About how she might take him around the back to look at the rest of her garden first, and how he might have kissed her again the way he had in the lab. Like he couldn’t get enough.

  She did look at her garden, eventually. It wasn’t that exciting. An hour after she’d arrived home, after she’d climbed into a nice deep bath and reluctantly out of it again. When she was turning the hose on the plants in her backyard. By herself.

  She saw Charlie first. The little white terrier mix came scampering across the yard, tail wagging, and jumped out of the path of the hose as if it were attacking him.

  Dell wasn’t far behind. She was wearing a broad red straw sun hat today to go with her cherry-patterned blouse, and carrying a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses out to her patio table.

  “Come on over and sit in the shade with me when you’re done,” she called.

  When Rochelle had finished her watering and accepted the invitation, Dell poured her a glass of iced tea, using her special watermelon-printed patio glasses, and said, “That hydrangea in the front is looking all right. Thought it might die, planted so late and all, but it’s doing real well. You’re taking good care of it.”