Chapter 4: Getting to know you

The final was completely anti-climatic. Both Reed and I had each taken a big knock-out during the tournament, so we both weren't exactly fresh, and our fighting styles still cancelled each other out. Unfortunately I hadn't recovered enough from the brawl with the Argentinean gorilla, and Reed dominated the third round with several hits to my torso – not enough to knock me over, but enough to ring up points. The bout went to full time and he won the fight by a unanimous judges' decision, 116 points to 111.

I couldn't care less. My biggest win was holding Erika's hand, even if it was just one final time. I still didn't know what to make of it.

The stairs up to our apartment seemed endless, but I'd not used the elevator once since coming back here and I wasn't going to start now. When I reached the fourth floor, I saw Mrs. Zelenkova standing in front of her door.

"Hi Mrs. Zelenkova."

"You fight good," she said with a smile, but I just shrugged, leaning against the guard rail of the stairs.

"Would have liked to win it, but I was too knackered," I apologized for my defeat.

"Biggest prize is not medal," she said shaking her head. "You not win heart back of beautiful girl yet, but found way to it."

"You've spoken to her, haven't you?" I asked, as the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.

"Sometimes young people need wisdom of old woman," she said vaguely. "Now hard work starts, young Kosmonaut, in ring and in love."

She gave me a knowing smile and turned to shuffle back into her apartment.

"Thank you Mrs. Zelenkova, for everything."

She just smiled at me and closed the door.

Now, at the end of October, the night fell early. I was standing at the open window looking out at the clear sky showing the myriad of stars. One day I'd be out there seeing them up close. The cool breeze felt good on my battered face.

Lizzie had reacted hysterically when I'd come home. She'd never liked seeing me getting battered, and when she saw my disfigured mug she lost it big time. It had taken me an hour to calm her down. Fortunately, she was finally sleeping now.

I was taking a swig from my beer when I heard the soft beep of a PADD. It was an incoming message.

To: Tucker, Charles Anthony, Cdt3 From: Hernandez Mendoza, Erika Maria, Lt. Re: Training Partner

Have my yearly fitness check coming up in December. Could use a training partner. Any suggestions?

Erika

My heart jumped in circles and I remembered the words of Mrs. Zelenkova. That's what she meant by saying that I might not have won her heart back, but I may have opened a way back towards it. Erika wasn't jumping into my arms, but she was reaching out. At the moment I would take the slightest chance. I opened the onscreen keypad and typed the answer.

To: Hernandez Mendoza, Erika Maria, Lt. From: Tucker, Charles Anthony, Cdt3 Re: Re: Training Partner

Hope you're an early riser. Training every morning 0530, north entrance Golden Gate Park. Would love to have company.

Trip

The answer came promptly.

To: Tucker, Charles Anthony, Cdt3 From: Hernandez Mendoza, Erika Maria, Lt. Re: Re: Re: Training Partner

Oh dear. Okay, 0530 it is. Good night.

Davai posnakomimsya, Erika

The last one choked me up. She had remembered that I spoke a bit of Russian because of my great granddad, as did she because she'd had a Russian boyfriend in the past. We'd made a bit of a game out of it, talking dirty in Russian while she was taking my virginity that night three years ago. But this wasn't dirty talk. It meant "Let's get to know each other". She wanted to start over from scratch. I blinked away a tear of joy before it could fall.

Temperatures were mild despite the early morning hour, but today the air tasted especially fresh and sweet. The chirping of early birds was a veritable symphony as I floated towards the north entrance of Golden Gate Park. Of course I was hopelessly early, so I took the opportunity to soak in the serene atmosphere of the place.

On a Sunday morning there were no people around at this time and the sun was only just sending in the first silvery rays of light. I've always liked early dawn. The panorama of differently colored light as the sun crept over the horizon had always created a special ambience for me. Unfortunately, today the spectacle was somewhat spoiled by the sunglasses I was wearing. My face was shining in all colors of the rainbow, especially around the eyes. That guy from Argentina had left me with plenty of souvenirs, and they'd take a while to fade.

Suddenly the early morning got even brighter. I'd had a subconscious doubt whether Erika would show up, but now she was really walking up to me. Her hair was bound in a ponytail; her glance was a bit sleepy but warm, not the empty look I'd seen so often on her face in recent weeks, but the greatest thing of all was that blindingly beautiful smile – it was back.

There was a moment of awkward silence as we stood and looked at each other. I stuck out my hand and with a look of slight confusion she took it.

"Charles Tucker III. My friends call me Trip," I introduced myself formally.

Her face lit up when she realized that I had gotten the starting-over reference in the last message, and she answered in kind.

"Erika Maria Hernandez Mendoza. My friends call me Erika."

I smiled back and decided to avoid any awkwardness by getting right down to business.

I indicated her to follow and jogged away lightly. She fell in step next to me. She wore a pair of jogging pants and a baggy green shirt. Her long ponytail swung left and right as we jogged along at medium speed.

"So, what did you select for the check up?" I asked.

"Track and field. High Jump, Long Jump and 5 mile run."

"I can help you with the running and long jump, but for the high jump we better ask Lizzie for help."

"Who's Lizzie?" she asked and I could hear a slight alarm in her voice.

"My sister. She's going to Hundertwasser school and lives with me. You must have seen us on campus before. Blond, cute as a button, my height?"

"Oh, the one who feeds you tacos in the park?" she noted with a chuckle. "I thought I saw a resemblance."

I let it slide that she'd just given away she might have kept a somewhat closer eye on me than might have been expected.

"Yeah; she's doing heptathlon. High jump is too technical for me."

We reached Keezar stadium, I keyed open the side entrance and we walked out onto the field. The morning dew in the grass reflected the early sunlight in a myriad of colors. The scene was perfect for my mood. I was euphoric. The lost final was completely forgotten, inconsequential, and not only because I'd qualified for the final tournament anyway.

"Alright," I said. "I'm doing a one-hour interval training of about 10 miles. You should try doing 5 miles in about forty minutes, then ten minutes' break and then you try keeping up with me for the last ten minutes, okay?"

"Forty minutes? That's a gold time for my age group," she said with a sarcastic chuckle.

"Were you going for bronze?" I looked at her with a deliberately cocky glance.

"I never got more than that," she admitted, her eyes cast downward.

"What's your personal best?" I asked, softening my voice. After all, I wanted to take this seriously, but not alienate her by being a jerk, and her emphasis on 'my age group' had not escaped my attention. She was self-conscious about being older than me.

"Forty-seven thirty-three," she said.

I did a quick mental calculation.

"Okay, that's a little over ten kph. Change of plan. We'll do eleven kilometers in a one hour session. I dictate the speed, you keep up. Even if you feel fresh enough, do not go faster than me, okay?"

She nodded and started stripping off her shirt and pants. My vision blurred slightly. She wore one of those ridiculously tight two-piece track and field suits that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Her body was as breathtaking as I remembered it.

"Holy shit!" I stammered in awe, realizing too late I'd said that out loud. She just smiled at me and started stretching to warm up her muscles.

I looked at my watch – fifty-three minutes. Erika was seriously running out of steam, while for me the five kph drop from my normal pace made it a rather moderate jog.

"Listen, slow to normal marching pace and walk. Don't stop," I instructed her. "When I come round to lap you, you speed up again."

She nodded and dropped back. I continued the jog at a steady pace. That would give her about two and a half minutes to recuperate and leave a three to four minutes home stretch.

When I came round to lap her she sped up, but I could see that she had trouble finding the rhythm. In a spur-of-the-moment decision I grabbed her hand and our fingers intertwined. With me giving the cadence via arms movement, she quickly found the rhythm and we finished the final minutes of the run.

Once we were across the finish line she slung her free arm around my neck and with her head resting against my chest she started to cry. Much of it was sheer exhaustion, but I was well aware that my actions in years past were probably playing a role too.

I gently laid her down on the grass and freed myself from her embrace. She was lying on her back, her face buried in her palms, still sobbing. I bent her legs up and started to massage her calves and femoral musculature. They were rock hard and she'd be walking funny for the rest of the day – that much was obvious.

"You did the five miles in forty-three point six," I told her, still working on her tortured muscles. "And overall, you did seven and a half miles."

She looked at me completely dumbfounded. "That's a four minute improvement!"

I nodded, and continued to knead her leg muscles.

"Your problem is, you can't hold a rhythm. You waste energy by starting way too fast then slowing down too a crawl when your energy runs out. I think we can shave off at least another three minutes, probably more like five, if we can correct that."

She shook her head, still in disbelief over her time.

Even the weather seemed to agree that this day could not get any better. Who would have expected twenty degrees Centigrade and a perfectly clear blue sky in the middle of November? The happy squeals from a brother-sister pair playing in the sandbox reverberated from the walls of the four blocks that framed the interior courtyard of our home away from home. Even the air smelled sweeter than usual, but that could just as well be because Mrs. Zelenkova was baking her legendary strawberry cake again.

The last three weeks since the qualification tournament had been so great, I was almost afraid that something unforeseen and bad would be happening very soon. My life felt like I'd walked into one of those cheap sappy novels that Lizzie liked to read. You know the kind? They are those sappy pieces, where the hero and heroine live happily ever after from the second chapter onwards. That's how I felt, right then. I was a hero in a sappy dime novel.

The problem is, life usually costs a little more than a dime, and in return for happiness many a rock is thrown into one's path, but at that time I didn't quite give a damn. I was enjoying the good times while they lasted. The next hardship would be coming no later than in two weeks' time at the latest, when the finals tournament was on the schedule.

As far as my training was concerned, I'd done all that I could do in the three months I'd had to prepare. My stamina was in good order, certainly more than enough to go the distance in more than one bout, and my muscles were coming along just fine. I couldn't remember having ever looked that bulky, so I had to pay attention not too bust the weight limit. Searching for superfluous fat on my body was an exercise in futility, but muscle mass is higher than that of fat. It certainly met with the approval of both Lizzie and my daily training partner Erika; hell, even Mrs. Zelenkova had been paying me compliments on how healthy I looked.

Over the course of three weeks the morning training with Erika had become a comfortable routine, and it felt great how we reconnected more with every day. To be honest, 'reconnecting' was actually a bit of a misleading term, as in truth we'd never been as connected as we were now, not even when we first went to bed together.

Back three years ago she'd been lusting over a well-muscled teen while I was unable to refuse the obvious offer of bedding a hot lady (and had fallen hard for her in the process). But now we were becoming close friends. In fact, I was sort of wondering if this was where we'd been heading – friends, but not lovers anymore. On the other hand she'd recently started to ogle me with 'that look' again. No matter how hard we'd screwed up in '38 (me in particular), the desire was still between us, but I decided to just go with the flow. Sure, I still fancied her like hell, but if that wasn't what she wanted anymore, I wasn't going to push the issue. Either way, I'd be happy with it.

On the sporting front, things were a bit harder. Erika's running was coming along nicely. She had the stamina of an ox. The problem was her rotten timing. When we ran together, with me dictating the cadence, she could easily beat the gold time of 40 minutes and thirty seconds by now, but if left to run alone – what she would have to do in the fitness check – she always came in two to three minutes slower.

It had taken me days to find out why, until I noticed that she was entirely relying visually on her surroundings instead of internalizing the rhythm that would keep her at a steady 12 kilometers per hour. With only little over three weeks remaining, I needed to try an unorthodox method, just like Lizzie had done coaching her in the high jump.

My little sis had handled the technical side of the disciplines herself, and by god she'd come home a few times frustrated. The long jump wasn't so much a problem. Erika was easily capable of a silver distance, making up for the lower score with the running, provided we'd get the pacing sorted out. But the high jump was a disaster as for some irrational reason Lizzie's first 'pupil' had trouble jumping over the bar with her back to it.

In her exasperation my sister had dug out a technique called 'the straddle' that had gone out of style almost 180 years ago, which allowed Erika to jump forward. Strangely enough it didn't cost her much height and a gold score was not entirely unrealistic. I would have given a limb to see the faces of the adjudicators when they watched her hurtle over the bar with a technique that none of them had seen in their lifetime. Back at the time I didn't know yet that I would get to see it...

And then there was the R&D business. Either Varley had been dishing out a few friendly insults on my behalf or some of the engineers had seen the tournament. Whatever the reason, the atmosphere had undergone an almost tectonic change. No longer ostracized, I could actually draw on other people's experience now, and my V120 twin-nacelle layout had won quite a few proponents. Now the work on finishing those simulations could start in earnest.

With a bit of effort I pulled down the handle to turn on the floodlights. The large relay emitted a clunking sound as it closed the electric circuit and the smaller of the lights sprang to life. I didn't need the full illumination, but mid-November meant my usual training start at 0530 was well before dawn.

To improve efficiency of the training, we had split it. I would start at half past five and Erika joined an hour later. With my stamina improved as it was, I could put in an additional one hour run at a slightly reduced pace.

I was just finishing my last lap when I saw that Erika was already doing her stretching exercises to warm up. She was again wearing her ridiculously tight two-piece outfit (she turned up in it every day frankly), and I couldn't get enough of seeing this fit and trim, gorgeous female body displayed in nearly all its magnificence.

Especially now. After nearly a month of intense training her muscles had definitely firmed up some, and I could think of a few younger women who would kill for a body like Erika's. It became harder by the day to withstand the burning temptation to touch that body again in all the right and wrong places, but I was too afraid of damaging the burgeoning connection we'd rebuilt over the last weeks. After all, I'd hurt her once, and I was determined to leave the decision to her. At that time I didn't yet know that I was holding the key in my hand.

I stopped my run and shook my legs to cool down. She was smiling at me as she continued her exercises.

"Erika, we'll try something new today," I said, as my breath slowly returned to normal. She looked at me, interest and curiosity reflecting in her dark eyes. "You're completely relyin' on visual clues for your rhythm."

She nodded. "I'm counting the trees as they fly past."

"What if there aren't any trees where you do your test, or what if it isn't even a tartan track? You won't have any reference and you'd have tortured yourself for nothing."

She nodded, clearly thinking through the consequences. "Any ideas?"

"This one," I said, and took out the utensils I'd brought in my backpack.

She looked at the stuff dangling from my hand, first in shock, then dubiously and finally with some bewildered amusement.

"You've brought a blindfold and handcuffs?"

"It's a tether they use in disabled sports," I explained, and fastened one of the two leather bracelets around her left wrist. The second would go on my wrist and the two were connected by a leather string. "I'll be your guidance partner, while you concentrate solely on your rhythm. Internalize it. You have to teach yourself to feel it with closed eyes."

"Well, we've tried everything else," she replied dryly as I put the blindfold over her eyes. Once I'd fastened the second bracelet around my own wrist, I took her hand and guided her to the track.

"Okay, we're goin' for a thirty-nine. You've done that before. Start internalizin' the rhythm. Try to find a song that fits and sing it in your mind for forty minutes or whatever works. Okay?"

She nodded and we started to jog. It took about two laps until we were in tune with each other. As soon I was satisfied of that, I gave the sign – a squeeze of her hand – and we picked up the pace that would allow her to beat the forty minute mark.

Thirty minutes into the run I could see how her rhythm had improved. She was holding it well, even when I let the tether go slack. My experiment seemed to be working, although for some reason she was having a harder time than usual. Her face was flushed a deep crimson and her breathing even more labored than normal.

"You okay, Erika?" I asked, slightly worried. We were en-route to a blisteringly quick time, but I didn't want her to keel over.

"I'm afraid we haven't thought this through, Trip," she pressed out, interrupted by heavy gasps for air. Her voice was quivering. "It helps with the rhythm, but it's turning me on like hell."

Realization dawned on me. Erika had a thing for strong guys. Having her blindfolded and dependent on my help, I had inadvertently put myself into a dominant position.

"Want me to take it off?" I asked.

"Don't you dare," she puffed. "I've not felt so horny since forever. Think we can do something about that soon?"

The admission, and the prospect it brought with it, had the inevitable effect. I was only glad that we were alone out on the track, as any onlooker would have suddenly seen rather more of Charles Tucker III than was normally visible in the middle of a training run.

Man, it would make keeping up the pace difficult, if not downright uncomfortable, but there was nothing much I could do about it. Except maybe whimper occasionally with the discomfort.

We continued our run, but the mood had changed. I felt reminded of the Wimshurst machine back in middle school, where flashes of electricity would strike between two globes. That was what happened right then – the proverbial sparks were flying between us. The air was heavy with pent-up desire. Ignoring our exhaustion we sped up more and more, driven by sheer desire and longing for each other's touch.

I had just about the necessary presence of mind to stop the watch when the five miles were completed, and then I made a sharp turn towards the underpass through which the players usually walked out of the catacombs. Still blindfolded, Erika just stumbled along.