Chapter 14

Anne and Lizzie had rolled out a surprise in the morning. They had contracted with a small jersey maker to make team jerseys for all of us. They were mostly pale red with a set of four playing cards on the front and back. The cards on the ladies jerseys were the Queens, with the Queen of Hearts on top. My jersey had the four Aces with the Joker on top! Very fitting, I thought. So, we changed out of whatever we had been planning to wear and all changed into the new team togs. My goodness, but we looked like a real team now!

Jane and I had taken our bikes outside to add air to the tires. The door to the room next door, the one we had overheard last night, opened and a young couple also walked their bikes outside. We offered them the use of our pump, and they agreed. He was probably in his late twenties, and she was perhaps Jane’s age, with dark black hair in a tight braid that stuck out of her helmet and ran down to the middle of her back. They smiled, and we chatted briefly while waiting for the rest of the team to emerge. Anne and Lizzie came out next, and his eyes rose, while she simply stared. When Meredith and Melody came out with the last of the baggage and closed the door, I thought he was going to explode. His eyes had bugged out, and he was looking from one to the next as though he had died and gone to heaven. I merely smiled at her as she looked at them and then at me.

“You dog!” he muttered as he swung into the saddle to hit the road. She simply looked at me somewhat wistfully. It was clear that both were now putting a new set of mental images with the sounds they had undoubtedly heard from our room. I wondered if he was going to be able to ride with the growing hard on that was quite visible in his shorts. Remember, spandex hides nothing!

We walked our luggage over to the truck and made sure all our bottles were topped off before we too swung into the saddle to hit the road briefly before we stopped for one of the numerous pancake breakfasts along the route.

We had ridden about ten miles when we came to the small church outside of Chehalis. This was a place where I had gotten breakfast in the past, and knew it was both cheap and hearty. When you have eight-thousand riders on a ride, everybody turns out for every opportunity to make a buck. It wasn’t that they were greedy, far from it; it’s just that having that many people pass through a small town made for some creative fund-raising ideas.

This small church used the breakfast as a way to raise funds for their teen activities and such. So, you had a bunch of parents making breakfast and a herd of teens serving it and clearing away. All in all, it was a win-win situation! We saw the young couple in line ahead of us, and exchanged the usual polite nod among strangers with a shared activity. Once we had our breakfasts, we noticed they had a table to themselves, so we wandered over to join them.

“Hi,” I said, “I’m Nate. And my teammates are Meredith, Melody, Anne, Lizzie and Jane”.

“Err, Hi,” he said, “I’m John and this is Beth, I mean Elizabeth.”

“I prefer Beth, he just can’t bring himself to say it without feeling guilty!” She said with a warm smile. “He just can’t get past the whole nickname thing yet. Bad experience with a former girlfriend.”

Melody and Meredith just nodded as if that settled it, and we all sat down to eat.

“Well Beth, John, glad to meet you.” I said as we all settled. We then tucked into our breakfasts and, for the most part, sat in companionable silence. As we were winding down, John and I volunteered to clear the table and the ladies went off to ‘freshen up’.

Once they were out of earshot, John immediately said, “So, all five of them? I mean, how, I mean, shit man, how did it happen?”

“Beats the hell out of me. I started out as a group leader for a club ride and next thing you know I have eight women that all want a piece of me.”

“Eight?” John choked out, “You have eight of them?”

“Well, yeah. Three of them are in New York dancing for the Metropolitan Ballet.”

“Shit man, even in my dreams it’s not that good!” John looked at me like I had three heads!

“What can I say, man? You really need to volunteer more! Be a ride leader and see...”

He stood there muttering and sputtering as the ladies returned from the washroom. It appeared that Anne and Lizzie were deep in conversation with Beth, but it broke off rapidly as they approached. Anne and Lizzie simply nodded, and Beth colored quite a bit. I stood there, feeling as left out as I’m sure John felt. John and Beth hit the road and I took my opportunity to hit the head before we also rolled out.

“Okay, give!” I said as we entered the main road and the ladies were still sharing whispered conversations around me.

“What?” said Meredith in her more innocent of voices.

“You know damn well! The whole lot of you are ‘up-to-something’. I can tell when you are, you get too damn quiet!” and I glared at them briefly in hope of getting them to open up.

“It’s nothing really,” Melody said with a smile. “Just something Beth said in the washroom. It doesn’t concern you, or at least not, yet it doesn’t. If you are a good boy, we might let you in on it, then again, we may just not.”

“Okay, I suppose you’ll tell me if anything needs my attention?” I said.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure she’ll need your attention! She did mention that she and John overheard pretty much everything that went on in our room, and since John isn’t up to your standards, she seemed ‘intrigued’ by the possibilities. Yeah, that’s it, ‘intrigued’.” Jane said with a smile of her own.

“Yeah Nate,” Anne said, “She is staying in the same hotel in Portland that we are, and it seems that unfortunately John has to drive back tonight. Tough break for him.”

“But like I said,” Jane said with a ‘cat-that-ate-the canary’ grin, “She did indicate that she would be ‘intrigued’ by the possibilities.”

“Now that’s not entirely accurate,” said Lizzie. “After all, all she really asked was if Nate was as good as he sounded last night. And I said, ‘oh no, he’s a whole lot better than that’. Other than the blush, I don’t think she had any problem with the concept, did you, sister dear?”

“Now that I review the conversation, I do believe that you are right. She did say something about how John just couldn’t quite help her over the top, but it sounded like Nate was up to the task?” said Lizzie with a smile.

“And by the look of Nate’s shorts, I do believe that he is up to the task as we speak.” said Jane as she rolled by me to the back of our pace line.

Did I mention how hard it is to ride well with an erection?

We did the photo-op stop in Winlock. It’s a tradition for groups of riders. You see, they have this massive egg (that’s right the world’s largest egg!) on a pedestal in the center of town and the STP route goes right by it. There is a mini-stop where you can pee and get more fluids, and most groups stop and find some stranger to hand their cameras to take their picture in front of the egg. So, we all got off and did the photo-op. I tell you, I have some amazing pictures from my racing days, but I still want an eight by ten glossy of this photo. There we’ll be, all proud in our matching jerseys. God, I can hardly wait!

The next really big event of the ride is the crossing of the Columbia River in Kelso. The bridge is the massive old arch bridge that has two lanes for traffic on it. On the two days of the STP, the State Patrol closes off one lane at intervals and the entire herd of riders that have been staged next to the bridge for a bit surge across the bridge in a mass. It looks really cool, at least until you’re in the herd, or if you are sitting at the traffic light in a long line of cars waiting for your turn to cross the river.