Rediscovering Rebecca

Her gaze was lost in the gas flames licking at the ceramic logs in the pit, and she seemed to speak from a distance. My gaze was locked on her, studying her face, her mood, trying to intuit what she left unspoken, just beneath the surface. I let several long, silent seconds pass.

"But?" I said. She flashed me a faint smile.

"But... in spite of all this, in spite of Philip, in spite of the grandkids, there's a piece of me that I left back in 2012, before that night in April, something I keep trying to get back but is just out of reach. What I want back is the me who was less afraid, who laughed easier, worried less, slept better," she said.

"I can't even identify what it is that I am looking for or that I'd know it if I saw it. So much turbulence in my life then with leaving the only profession I knew, our relationship as it was developing at that time, that nightmare of a night, then our..." she paused, looked downward and exhaled, "... me driving you away."

I gently took her hand.

"Becky, do not blame yourself," I said. When her head raised and she looked at me, I could see tears clouding her eyes. "I had your phone number and I could have and should have been more persistent in seeing about you. Before I knew it, the time and the silence and the distance took on a life of its own and it seemed... too late. A horrible event that altered so many lives changed ours.

She kept looking at me even though she wanted to hide the tears that had begun to spill down her face. Her jaw began to quiver as her resolve to control her emotions in front of me crumbled and then collapsed. She pressed her face into my gray, flannel shirt and the blue poplin windbreaker I wore over it and sobbed openly, just as she had in our hotel suite after she had scrubbed her skin raw in the scalding shower after the crash. I put both arms around her and pulled her tight to me. With one hand, I slowly caressed the silky, silvery hair that spilled over her shoulders and across my chest. I planted soft kisses on the top of her scalp.

"I'm so sorry, Rick," she sputtered between sobs.

"Beck, I'm sorry too. Have been for many years," I said, emotion now clutching at my words as I spoke. "Not a day passed over these last 11 years when, in some way, I don't think of you... of what we had and what might have been had I shown more guts and perseverance."

We kept our seat on the pergola porch swing for nearly an hour, saying nothing. Scarcely moving. Softly crying in each other's embrace for most of that time, releasing a decade of mutual sorrow and absence and disappointment. We momentarily fell asleep together before my head drooped and my chin brushed her forehead.

We woke in the deepening nighttime chill, making its bite known despite the radiant fire a few feet away and the shared warmth where Becky's recumbent form rested against mine.

"Oh my, how long have we been asleep?" she said.

I shifted my left arm to see my watch. "Says here it's 10 o'clock," I said.

"I guess we better shut this down for the night, huh?" Becky said, stretching as she sat upright, her legs still curled beneath her.

"Yeah, but it's a shame. Except for the temperatures reminding us it's not really spring yet, this is pretty close to perfect," I said.

The phrase evoked a pleasant memory in both of us as soon as I uttered it. Becky flashed a grin.

"Wasn't that my line?" she said. We both recalled that she said words almost identical one afternoon as we sat on a bench at a mountain overlook with a view of the Shenandoah Valley during a hike along the Appalachian Trail many years earlier. It led to our first romantic kiss.

"I believe it was," I said. "And I believe, if I may reinterpret what I said, 'a beautiful evening, beautiful surroundings and my arm around the most beautiful, wonderful girl.'"

"Close enough," she whispered as we pulled each other closer and our lips slowly, tentatively brushed together before we fell into a tender, searching, lingering kiss that carried the pent-up energy of 11 lost years. She held me tightly to her as my arms pressed her lithe body against mine.

The emotional yield of this kiss was stunning in its power, but it shouldn't have come as any surprise. As I had just told her, every day -- even during the most torrid phase of my protracted tryst with Denise --my thoughts wandered back to Becky.

Whatever Becky and I had never went away: Not during the emotional and psychological torment she endured from that hellish night in the gruesome charnel house of an overturned bus; not during my uncertainty, fear and spinelessness that paralyzed what should have been an unflagging outreach to her. Whatever it was -- a once-in-a-lifetime friendship? unspoken love? -- never died, never left us. It had been hibernating. Now, it was awakened and it was hungry.

I could feel it burning in my core and radiating through every corner of my being, this unequivocal and unquenchable need to integrate this missing and rediscovered essential person, this complementary part of my spirit, back into my life. So I clutched her as desperately as a drowning person would a buoy.

"God in heaven, I missed you so much, Becky," I said in a moment we took to breathe. "Whatever should challenge us, I swear to you here and now that I will never again part from you."

"And I will never ever give up on us," she said, kissing my chin lightly.

Then she fixed her eyes on mine. "That's a promise. I wanted to look you in the eyes when I said it. I want you to see for yourself I mean it."

I saw it. But I already knew it. It was a commitment our hearts had communicated wordlessly in the moments when our energies were focused on this remarkable, redemptive, restorative kiss. That truth burned within us.

▼▼▼

As passionate and transcendent as the porch swing moment by the fire pit had been as well as another sweet, lingering kiss at her front door as I bade goodnight, it didn't strike me as odd that it didn't turn erotic until I was back home. The first romantic, physical contact I'd had with a woman in more than two years, and not even a chubby. There was no pawing at breasts or furtive caress of a soft thigh.

Is something wrong with me? I wondered. Have my carnal desires succumbed to age? Will I ever satisfy a lover -- Becky? -- going forward?

Forming those thoughts into questions left me feeling guilty. I knew that this night was about a deep yearning of the soul and the soul's jubilation at the restoration of something dear that it feared was lost, even as the soul kept its longing secret from the conscious mind. Or maybe it was a truth incompatible with and banished from the conscious, waking mind until it grows too big and powerful the way floodwaters overtop and breach a levee.

What had happened Saturday between Becky and me on that porch swing was closer to worship than something carnal and libidinous. Yet now, alone in my bed as sleep tugged at me in Sunday's wee hours, I was left to wonder when our physical needs would assert themselves and, when they did, whether I would be emotionally or physiologically equal to the moment.

The answer came in a dream, which is rare because I can seldom recall the plays my subconscious performs in my sleeping brain. In it, Becky and I were strolling again along the beach near my house as we had the night an impromptu groping session as we stood in shallow water had inspired a conspicuous protrusion in my swim trunks. In the dream, however, neither of us were clothed. We saw an empty sailboat that had was waiting nearby on the shore and we climbed in. And as the winds guided us out into the Bay beneath a bright full moon and we reclined on the deck of the vessel, she climbed astride me and, for the first time, I was within her. We began rocking in the slow, comfortable tempo of the waves during a moment of sublime unity. And then I was awake, but rather than vanishing into the darkness, the images remained vivid.

Inside the baggy basketball shorts I favored for sleep, I sensed heavy arousal and the stiffest erection I had known in years. I closed my eyes to keep the dream image of Becky alive and touched the head of my straining dick. It had not softened, and the clear, viscous fluid that was beading at its opening had already left a trail in my shorts.

"Oh, please," I said, teasing myself further as I imagined intimacy with Becky. My mind flashed to the night in the Goochland Drive-In when I lay on my back and she mounted me, grinding the increasingly wet crotch panel of her panties into the lump my fully erect dick had made in my blue jeans. The climax that resulted for her was the only one either of us has experienced since our introduction 13 years ago.

I ran my palm, slick with my own precum, over the underside of my penis pressed against my lower abdomen, emulating both the pressure and tempo I recalled from that night, but my mind's eye was doing all it could to see the abandon in her face as lust overcame her and pushed her toward orgasm, and the beauty of her breasts and their tight, pink nipples as they hardened and swayed in time with her heaving hips. That's when I recognized I had passed the point of no return, and that the orgasm that had eluded me for nearly two years, since intimacy with Denise ended, was now imminent.

In my memory, I could see Becky as she crested and her hips drove her covered mound into me. I felt the tingling, hot pressure gathering in my loins and ready now for a long-overdue release. My hips lurched upward as wet warmth spewed across my navel, onto my stomach and as far as the sparse hair of my chest. Again and again, with surprising force, my semen streamed onto me, some of it pooling and the rest cascading off my sides onto the bedsheets, until at last my swollen glans was too sensitive for any further contact.

A 65-year-old man had just brought himself to orgasm... and was proud of it. For one thing, it developed organically, from a dream and treasured memories of actual past joys, without the need for disgusting videos or the artifice of a Fleshlight. For another, it provided at least momentary assurance that I was still capable of a robust sexual response in the right context, something essential to the fragile male ego. Finally, it assured me that my poor prostate need not be in straits as dire as Dr. Sujit implied.

A sense of immense relief and languor washed over me, so much that I decided not to trudge to the bathroom and towel off my copious ejaculate. These sheets are overdue for a change anyway, and I'll just shower the crust off tomorrow, I told myself. And then I'm calling Becky.

► Over Par at Sleepy Hole

Becky answered the call on the hands-free, Bluetooth system in her Volvo on a cloudless Sunday morning.

"I'm driving to church right now. Where are you?" she said.

"Home. Sipping coffee. Wondering what plans you had for the day," I said.

"Well, I had a 2:30 tee time at Sleepy Hole, but one of the girls dropped out of the foursome Friday, so I'm debating whether to play with just Sheryl and Amy or bag it altogether," Becky said.

Sleepy Hole in Suffolk, about 20 miles to the west of Norfolk, was one perhaps the top-rated public golf course in Hampton Roads. But still in the first quarter of the year and not fully free of winter's grasp, the lush Bermuda grass that would cover it later in the year would be thin and the course would play fast.

"Well, if you could find a fourth but the fourth was a guy, do you think that would work?" I asked.

"Depends on the guy," she said.

"Well, it's somebody who's definitely not going to embarrass you and the two other ladies. You should know that because you used to kick his ass regularly, even on that same course, and sometimes by a half-dozen strokes or more," I said.

"I don't know, you might have worked on your skills over the past decade. How do I know I'm not getting hustled by a ringer?" she said, evoking outright laughter on my part.

"Becky, I haven't picked up a club in more than a year other than to go to the driving range a time or two. If you've been playing any golf at all, you'll humiliate me. Again," I said.

"OK, I'm in the church parking lot now. I'll text Sheryl and Amy and see if they're OK with it and circle back after the service."

Not two minutes after noon, she called. The other ladies, both with handicaps as low as Becky's, agreed to allow a guy to play "as long as I assured them he wasn't like a PGA professional."

She reminded me I had met Sheryl with her long-ago former boyfriend at a Norfolk Tides baseball game many years ago at Harbor Park, one of minor league baseball's more scenic venues. Amy was a come-here from Connecticut who took over as the CPA in charge of the Virginia Beach office of a national accounting firm. I agreed to meet them at the course, giving me enough time to toss my clubs in the Range Rover and get there early enough to hit a bucket of practice balls before they arrived.

The problem with a Sunday afternoon tee time at a public course is there's no time to tarry and socialize. Serious golfers who would tee off 10 minutes later would be bearing down on poky foursomes and, if they were guys, felt no need to be nice about it, even (especially?) with ladies.

I started out en fuego, parring the first hole, coming tantalizingly close to an birdie before settling for par on the second, then sticking an eagle on 3. Sheryl and Amy trailed by three strokes at that point, and Becky was two strokes back. They were giving me and even Becky the stink-eye as we reached the fourth tee. That's when Amy hit a towering drive directly down the fairway for 150 yards and Sheryl did much the same, beating Amy's drive by what appeared to be an additional 50 feet. Becky addressed the ball and made good contact with her 2-wood, but it took a low trajectory and barely cleared 100 yards.

Golf is a humbling sport, one that can quickly punish the prideful. I strutted to the tee box, ripped a couple of practice swings and flexed as I addressed the ball. Having just holed an eagle, I was feeling pretty good about continuing to teach the ladies a lesson on this par 4 hole with a green that wore a U-shaped sand trap on three sides like an open collar. I made good contact and the ball, out-distanced Sheryl's by perhaps 30 yards, but it took on a leftward draw as it reached its zenith and its descent and it wound up in the rough.

The women made conservative shots that left them with an easy approach from the one direction in which the bunkers were not a threat. My ball, though closer, had a much higher angle of difficulty because of the location of the bunker and the depth of the grass at my lie. That's OK, I reasoned, I'd been in worse situations and gotten out of them because of my skill with the 5-iron, my favorite club.

And that's where I learned that testosterone is not your friend on the golf course. Makes you think you're better than you are, take unwise risks and cause things to go south in a hurry.

I got too much power and too little loft on my second shot and the ball skittered right across the green and imbedded itself in the sand on the far, downward slope of the bunker well beyond the pin, the worst possible location from which to wedge the ball back onto the green.

The women, meanwhile, were on the green in three strokes. Amy sank a 14-foot putt for par. Becky and Sheryl both carded a bogey. It took me two more shots just to get on the green and I finished with a humiliating triple bogey.

It was bad enough that I could hear Sheryl and Amy snickering as they walked back to their cart. What really emasculated me was hearing Becky give up trying to restrain her laughter and chortle freely as she drove our cart to the fifth tee.

Frustration turned into self-consciousness and the wheels came off my game. The leader at the turn was Amy at seven over par. Becky and Sheryl were tied for second, two strokes behind her. I was bringing up the rear, 14 over par, six strokes behind Becky and Sheryl heading into the final nine.

I popped my second beer of the day after shanking my tee shot on 10 into the pines to the right of the fairway.

"What the hell. I'm just going to enjoy this beautiful day and being part of it with you," I said. "Just a game anyway."

She glanced my way with a mock pout on her face as she guided the cart down the asphalt path. "Poor baby. Tough on a boy's ego having these mean ol' girls beat you."

Becky had a point and knew it, but the humor she found in the situation made me laugh. I nodded. "Yep. I had that comin'," I said.

From that point, however, my game rebounded a bit. By letting all the pretense go, I relaxed and my swing and long game came back, though I remained a gorilla on the greens. By the time we finished 18, I remained in last place, but I had pulled to within two strokes of Becky, the third-place finisher. Sheryl took home the honors, finishing nine over par after a strong back nine. As we turned in the carts, the sun was just hiding itself behind the pines, its rays momentarily creating beautiful orange streaks that contended with the shadows to create a magical tiger-stripe effect on the still-dormant grass of the 18th fairway.

"This was fun. Thanks for letting me crash your foursome," I told Becky as we walked to our cars.

"Good having you here, though I think Amy, who's single, was eyeing you, thinking about hitting on you," she said.

"I'm sure she's nice, but no thanks. Not interested," I said. "What I am interested in some food. Did you have time to eat after church and before getting here?"

"A banana. That's it," she said.

"Ever been to the Twisted Pig in Portsmouth? It's on Highway 58 right on the way. Decent barbecue. I'm buying," I said.

"See you there," she said.

We chose a booth in a corner by a window looking out onto the asphalt parking lot and the highway beyond it. I demolished a plate of pork ribs while she tore into a barbecued chicken leg, coleslaw and beans. We both washed it down with a cold Coors.

"Becky, I don't want this to sound weird or anything, but I have been so at peace since reconnecting with you," I said. "The world feels right again."

She exhaled, smiled and nodded. "Me too, Rick."

"Is this our second chance? Is this the rare opportunity life gives us to get it right?" I said.

Becky was silent for longer than I would have wished as she assembled her thoughts exactly as she wanted to speak them.

"Rick, I am skeptical about close relationships. Maybe because so many have disintegrated: my marriage, Philip," she said, pausing again. "This is different. Life-changing external factors intervened and blew up what we had. The decision wasn't really ours. I hate that we drifted apart, but we weren't parted by what one or the other of us did."

She leaned forward and we clasped each other's hands.

"I don't think this is a do-over, Rick. I don't want to think of it that way. I think the answer was in our kiss last night. I've never felt anything that powerful and moving. But I've thought about it and I want to think of this as a resumption -- a resumption of something that fate delayed far too long," she said.

I kissed her hand.

"That kiss told the truth. That kiss realigned my life. I realized that I never again want to be without you."

I paused.

"OK, you haven't run away, so I guess you're not totally opposed," I said.

Her lips trembled. Her eyes searched mine.

"Oh, Rick. You see the truth is I... I love you," she said as a teardrop spilled from her cheek. She shrugged. "I love you."

I stood, scooted into the booth beside her, held her face gently in my hands and our eyes locked on each other's for a long moment. "Let me respond with this truth," I said.