Triptych
Thirty-eight
IT WAS AN INTENSE TWO WEEKS getting to Opens. After that incredible birthday party, when Kate joined us in the big bed, we spent Sunday drifting in and out of the bedroom, getting food, presents, and drifting back to bed. It was such a dream. Kate was… just Kate. Every time I thought of her, my eyes started to water.
But Monday morning, three of the four of us had to go to school. I had to go first since I had that god-awful seven-thirty Human Anatomy course. Not that anatomy is awful for me. I’m pretty good at it. But who gets up at that hour?
When I woke up to the screeching alarm on my cell phone, it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed. My three unbelievable lovers rolled together and held each other as if I’d never been in the bed at all. My sweet, frisky playmate, Melody. My toned and muscular partner, Lissa. My… my? Oh my! Sweet Kitten. I don’t know what you are yet, but you are so important to us!
I figured my best bet at seeing my lovers awake before I left for school was to make coffee. I took a last look from the bedroom doorway and then headed to the kitchen.
Wendy handed me a cup of coffee when I walked into the kitchen.
“Wow!” I said. “I wasn’t expecting this. Thank you.”
“I thought I’d try to extend your birthday a little.”
“You’re sweet, Wendy. I need to make coffee for the other women in my life, okay?”
“Can I help? I’ve got the knack of this new machine down pretty well.” In fact, she was making better coffee with the fancy espresso maker than I was.
“Wendy, you know how much I appreciate all your help?”
“You do?”
“I do. But you aren’t a servant here. Why don’t you make your cup and then I’ll make coffee for the girls.”
“I couldn’t, Tony. Not before they have theirs.”
“They are still asleep and will wait until I bring their coffee before they wake up. I’ve got twenty minutes before I have to leave. That’s plenty of time for you to have a cup of coffee with me.”
She smiled and shook her tiger-striped locks as she made coffee. As much as I wanted to get back to my lovers, I sensed it was important to take a little time with Wendy. She was still awfully vulnerable.
“Was it good?” she whispered.
“You make much better coffee than I do,” I answered.
“I meant… you know… with Kate?”
“Oh! Um… yes,” I said. “I really don’t know what to say, Wendy. We don’t talk a lot about what goes on…”
“It was dreamy. Every time I heard one of you scream out, I came. I couldn’t take my hands out of my panties the entire last thirty hours. So beautiful.”
“I’m sorry if we disturbed you. We should have been more considerate.”
“It’s your house. And it was beautiful. She’s beautiful.”
Now I was beginning to get it. I think Wendy had a crush on Kate. Well, who could blame her?
“Maybe we should make their coffee and go wake them up before I have to leave for school,” I said. She grinned at me and started turning out three more cups of perfect espresso, just the way the girls each liked theirs.
School was good. Hell, that’s new! Bree plopped down next to me in Human Anatomy, glanced over at me and got an incredibly smug look on her face. She actually snorted.
“What?”
“You, birthday boy.”
“What about me?”
She shook her head, looked at me and just grinned again.
“Shh,” she said. “Doctor Dennis is here.”
That’s all it took. As soon as Dennis entered the room we were off at a pace of about a hundred miles an hour and I was scribbling down notes as fast as I could. I mean, I’m pretty damn good at human anatomy, but he was hitting it at a whole new level. This was not going to be the breeze I thought it would.
An hour and forty-five minutes into the lecture—just five minutes before the end of class—he stopped abruptly.
“Now! If you thoroughly understand everything that I’ve said in the past two hours, know and understand it all, you may stay after class and take the final exam. I’ve just given you the quarter in two hours. If you don’t think you’d do well on the final today, then I’ll expect you ready to go to work tomorrow morning. We’ll take things at a slower pace, but it will still require your complete attention. If you can’t live with that, pick up a pink slip at the front of the class and go withdraw. The class is over-booked. Dismissed.” With that, he closed his notes and walked out of the room. We were stunned. When people left the classroom, I saw several pick up pink withdrawal slips.
“Well, that was exciting,” I said.
“I’m depending on you to get me through it,” Bree said. “Come on. I’ll introduce you to Coach Fredericks. He’s your Sports Conditioning instructor.”
“Don’t you have a class to get to?”
“No. My next class is eleven-thirty. I won’t be able to walk you to your Lit class. Think you can find it?”
“That’s one thing Rick and June made sure they did with our cohort. They walked us to each professor’s class that we had on our schedules. I can find it.”
Bree introduced me to Coach Fredericks, a guy who was scarcely older than we were. I guess ‘coach’ is a term like professor. You use it for any instructor until you find out different. He wasn’t a coach of a team, but was one of the guys I’d seen around the physical therapy room. He had sandy hair and as soon as Bree had finished introductions he led me into the gym.
“So, Tony, I understand you’ve been doing conditioning at the racquet club. We’ll be taking over that part of your routine except for the Saturday Pilates that you’ll continue to do there. So we’re not really adding anything to your schedule here. I’ve gone over the notes on your training with John Gilbert and Coach Jacobson. Twice a week, I want you to work weights, but we’re taking the approach of long and lean, not bulky. A lot of reps with lighter weights and every muscle will work with its opposite. If you work on pulling, you’ll work on pushing. Everything in balance.”
He had a clipboard with my expected routine mapped out on a thick pad, one page per day. We headed toward a row of aerobic machines, but he didn’t have me get on any of them.
“Weights on Tuesday and aerobic machines on Wednesday. Mostly your workouts on the court are going to take care of aerobics. But that brings us to Monday and Thursday.” He paused and grinned at me. “Once we get set up, you’ll do your Tuesday and Wednesday routines alone. Just fill out your record on the workout sheets I’ve prepared for you. But Monday and Thursday, you are mine.”
“Sure, Coach. What are we going to do?” I bit.
“Agility training. Also known as Parkour or just PK. I’m going to teach you how to move through obstacles, walk up walls, vault through tight spaces, and roll under your opponents. And you will maintain perfect balance throughout. When you’ve got the basics, we’ll drop the Wednesday aerobics and do PK three times a week. It wouldn’t surprise me if, when you find out how exhilarating it is, you start doing your own on the weekends or join a club. I’ve talked this over with Coach Jacobson and we’ve agreed that the best thing we can do for your racquetball game is to improve your speed and agility. What do you think?”
“I think speed and agility are good things. But my racquetball technique takes me into a zone where everything comes automatically,” I said.
“Which is exactly why we chose this discipline. It will add to your arsenal so your body will have more ways to react. After we get started, I’ll have you carry your racquet and periodically, I’ll throw a ball at you to hit toward a target. We’re really going to have fun. You game?”
“I’m game,” I agreed. “Just try not to injure me before Opens.”
“Not to worry. Just the basics for now. Let’s go.”
He led me to a room with a variety of obstacles. There were pillars a couple feet tall and eight inches across, a balance beam, a ramp, trampoline, stairs, a kids play tunnel about six feet long, and a hula hoop hanging in the middle of the room. It looked pretty bizarre. We walked the course first and he showed me what he wanted at each obstacle. He showed me the pattern he wanted and then said, “Okay, let’s see what you can do. Ready, set, go!” He clicked a stopwatch.
It took a long time. I was running—when I could—following the serpentine pattern marked out on the floor. The stairs led to a short jump to a pillar that I made without a problem. But I was on the wrong foot to make the jump to the next pillar and ended up falling off and having to climb back on. I crawled through the tunnel and figured out how to pull myself up on the balance beam. Walking it was another challenge. I hit the mat at the end of the beam before I figured out how to do a forward roll sort of thing through the hula hoop. I bounced once on the trampoline and almost missed the top of the steps, but managed to hold on. Finally, I ran down the steps and serpentine to the finish line. I was dizzy and breathing hard. It took nearly four minutes.
Coach handed me the clipboard and stopwatch.
“That was good,” he said. “You analyzed every obstacle and put a good strategy in place for meeting it. But that strategy isn’t good for anything if I move the obstacles around. It’s pattern memory. Your body has to be thinking three to ten steps ahead of the move you are executing. Say ready, set, go and click the stop watch.”
I did as instructed and watched in awe as he flew over the course. I mean flew. I swear his feet never touched the floor. He took all four steps in a single move, launched to the first pillar and then bounced up to the balance beam. He didn’t walk the beam; he did a forward roll and launched himself off the end of the beam through the hoop. He hit the trampoline, planted just the toes of his right foot on the top step and made a single leap to the finish line. Forty-five seconds.
“Wow! That was so cool!”
“The obstacles will never be placed in the same position,” Coach explained. “You’ll always have to make the decision on the move. Just like you do in racquetball.”
This was going to be fun!
The best part of Critical Reading was that it was only an hour long. But the first class was followed immediately by Critical Reading Lab for another fifty minutes twice a week. Professor Strait warned us that we were going to have to read a lot this quarter, and once I looked at the full syllabus, I was almost overwhelmed. The lab focuses on reading skills so we can improve our reading speed and pick out salient details on the fly. It’s obvious that I’m going to need that lab.
Of course, the fact that Rio sat next to me in both classes certainly lightened the burden a little. I think she’s a faster reader than I am already, so we’ll be doing a lot of discussing the works we’re reading. She wanted to sit and talk after class, but I had to get to the club for my two o’clock court time with Lissa.
What a disaster! It seemed like neither of us could even hit the ball. I kept trying to apply things I learned in my sports conditioning session, but nearly killed myself. Lissa was a little frustrated, too. Now that Melody and I were both in school, all the business management was on her shoulders and she was on the phone all morning with the management of the Opens. Since it’s a sponsored event and Gearbox is the official clothing sponsor, having our clothing there is creating problems. They’ve agreed that there is a section of the lobby where unofficial vendors can exhibit, but they’re trying to make it really expensive. Geez!
Regardless, we were both so frustrated with our game that by four o’clock, when we went home, we were hardly speaking to each other.
“Tony, we have to talk,” Lissa said as I sat in the recliner with my nose in a book.
I looked up.
“Not for long,” she continued. “I know you’ve got homework.” I closed my book.
“I’m sorry,” I said, holding out my arms to her. “It was a frustrating practice and a crazy day. I didn’t mean to take it out on you on the court.”
She curled up in my lap and gave me a long, gentle kiss.
“I know, love,” she said. “I wanted to say the same thing to you. Don’t let practice get you down, darling. We’re going to be okay. We work hard and it’s normal to have an off day now and then.”
“I don’t want to let you down, Liss. I feel terrible that I was trying new things when I didn’t even know what I was doing.”
“That’s what practice is for.” She kissed me again. “But maybe not two weeks before Opens. Let’s focus on the game we know and take it to the next level for competition. I think your training is going to do wonders for your game, but you can’t expect it to change overnight. Or over lunch, as the case may be.”
“I’m struggling already, Lissa,” I confessed. I buried my face in her neck and felt her hand on the back of my head pulling me to her. “First day of class and I have so much reading to do I won’t be done before midnight. Thank heavens Professor Strait gave me the first two papers to work when we met last month or I’d be out of there by now.”
“Are Rio and Bree going to help?”
“I think so. They were both really focused and seem like they just want to study. That’s a relief from Bree. I’m glad Rio is focused on studying, too. Like I have friends.”
“You have friends and you have lovers. I won’t delay you any longer. I’d like you to get your reading done and come to bed since I’ll be alone there until you join me.”
“What? When’s Melody coming home? And Kate?”
“I got a very mysterious call. Melody just said something had come up at school and she was working late and would crash in Kate’s room tonight. With Kate.”
“Those wanton little hellcats! I’ll bet Kate’s roommate is mysteriously missing tonight.”
“I think she’s going for one-on-one time with us now that she’s had us all,” Lissa laughed.
“Well, I could use a little one-on-one time, myself. Can you keep your hands to yourself if we take a hot tub together? I really need to read, but I’d love to be with you,” I said.
“I’ll run the water in half an hour. You read until I call you and then I promise not to disturb you while you read in the tub. But afterward…”
“Darling, afterward, I’m yours.”
I’d like to say the week got better. Ha! Tuesday I had 2D. I got a delicious kiss from Kate after class and we had a light dinner together, but I had to rush to the club for team practice at six-thirty.
Officially, we had five team members, plus Lissa as coach and Bree as team manager, and three or four more who were interested but couldn’t make all our practice times. Two of the other four players were women. Tall women. There was Tonya, who would be a part-time player when basketball season started. That would suck for the early spring, but she should be able to compete in the big end-of-season tournaments.
The other woman was Whitney, my Louisiana Bayou friend. She’d decided that since we didn’t have any classes together, she’d try racquetball. It turned out she was good, too. I worked with the guys, both of whom had played some before. So after a quick review of the basics, I had them play a match together so I could see how good they were.
Brent and Franklin were well-matched. They’re both juniors and six feet tall. Brent is a blond guy and a typical preppy, and Franklin is a black guy from the hood. It was actually funny to listen to them talk to each other. It’s like they’re from different countries and don’t speak the same language. But I saw something else that I really liked. They learned from each other. When one tried something, the other tried it, too. They coordinated.
Lissa worked with Whitney, Bree, and Tonya, all of whom needed instruction from the ground up. Bree knew most about the game because she’d been studying it for a few months. Tonya decided to join the team before school was out last spring, so she’d read up on the rules, but hadn’t had an opportunity to play yet. Whitney had basically never heard of racquetball before SCU. She was some kind of track star.
Lissa started them with lob serves. Five each. She’d point out places on the wall that they were to aim for and only got hit herself once or twice. From my vantage point outside the box, I was able to observe her and my pair at the same time.
The last half hour, Lissa and I had the team watch what it meant to be at an Open level or elite player. We did much better than the previous day. Not only did it give the rest of the team an idea of what they could shoot for, but it made us feel better about working together. John had lined up a men’s doubles team for us to practice with the next day. It was good to get our confidence back.
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