Caught in the Rain with a 25-year-old heartthrob at 48

a short piece of mostly fiction

I didn't have my first kiss until I was 16 years old, and at a Summer performing arts camp with a boy named Tim who played the trumpet. I was so shy that when he asked to kiss me, I stood there, immobile, face frozen, and with my feet rooted to the gravel driveway that led up to one of the practice room blocks. When his lips finally met mine, he gave the most chaste kiss imaginable. There was no tongue. I felt nothing, but when I returned to the cabin, it was as if my face announced in bright lights that I was no longer a girl who couldn't be kissed. I was now an experienced kisser!

Remember that one time at band camp?

In our entire relationship, which, as Summer romances go, lasted maybe a week and felt like a year, we took a few walks together and passed maybe 50 words between each other. Tim was the type of quiet guy whom I gravitated to. He wasn't showy. He was cute and looked smart - something about him seemed to convey the wisdom that comes from hard-earned life experience (as it turned out, he had suffered the loss of a sibling). I often fantasized that he had a rich inner monologue, tucked beneath layers of reticence, and so many thoughts waiting to be unleashed, that just needed me to untap the well from which personality would spring forth. Unfortunately, I wasn't that girl yet. I hadn't found my agency or my true self. It was the summer before my mom died, and I lived completely inside my head. I had whole conversations in my mind that never saw the light of day. It's a shame, too. Still, I did make a few great friends, real connections, and discovered the Indigo Girls—and a lifelong love of jogging.

Not Tim.

Tim went on to date a girl from my bunk the following Summer, and I totally understood why, yet I mourned for his rejection of me. She was my opp - brash and confident, lived life out loud, and he gravitated to that mirrorball like he never wanted to let go. Quiet meets Loud. Introverted people find extroverted ones, and they live happily ever after. Their relationship lasted most of the Summer, 8 whole weeks. And while I didn't want to date Tim and harbored no feelings for him at that point, I couldn't stop the comparing myself to his girlfriend. It was like mourning a version of myself that I could never be, and that this somehow made me less attractive and alluring to men.

Fast forward ten years…

Peek .COM /bubble was the Rick era

I met Rick on my third day working at an online dot-com startup, a full decade after that unremarkable yet unforgettable kiss from Tim. Rick had graduated from an Ivy League school and gave off quiet reflective, smoldering, and brooding, intellectual swagger mixed with the physique and face of an Iowa farm boy. I absorbed all these details, and while “easy on the eyes” was among our initial attractions, my main reasons for befriending him were largely cerebral.

We would talk about our lives, the people at work, and enjoy such an effortless, playful rapport with one another, which made the workday better and brighter. I’d be lying if I said Rick didn't turn me on with his persuasive charm and side winks (he was a walking “rizzler”), but when I wasn't with him, it was our deeper conversations that I thought about and not his tight abs and rippling triceps, or so I recall. Rick was safe for me because he had a girlfriend, and a gorgeous one at that, who was Pre-med, which meant we were work spouses at most and could never be more. Besides, despite protests from my work friends and the office gossip mill spinning tales to the contrary, Rick and I never consummated our connection. We never kissed. We hugged maybe a handful of times. We were soulmates in our 20s. Think Pam and Jim from “The Office,” only if they never got together and the sexual tension wasn't quite as thick.

Not quite combat boots but close enough

And yet, looking back, there were times when I was convinced we were in denial, or both of us were trying to avoid something that was inevitably growing between us. We had a third friend, another guy, whom we'd sometimes ask to go for walks with us. I sensed that we both did this when we felt the need for a buffer. Things got too real, too intimate, and the presence of this third body diffused that charge. Our interloper would walk between us, serving as a physical barrier that prevented direct connection. It was almost as if both Rick and I agreed to some unspoken oath, avoiding all eye contact with one another, rendering touch impossible across a human shield.

One day, desperate to escape our newsroom-style workplace setting, which offered zero privacy, Rick and I went out for one of our regular lunch walks under ominous skies. It was still Summer, and the crackling of thunder could be heard. Rain would not be far off. We should have turned back, and yet we both needed this time together. Our silence communicated what words couldn't. There was no turning back. Even the threat of perishing by getting hit by lightning couldn’t deter us.

Rick was wearing his standard work uniform: a Hanes white T-shirt, black cargo pants, and a belt, accompanied by combat boots. He smelled like Irish Spring bar soap, along with a unique blend of his natural scent. I must have been close enough to him to sense this, but I can’t recall being that physically close. I was in a tank top and jeans with a cardigan. As we walked, I noticed that the droplets falling from the sky were making Rick’s shirt increasingly transparent. His chest hair now visible, and his nipples erect, I turned toward him and looked up at his face. It was cocked up, looking toward the sky and he was smiling with joy and pleasure beaming from ear to ear. I wanted to say something to break the mood. I suddenly became self-conscious, which caused me to notice his breathing patterns even more acutely, along with the steam rising from the sidewalk, which the cool rain brought as relief and release from the heat.

“Rick, I think we should head back.”

No response. Rick looks at me as if seeing me for the first time. His eyes twinkle, and his dimple appears. There's magic. He’s holding my gaze.

“Ok, Rick, I’m going to head back.”

A hand reaches for mine, inviting me to share this moment, this experience with him, but it makes me uncomfortable, I suddenly realize. What is he doing? Changing this for us. This playful and fun relationship, trying to make it into something more. I’m not ready. I can’t. He can’t. We won’t. It can never.

“Let me know when you’re done being weird so we can head back. I’ve got a mountain of work.”

The flicker of regret flashes for a single moment before Rick assumes his hot and sarcastic smart guy exterior. The spell is broken.

“Yes, boss. I’m ready. Let’s head back.”