Overtaken

Felix

Felix rides his bike east on Mainzer Landstraße and reaches the light at Güterplatz just as it turns red. It has rained for most of the day. The evening is gray and mild, the bike lane still wet under his tires. Beside him, the cars headed for the city center idle in their lanes. On the far side of the crossing, a tram rings its bell.

This afternoon his department head, Bernd Lorenz, called all his teams into the big meeting room and gave a presentation. Felix has been replaying it all the way down from his office at the fairgrounds. The visitor registration and the trade fair app, the system he has helped build and keep running for years, will be replaced. An outside firm will build the new one. Felix and his colleagues learned it from a slide, at the same moment as the other teams.

Most evenings the ride to the station clears his head. Today it doesn’t. Waiting for green, he looks down at the front gears of his road bike. It is nearly ten years old, a dark green aluminum frame with drop handlebars and thin tires, bought new with the money from his first student job and looked after well. Only the shifting on those gears has been sloppy for weeks, and he keeps meaning to fix it.

The light turns green. As Felix pushes off, in no hurry today, a slim white road bike sweeps past him on his left, so close that the rush of air brushes his arm.

The rider is a young woman, bent low, her hands down in the curve of the handlebar. She wears a gray sweater and a short black skirt that ends well above her knees. Her light brown hair lifts in the wind and waves out behind her shoulders. With every hard, even push of the pedals the skirt rides higher, until the wind catches the hem. For a second he sees the top of her stocking, a band of black lace around her thigh and a strip of bare skin above it, and his mouth goes dry before the hem falls back.

She rides through the evening traffic fast and low and completely at ease, as if a skirt and stockings were the obvious clothes to race a bike in.

At the junction she glances back over her left shoulder, swings out an arm and cuts across the lane into Hohenstaufenstraße. For half a second he has her face, the cheeks flushed from riding, a straight nose under dark eyebrows, her lips parted for breath. Her glance slides past him to the cars before she rides away up the street.

He wants more than another look at the lace. He wants to see that face again. Felix rises out of the saddle and drives the pedals down hard. As the bike picks up speed, he shifts to the big gear. The chain jumps off and leaves the pedal slack under his foot.

He coasts to the curb. “Shit.” He swings his leg over the saddle. “Shit, shit, shit. Why now?”

Crouched by the bike, he works the chain back onto the gear with his fingers. He straightens and looks for her among the cars of the evening rush hour. She is gone.

He stands at the curb with black fingers, angry at the shifting he never fixed, at himself, at the whole day.

On the regional train to Darmstadt he stands in the bike area, one hand on the saddle so the wheels don’t roll, and scrapes at the black under his nails with his thumbnail. The grease stays. Outside the window the fields turn blue in the dusk. He tries to call up her face and gets only pieces, a flushed cheek, the dark eyebrows. He can remember the lace in every detail.

That night in bed he lets the wind lift her skirt higher than it really did, all the way up to her hip. In his picture she brakes at the junction and looks back over her shoulder, at him this time and not at the cars. She swings off the bike as easily as she rides and undresses for him, looking straight at him, the gray sweater first and then the skirt. She leaves the stockings on. He imagines taking her like that, the lace rubbing against his hips with every thrust, and strokes his cock to the same rhythm until he cannot hold back any longer. He comes fast, breathing hard into the quiet bedroom, and lies there afterward a little embarrassed and not sorry at all.

The next morning Jens, the other senior developer on the team, leans around the monitor between their desks. “Did you see the mail? The new firm is presenting next Thursday. Ten o’clock, the big room, and we’re all invited.”

“To clap for them?”

“To ask clever questions, apparently.”

Felix laughs, because the alternative is to swear again.

Jens lowers his voice. “Has management said anything to you about what happens to us afterward? It would be nice to know whether they’re going to fire us.”

“Nobody has told me anything either. We could ask on Thursday, in front of everyone.”

“Now that’s a clever question.” Jens drops back behind his monitor.

Every now and then, between two meetings, the woman on the white bike crosses his mind.

That evening he leaves the office at the time he left on Tuesday. The chance of meeting her again at the same traffic light at the same minute is close to zero, and he knows it. He likes imagining it, though, so on Thursday he does it again. At Güterplatz he checks every road bike that pulls up behind him and every rider with light brown hair. Twice he turns his head too fast and finds someone else, once a student with a ponytail, once a woman of fifty on a city bike with a basket. He feels a little ridiculous.

On Friday most of the team has gone home by four. Felix leaves a bit earlier than usual, too.

Brakes hiss behind him at the red light at Güterplatz. A white road bike rolls up on his left and stops half a wheel ahead, its rider putting a foot down on the painted line between the bike lane and the cars. Her light brown hair lies loose over the collar of a short navy jacket, and the low sun, through the clouds for the first time in days, catches in it. Felix’s heart jumps as he recognizes her, even before he sees her face.

Today she wears wide trousers instead of the skirt, soft dark cloth falling loose to her ankles, the right leg held away from the chain by a reflective band. She sits upright this time, her shoulders relaxed, one hand resting on the brake lever. She looks as sure of herself in trousers as she did in the skirt.

Felix stares at her profile, the face he has tried all week to call up, an arm’s length away now. A few freckles cross her nose, and the corners of her wide mouth turn up even at rest. She is around his own age, he guesses.

She turns her head and catches him at it. She looks him over with dark brown eyes, from his face down to his bike and back, then smiles and gives him a small nod.

He nods back when she has already turned to the traffic light.

At green she pushes off, not racing this time, and turns left into Hohenstaufenstraße again. The station lies straight ahead, but Felix turns left after her.

He keeps well back, three or four cars between them, staying on the small front gear so the chain cannot jump off again. She rides up past the foot of Tower 185 and across Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage into the Westend, where the street turns quiet, with old apartment houses on both sides and bikes chained to the fences.

At the next corner he pictures telling this to anyone. A man on a bike follows a woman through the back streets because she smiled at him at a traffic light. He would not like that man.

He brakes at the corner and lets her go. She rides on to the end of the street, a navy jacket and light brown hair growing smaller, and rounds the corner out of sight.

Felix wheels the bike around and rides back down to Mainzer Landstraße and on to the station. Tuesday and now Friday at that traffic light was luck. On Monday he will leave the office at the usual time anyway.