By Any Other Name(12)

Ryan and I met in traffic. I love this, and not just because it gives me a lifetime fast pass out of tedious small talk at parties. (No one wants to hear about your awful commute, but if traffic be the food of love, play on!) I love it because the way I met Ryan feels like the way two characters in an epic love story might meet.

It was a steamy summer morning in Washington, D.C., about three years ago. I was in town for a conference. I’d left plenty of time to get from my Georgetown hotel to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, where I would speak on a panel about feminist romance. But a bus broke down on M Street, with my taxi directly behind it.

Ryan’s first sight of me was a stream of curse words flowing from the window of my taxi. He was on a vintage Triumph Bonneville motorcycle, idling next to me.

“In a hurry?” he said.

Looking back, I liked his voice right away: steady with a hint of teasing.

“I’m supposed to be at the convention center in negative five minutes.”

“Then you’d better hop on.”

I laughed, then really looked at him for the first time. I’ve always had a thing for bikers. It’s actually an item on my Ninety-Nine Things list. Not the greasy, aggressive kind. Think Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. Ryan fell squarely into the latter category. He was wearing a nice suit and shoes that gleamed with fresh polish. He had clean fingernails, sexy hands. Then he lifted the visor and I saw his eyes. I was a goner. Even if I’d needed a lift to Louisville, Ryan’s brown eyes would have gotten me out of that cab.

Check another item on my list.

“You can wear my helmet,” he said, like he knew he had me.

“I don’t normally do things like this,” I said, chucking a five at the cabbie and opening my door.

“Maybe we should make a habit of it,” he said. “I’m Ryan.”

“I’m Lanie.”

I put the helmet on as cars honked all around us. If I’d been with Meg or Rufus we’d have flipped them off en masse, but I stood there patiently as Ryan fastened the helmet’s clasp, feeling his fingers at my chin.

“Don’t worry about them,” he said close to my ear, nodding at the honkers. “In a few seconds they’ll all be in the rearview mirror.”



* * *





It’s ten-fifteen by the time I slip my key into the lock of my fifth-floor walk-up apartment. I’ve lived here for six years but have only had the place to myself for the past three, after my roommate moved to Boston, and I could finally (barely) cover the rent on my own. I hired a company to knock down the temporary wall in the living room that had served as my roommate’s old room, and restored the apartment to its one-bedroom glory.

Tonight, when I open the door, a blast of heat engulfs me. I throw up my hands to ward off flames. I sniff for smoke, but all I get is Vito’s garlic knots.

I step inside, and there is Ryan in my kitchen, shirtless and half-submerged in a heap of hoses and hardware, which looks like it used to be my dishwasher. At the sound of my boots, his head pops up, and he gives me the wide grin that makes my dry cleaner fan herself with her pad of receipts.

Ryan played tennis at Princeton, so if you’ve seen Nadal change shirts after a match, the comparison would not be hyperbolic. His muscles are so defined they have etymologies.

I’ve never been drawn to muscles before, but on Ryan, it’s part of the whole package. He’s solid inside and out. He’s the youngest LD on Capitol Hill, leader of his local Big Brothers program, captain of the intramural soccer team, and he happily offers to babysit his niece and nephew. He has never—not once in three years—not called me when he said he would, nor left me to wonder about his intentions. When he wants something, he gets it. In that way, we’re alike.

Ryan has presidential aspirations. Legitimate ones. When he told me this on our fifth date, laying out the path for the next twenty years of his professional life as we sat at the ceviche bar on West Fourth, it startled me, but then I figured Michelle probably wasn’t troubleshooting how to be FLOTUS on her fifth date with Barack, so I might as well enjoy my scallops and take life as it came.

“Hi, honey,” he says.

“Don’t move a muscle.” I reach for my phone to document this. “How have we never done a Christmaskuh card showcasing your abs? ‘Give me a pec under the mistletoe’ in a brushed script font. Or, if you turned around, we could do ‘Lats of love this holiday season.’”

“Awful.” Ryan laughs, his brown eyes crinkling, his Greek-statue triceps flexing as he twists my cheap wrench. He rises and comes to me, lifting me threshold-crossing style. We kiss. “But if it’s a holiday card, we’re supposed to be together.”

“But then I’d block your twenty-four-pack.”

“People would still know it’s there,” he says and kisses me again.

I tap his chest. “By any chance, is there something besides your bod making it so ungodly hot in here?”

Ryan sets me down, leans handsomely against the stove and tucks his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“I always want bad news first,” I say, setting down my many tote bags. I leave the house with one and somehow manage to come home every day with four. “What kind of person can absorb good news knowing bad news lurks around the corner?”