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I took a nap in the afternoon, and was awakened by a text message from Эриска. She had apparently been waiting at home for me to show up. She'd been off work since 3:00pm. I quickly showered and dressed, then picked up the bag of curry supplies that Шеррила had very thoughtfully assembled for me, and was out the door.

Finding the place was no problem, but when I got there I realized I didn't know what apartment number she was in, so I stood outside and tried to call Эриска, but got no answer. Eventually she sent me a text saying she was on hold with AT&T - had been for half an hour - and that she'd come down immediately to locate me. A few minutes later she led me up to her place on the fourth floor.

She ranted about her frustration with the phone company, then gave me a friendly hug. I got a quick look around her apartment, which was pretty well furnished considering that she'd just arrived on the West Coast a few seasons ago. The kitchen had granite countertops and a good-sized sink, and I expressed my envy. Then we got right down to cooking. She had eaten a handful of Oreos earlier in the day while waiting for me, and nothing else since lunch at the office.

We talked about frivolous things. Tastes in music. She played me something that a friend's band had sent her. New-wave punk-pop, by the sound. The band was called "The Harvey Cartel". Then Yann Tiersen came on and we discussed the movie Amelie briefly. I chopped vegetables and started the protein frying, and she cleaned things and moved them around. Her sous-chef skills were pretty good.

I found myself too focused on the food preparation to come up with genuine conversation topics, so I just threw casual words around. We traded stories about college radio. I remembered she had done an admission interview with a local college, and asked how it went.

"Oh, it went fine. I mean... I think it went fine. I need to file a report about it soon." Her work was financing the classes and there was some kind of hoop to jump through.

We chopped potatoes for a while. I asked her what she bought at the sports store the other day.

"I managed to escape after buying only a few things!" she laughed.

"Oh yeah?"

"I got some biking shorts that didn't look ridiculous, and this pair of pants." She turned and pointed down at her own ass, and since it was an invitation I took a nice long look at it. It stuck out like the rim of a coffee table.

While the curry was simmering she took me on a more detailed tour of the house. She told me about some photos perched on her piano, showed me the futon upstairs in the loft, and showed off the bathroom with the toilet-mounted cat-box. Her cat was hiding somewhere. The last item was a chair she had painted as a high-school senior project, and we talked about the details in the artwork until the curry was done.

The curry turned out a bit bland, which frustrated me. I usually do much better with the flavor. The rice came out well, which was a miracle since her rice-cooker was known for making messes. She poured some sparkling cider into nice glasses, set her little table for two, and placed a centerpiece in the middle with a collection of thick candles. The playlist she put on was relaxing but not sleep-inducing. With the lights low it was very pleasant, and more than a little romantic, which I liked. We both dug into the curry with zeal.

The intimate setting made the talk more intimate. When the meal was finished we kept talking, moving the dishes to the sink and our bodies to the couch.

I learned about the internal basis for her religious views. I heard the story of her teenage life, which was quite convoluted. I heard about her time in therapy sessions, and some allusions to deeper trauma that she was presently unwilling to even summarize. It must have been very personal, and very harrowing. She told me about her bipolar mother, and her emancipation, and about the severe communication issues that she was still sorting through. She had opened the heavy trunk in her mind labeled "emotional stuff," and was handing me unsorted hunks of a tapestry that was quite large, and I struggled to lay the parts out and get a coherent picture, feeling a compulsion to dig deeper, to see as much as I could because I knew I had a rare opportunity.

I told her that I perceived she had clearly built some kind of fortress inside herself, and as far as I could tell, she seemed fairly comfortable in it -- but that looks could be deceiving.

She offered me some orange sorbet. We each got little bowls and sat back down at the dinner table. It was very cozy.

She told me about her adventure buying and carrying a machete in Honduras. About dressing up as a "typical Honduran" at a college party a year later, and being confronted by some 'chicas' about it, and the mortifying self-examination that had prompted. About being popular with the inter-building bus drivers at her work because she knew Spanish and could converse with them. True to our earlier time together, she asked me almost no questions, but I was okay with it even then, because I was finally hearing things that mattered to her.

In the back of my head I made a hilarious observation: Both our profiles on the dating site had been sex-forward, talking about how important physical intimacy was to us, but here we were making a long evening entirely out of words, and both okay with it. Or perhaps just following a course that was possible, instead of the one we charted for ourselves in private moments.

Perhaps with someone different - or someone who presented differently - an evening like this would have moved rapidly, from cuddling to kissing to naked shenanigans, with no reservation or doubt, just some basic negotiations. But something in me was curled back and waiting. I didn't think it was a perceived lack of trustworthiness. More an unfamiliarity with the process, maybe the whole concept, of becoming intimate with someone in a complicated situation like this. There were too many paths to choose, and being open to anything, I found myself unwilling to take one that would rule out the others. And so was she. We were at a crossroads with a tent and a camp stove.

So I had to ask myself: What was drawing me to her? Wasn't sex supposed to be the main motivation? Her coffee-table ass? If I were judging this the way I judged my past relationships, I'd say there was something in her nature I wanted in my life, and the sex was just part of it. It was confusing.

The cat came out, and we crooned over it for a while, then put our bowls away and cleaned the table. We talked about the evolutionary pressure humans put on cats, to create a cat that did not use its claws while being held, and about the way that cats can be taught pretty easily to hold back with their biting and clawing during play. Somewhere in the exchange my brain flip-flopped and it seemed we were talking about Эриска herself, metaphorically, and whether she knew how to be gentle when angry. The indirectness reminded me too much of those clever wheels-within-wheels flirty conversations I had as a young man in college dorms, so I pushed the metaphor away and made the topic explicit. She seemed pleasantly surprised by that, and gave a thoughtful answer.

It was getting late. She packed up some of the curry for me in a plastic tub, and as she was doing so she did a little "packing up the curry" interpretive dance, which I found very endearing. Even this basic evidence that she was having a good time was something she would never broadcast in public, and I knew it. She trusted me to relax. I felt relaxed as well, but I knew there was too much on my mind.

I mentioned to her that we should probably have our "talk" at some point, about the relationship paths we might choose, and that I'd done some writing to try and prompt the discussion. We gathered together on the couch, touching side-by-side in a cozy but still plausibly deniable way, and started that conversation. After only a few more minutes she became very drowsy, then hunched over on the edge of the couch complaining that she was cold, and for a few seconds it seemed very clear that I was supposed to hug her, or at least ask if I should. I deliberately ignored the hint, because I wanted us to talk first.

There were a few revelations: First, she'd had no idea that Шеррила and I had opened our relationship recently, and that she was among the first people we were experimenting with, at least on my side. She was under the impression I was a seasoned veteran in all this, and was shocked when I said I wasn't.

Second, I got a big chunk of the puzzle about her mixed signals. She confessed she was afraid of physical intimacy, and had worked around that in the past by constraining the depth of her relationships with the people that she became sexually intimate with. "I always put 'casual sex' in one category, and friends in the other category," she said. "And I build up a wall between them. That's basically been the way my sex life has worked, for as long as I can remember."

"Well," I said, "I see how that approach makes sense, based on the history you're shared. I also have to say 'good for you' for being able to recognize that and explain it. I think most of the people who operate that way don't even know it's what they're doing."

"But," I said, and shifted on the couch, still touching her from the side, "that sort of confines sex to casual sex, and that isn't the way I work. Well, not the way I work now. It was for a while in my 20's."

She nodded. And there it was: Our age difference, under a spotlight. This was the impasse I hadn't seen coming, but should have expected because we were ten years apart. Was I willing to try and help her forge an entirely new path into physical intimacy? It would be complicated and probably fail: She could freak out and pull away, or a Pandora's Box of trauma could spring open inside her and demons could possess our relationship.

This only occurred to me later -- weeks later. At the time, on the couch, I was just telling her where I was, and feeling a bit sad that we weren't in the same place. I was optimistic about future conversations, and seeing her again. But for now she needed to go to bed.

We hugged at the door, warmly and a bit carefully, and then I left, and searched the area for the elevator. She opened her apartment door to direct me, and I took the opportunity to hug her again. "Tell the Шеррила hello for me!", she said, and I said I would.

As I drove home I wondered what had just happened. Did Эриска need me to make the first move? I needed something more than a hint, to do that. Would it have been a good idea? What if we'd tumbled suddenly into bed, and then she called a stop to it because she didn't have the usual sense of emotional detachment? If I was going to get really physical with someone other than Шеррила I wanted a different start to it.

The first actual date I arranged on okCupid was with Эриска.  She sent me an unprompted message inviting me on a bike ride when she got back from a trip to New York. I never did ask why she clicked on my profile, but I assumed it was the photo of me on a bicycle.  I looked at her photos and instantly liked her. Small and strong, with pale skin, blond hair cropped short, and intense gray eyes, she seemed like a more athletic and butch version of Кэролин. We had fun chatting over the website console, covering light topics like travel and our careers. In a few days I got some SMS messages from her while I was on the bus home from work, saying she wanted to hang out that night. I proposed that we ride in San Jose Bike Party, and she agreed.

She arrived at the house early, and we wrestled her expensive bike from the trunk of her Subaru and put it together. She was even smaller in person than I'd expected, but every bit as good looking. I started to get a little bit of a "dirty old man" feeling, because she was ten years younger than me: 24 to my 34. What could her intentions be? I didn't want to ask because I didn't want the answer to seem so important, so I just rolled along.

Her cycling outfit was partly spandex, and gripped her legs and ass in a way that magnetized my eyeballs. Her bike was built for speed, and I sensed she was used to riding in a more competitive mode, but when we were moving in the huge Bike Party crowds she waited patiently for me to climb the hills on my recumbent, which I appreciated. The ride was more about us than the event. We kept a chatty conversation going, but it was surface-level stuff. More travel experiences and funny stories. I was having trouble with my own expectations: We had just met a few days ago and we needed to be friends, or at least friendly, before we even considered anything romantic, but all my friendships had started organically, almost always with people who shared the same wacky sense of humor. On the other hand all my romantic relationships had started because of an immediate sense of comfortable emotional intimacy. I wasn't finding either with Эриска so far, though I wanted to.

As we rode I got more of her story. She was born in South Dakota, and emancipated herself from her parents at the age of 16. I didn't ask for details on why. Since then she'd finished college with an engineering degree and done some traveling in South America, and repaired her relationship with her parents. It was good she hadn't deferred the reconciliation, because her father had recently died, at a relatively young age from a life-long battle with alcoholism.

She was new to this area and just scored a high-paying job, but didn't know if California was her style yet. For the first three months she rode her bike nine miles across the South Bay to her workplace, which she explained was why she looked more in-shape than her profile photos. I hadn't noticed a difference. As I listened to her and watched her face I read a strong current of masculinity. "I'll be surprised if she isn't at least bisexual, and mostly gay," I thought. "Is she just here to make a new friend? Maybe I should just ask her. On the other hand, we just met. Maybe she's trying to decide for herself."

A few times when we were merging with the crowds, she helped to remount the conversation by reminding me where I left off. I appreciated that. When we rode over a rough patch in the street she exclaimed, "ribbed for her pleasure!" That got a laugh from me.

I threw out a dozen flirtatious signals, but she let them fall into the cracks of the conversation.  We seemed to be steering towards friendship, and of course I felt conflicted because physically she was a knockout. As she maneuvered the bike with her strong, compact body, I widened my gaze and took in the people around her. She was getting a continuous stream of hungry looks from the men and women who pedaled close, which she ignored with a long-practiced ease. She was everyone's type, all the time.

She was used to being wary and frustrated by men, but I caught her broadcasting a genuine expression of warmth towards me, clearly in spite of herself - in spite of her own expectations - for a few moments when we stopped in silence and looked at each other. The shell around her was strong, but she did let it drift open during small moments.

By the end of the evening I had a working theory for what she was like. It was clear she had a large part of her emotional self closed off, and to be consistently close to her I would need to spend time teasing her open, across a dozen encounters. This effort would be entirely separate from any physical intimacy we might have: If she found me attractive, she would say so in short order, and we would fuck, but an actual emotional connection would be way harder. And it was optional for her. If I were a younger person with more patience, and actually single, I might fall for her and try to start something, but I'd been down that path a few times already and wasn't willing to walk it again. Better to share whatever warmth she might voluntarily broadcast and expect nothing more.

Eventually we peeled away from the crowd and rode back to my house, then disassembled her bike into her car. She had to get home and sleep, since she had to work early on Saturday, or so she said. The idea that she needed to have an excuse to avoid coming inside sailed past me: I had no intention of inviting her in on a first date. We hugged, and she tucked her head in towards my chest instead of out. She said we should hang out again, but the friend vibe was strong and we didn't make any immediate plans. It was hard to predict the future with her.

Over the next few weeks she came over to the house a few times, apparently to hang out with me and our other dinner guests. The first time she was friendly but didn't pay any special attention to me. The second time we went on a walk around the city together at night, wandering around City Hall and the nearby park. She had a physically competitive streak and we took turns seeing how long we could balance and hop across the rocks. The conversations were more natural, and we covered more of our intimate past. At long last, she told me that she actually was in a long-standing, long-distance relationship with another woman, who was still living back East. This relationship was so venerated that she used the term "wife", even though they didn't speak very often and had been living apart for quite some time. I didn't judge, but I was definitely curious at how it worked. It also helped explain why she felt comfortable walking into a potential polyamorous arrangement with me and Шеррила.

It was interesting comparing her to Шеррила. The fact that I was looking for a romantic companion to fit into an existing relationship was never far from my mind, and the question of what I wanted in someone I was dating could only be answered by comparing it to what I already had with Шеррила. In some cases, I wanted the same thing from a new person: Intimacy was top of that list, and a shared sense of humor. In other cases I was feeling more energized by differences. Эриска could be very sarcastic, and had the mind of an engineer more than an artist. She was bold with strangers and would slap you on the back like a fellow man. Emotional intimacy was hard for her, but it was fun to try. At the end of our long walk I told her I wanted to smooch her but wasn't sure where her boundaries were. She thought for a bit and said "I don't know either. I'm not sure if this is the path I want to walk right now. I hope you're okay with me not knowing." I said that was fine, and suggested cooking dinner at her house at some point. To my surprise she accepted.

The next day Шеррила and I had a long discussion about Эриска and how we wanted to play things. I made an exhaustive list of "rules" about our polyamorous dynamic, covering a bunch more scenarios that we hadn't considered months ago, and we combed them over, comparing it with one she'd written a while back. What if I spent a bunch of time dating someone, getting emotionally invested, and they decided it was friends-only? It was nice to have friends, but could I honestly make that transition? I didn't think I could. I decided I would pay less attention to Эриска, and if she couldn't make up her mind after the next date I would end things.

It was difficult territory to negotiate, because it involved an acknowledgement that we were both looking for something clearly beyond friendship with this polyamory exploration: We wanted sex with other people. To some unknowable but probably huge degree, sex was the point of it. Not just talking, not just buddies to go to events and throw dinner parties. Those other things didn't need a fraction of the negotiation and care we had to marshal. Could Эриска mesh with us long-term?