Fire Down Below (3 page)

***

“Why not send Ben an email or just
text him?” Declan asks. “And then if he doesn’t respond you can be assured that
he remembers all too clearly what an opinionated harpy you are.”

“Shut up,” I laugh. “Maybe you’re
right though.” I study the email address on Ben’s card and don’t know why I
keep thinking I have to call. “Thanks for the idea.”

He looks at me expectantly.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Thank you
Master
.”

He nods approvingly and gets up to
leave. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this Kate, but we are here to work. No
more daydreaming about old boyfriends.”

I roll my eyes, making sure he
sees me.

“That looked like it hurt.”

“Ouch, it did.”

“Are you going to send Ben an
email right now?”

I nod.

“All right, I’ll leave you to it.
Let me know what happens.”

When he leaves I open a new mail
message and begin typing.

From: 
Kate Alexander

To: 
Ben Mathews

Subject:
Hey!

Hi
Ben,

How
are you? It’s been such a long time! I still can’t believe that we ran into
each other like that on Friday. It sounds like you’re doing really well and
that life’s been good. I’m happy to report that things are going great for me
too.  

Would
you like to get together and catch up on old times? I think it would be fun. We
could meet for lunch. Let me know!

Kate

Light hearted. Short and sweet.
Perfect. And before I can chicken out, I click the send button and watch as my
outbox empties. I suddenly have this curious sensation that I’ve altered the
course of my life, that my Fates have gotten up off of their dowdy and faded Lazy-boys
and are now re-arranging themselves on a pair of lovely rococo style chaise
lounges. And while I’m pondering this I notice a new message has appeared in my
Inbox. I get a jolt of nerves when I see that Ben has already responded.

From: 
Ben Mathews

To: 
Kate Alexander

Subject:
RE: Hey!

Kate
- It’s great to hear from you! Let’s definitely meet for lunch. How does tomorrow
sound?

Tomorrow! My God, I can’t possibly
lose ten pounds and lipo all the fat rolls off my stomach by tomorrow. I’m
already mentally running through all the clothing possibilities in my closet,
rejecting each one and realizing that I’ll have to go shopping right after
work. I stare at Ben’s message, reading it again, examining it for any sort of
hidden meaning. There’s nothing to be gleaned from it though. It’s so short.
But then I think—the way he wants to meet me so soon is rather flattering in
itself, isn’t it?

I respond telling him that tomorrow
sounds great and suggest we meet at a Mexican restaurant in Belltown that’s one
of my favorites.

***

After work I meet Suzy downtown to
go shopping. I called her and Lauren at the end of the day explaining about my
lunch with Ben and asking for help finding something to wear. Unfortunately
Lauren said she had to work late that night, as one of the Seattle Seahawk wives
had decided to color her own hair and needed help.

“I’m sorry, but it’s basically an
emergency,” Lauren tells me. “I usually foil her hair a sandy blonde, but one
of her girlfriends talked her into becoming a brunette and now her hair is pine
green. Apparently they were drinking tequila at the time—you know how
that
goes. Anyway, she’s sitting in my chair crying.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Let’s just say I’ll be looking at
some nice tickets to the Seahawks come this fall. Hey, maybe I’ll take Justin
with me.”

“So you guys are still going
strong?”

“Fourth date this Friday,” she
giggles. Lauren has a rule about not sleeping with a guy until the fourth date.
It seems arbitrary to me, but she swears by it. She read it in a book on dating.
Apparently if you wait until the fourth date you’ll know whether the guy is
taking you seriously. He’ll respect you for making him wait a little longer,
but not too long. If you make him wait too long, then the concern is that he’ll
either think you’re a tease or that you’re not interested in sex.

“I take it Justin’s getting lucky this
Friday. Does he know?”

“I’ve hinted, but I haven’t come
right out and told him yet. Oh darn it, I should go. I’m sorry I can’t help you
out tonight Kate. Call me tomorrow and tell me what happens at lunch. I can’t
wait to hear about it!”

Luckily when I call Suzy she says
she can come right after work. Mysteriously though she tells me she’s glad that
Lauren can’t make it because there’s something she needs to talk to me about
alone. 

I’m already in the dressing room trying
on a pair of designer jeans when Suzy finds me. They look fantastic, but grimace
when I see the price tag. I make okay money, but there’s no way I can afford
them. In the olden days before I bought my house I would have snatched them up
in a second, but now that I have a mortgage and all the associated debt that
goes with home ownership, I’ve had to force myself to be more responsible.

“Wow, those are amazing on you.”
Suzy sits down on the small bench in the dressing room and puts her car keys away.
I can smell her woodsy perfume. She has a distracted air about her though. “You
should get them.”

“I can’t, they’re too expensive.”
I show her the price tag and she raises an eyebrow.

“Hmmm, they’re not
that
nice.”  

I wiggle out of the pants and try
on a green sundress. It’s a size four, which is pushing it for me, since I
usually wear a six, but I didn’t see any sixes out there. It fits, but it’s
snug.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“It’s nice, but it looks too
small.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I must be the only woman in the
world who’s so neurotic about clothes shopping. It’s not that I don’t like it. I
like having nice things, but the process stresses me.

I’m still standing there with the
sundress on when I notice that Suzy’s brows are drawn together and there’s a tense
expression on her face.

“What is it? You look upset about
something.”

“Luke asked me to marry him.”

I’m too stunned to speak for a second.
“Wow…that’s great, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, is it? I’ve been a
complete wreck for the past two days.”

“He asked you two days ago and you
didn’t even tell me!”

“I needed time to think about it.
I had a feeling he might ask, but then I thought we’ve only known each other
four months, so I must be imagining things.”

“Are you in-love with him?”

She nods. “It’s crazy, but I am. I
just don’t know if that’s enough for me to want to marry him.”

I understand now why she didn’t
want to invite Lauren to this conversation. Lauren would never understand
Suzy’s dilemma, but I do. Lauren is one of those women who
really
wants
to get married and every man she dates is a potential husband. She wants lots
of kids, a big house in the suburbs, neighborhood barbeques and soccer games
every weekend. She wants to quit her job and stay home and raise a family,
relying on her husband as the sole bread winner. And this is despite having already
been married to The Toad. You’d think her divorce would have dimmed her
marriage lust, but it hasn’t.

Suzy and I are different though.
We’ve never been married and even though we both say we want to someday, when
you’re a reasonably attractive thirty-something-year-old woman you start to
wonder if the reason you haven’t married is a little more complex than you
simply haven’t met the right guy. You wonder if maybe you enjoy being single
despite all the pressure from society telling you that you’re not supposed to
feel that way.

“What did you say to him when he
asked?”

“I told him that I needed to think
about it, that I love him, but I needed to think.”

“How did he take it?” 

She gave me a look. “How do you
think he took it?” She shakes her head. “He’s so different than anyone I’ve
ever dated, you know? He’s so...
normal
!”

I laugh at this. It’s true that Luke
is by far the least exotic boyfriend Suzy’s ever had. All the guys she dates
are unusual in some way, and I’m not saying in a bad way necessarily, though
there have been some weird ones. I remember she once dated a sitar player who traveled
to Turkey a lot where she assumed he had concert dates, though eventually she
discovered he was smuggling hashish in his sitar case. She also dated this guy
from Spain for a short while who turned out to be in a Basque terrorist group.
Those are the extreme examples though. Mostly she dates musicians or
photographers—artsy types.  I’ve never known her to date your typical
run-of-the mill engineer before, which is exactly what Luke is—an engineer.
He’s a mechanical engineer who works for Boeing and you don’t get much more
normal than that. But I could tell the instant I met him that Luke is a good guy
and he is absolutely head over heels in love with Suzy.

“He really loves you,” I say. “I
know he’s not running a drug cartel out of his basement or anything, but he’s crazy
in love with you and he’s a great guy.”

She smiles. “I know. He is
wonderful, isn’t he?” Her face grows tender.

“Have you told anyone else about
the proposal? Does your family know?”

Suzy shakes her head. “No, I’ll never
hear the end of it if I decide not to marry him. Nina came over the other night
and I told her about it.”

“And what did she say?”

“Oh, you know Nina...as long I have
all the legal documents drawn up by a lawyer, and as long as I’m prepared for
the possibility that it might end in divorce, I should go for it.”

Nina is Suzy’s older sister and she
is—and I mean this in the kindest possible way—completely terrifying. She graduated
Summa from Yale, got an MBA from Harvard, and currently works as some kind of
business consultant, though I never understand her job. She always has a cell
phone glued to her ear and a painful expression on her face. Suzy once told me
she makes like two hundred grand a year, and to top it all off, she looks like
a super model.

“She wouldn’t tell your parents
would she?”

“No. Nina knows how much they love
Luke, and she knows my mother would have heart failure if she heard that I
turned down a marriage proposal from him. Two unmarried daughters in their
thirties has been a bit much for her to take.”

“Well,” I say pointedly, “that
might be changing soon.”

She stares at me. And then she starts
to laugh. “I can’t believe this is happening to me! Do you think I should I do
it? Should I say, yes, and marry him?”

“I can’t tell you what to do, but
I will say that I think you guys are good together.”

Suzy nods. “I know. We think
exactly alike. It’s almost scary sometimes the way we can read each other’s
minds.”

I’m still wearing the too tight
sundress and the shoulder straps are pinching me, so I peel out of it.

“That’s way too small Kate. Let me
go and tell the saleswoman to find you a larger size, okay?”

After she leaves, I look at myself
in the mirror and unexpectedly feel a sharp sense of loss. Suzy will marry Luke
and it’ll be the end of an era. Tears fill my eyes and I’m ashamed of myself. I
know I should be happy for her, but I can’t help it. I
am
happy for Suzy.
I want good things to happen to her, but I’m sad because our friendship won’t
be the same anymore. We’ll still be friends, and we’ll still do girl stuff
together, but things will change as they invariably do when somebody gets
married.

And then inexplicably I find myself
thinking about Ben and how he’s fallen into my life again. Wouldn’t it be
strange if things did change and if he were a part of it?

The Past….

After Ben
and I slept
together
in his apartment that night we became inseparable, or as inseparable as two
people can be who have completely different interests besides sex. Most
weekdays he either came by my work to drink coffee before his shift at the bar,
or he’d call me on my days off when things were slow to ask me what I was doing.

“Painting my toenails,” I said,
positioning the phone with my knee up so I could talk and still paint.

“What color?”

“Dark red.”

“Sexy.”

I laughed coyly. “You think so?”
I’d been known to paint my nails weird shades, but have toned it down since I started
dating Ben.

“You have such pretty feet. I can
think of all sorts of things I’d like to do with them.”

“You’re a pervert.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.” He laughed.
“Are you coming over tonight?”

“Yes, but let’s go out to dinner
or a movie instead of staying in all night.”

Ben sighed. “We should just watch
a DVD.”

“Come on, I really want to go out
to a movie.”

“You should go with someone else
then. We’ll never make it through the whole thing anyway.”

I knew he was right. Obviously Ben
didn’t like sitting in a theater, but we also groped each other so much that it
was pointless to be there in the first place. We usually left early so we could
fall into bed together. It wasn’t a big deal. I thought it was sort of fun, but
Ben thought we were wasting too much money. I was tempted to point out that he
didn’t have to grope me, that he could keep his hands to himself, but I didn’t
think that sounded nice and I also didn’t know if I could keep
my
hands
to myself.

“All right, fine.” I gave in.

Later that night I met him at his
apartment where we ordered pizza and watched
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
.  Even
sitting on his couch, eating pizza we couldn’t stop touching each other. I’d
sit with my leg thrown over his while he rested his hand on my thigh, moving it
slowly upward, until I’d tell him to stop—though I didn’t really mean it. Then
he’d slide his hand between my legs, so there was only a piece of fabric
between his fingers and me. He’d cup me, pressing with his whole hand while I
squirmed against him.

Ben liked to watch my reaction to
the things he did to me. When he saw me getting aroused he’d tell me how much I
turned him on and how he couldn’t stop thinking about me, how he could barely get
enough of me even when we were together. And I knew exactly how he felt because
I couldn’t stop thinking about him either. I’d find myself in the oddest places—at
work, buying groceries, or shopping downtown—when I’d get a flash of him,
anything at all—the way he looks when he takes his shirt off, the taste of his
mouth on mine, the sounds he makes when I give him a blow job, and I’d feel an
intense longing, not to mention instantly horny. I’d never had such intense
sexual chemistry with someone before and I swear it was like heroin, not that
I’ve ever tried heroin. In truth, I imagine it was far better than heroin.

Usually when we got together we’d
have sex three or four times a night, varying the things we did with each other,
the positions we tried, the way we used our mouths or hands, doing it in the
bathtub, doing it in the shower, doing it with our clothes on or off. Ben joked
that he needed to start buying condoms in bulk at Costco because we were
burning through them so fast, though after a few weeks I decided to go on the pill
and we didn’t need them anymore. He told me I was the only woman he’d ever been
with who could keep him hard all night. (A scandalous compliment if I’ve ever
heard one!) Being with Ben was like having endless thirst while he offered me one
tall glass of water after another.

One night, about two months after
we had started dating, and after we’d satiated ourselves in bed, Ben told me he
loved me.

“I’ve never felt like this before.”
 

“I love you too,” I said, though
in truth, I wasn’t entirely sure. I’d never been in love. For all I knew this
constant state of dizzying arousal was how it felt. We had fun hanging out
together, although it was mostly in bed. Ben had never met my friends, nor had
I met his. Occasionally he’d say something about going hiking with him on the
weekend, but nothing ever came of it. The truth was I didn’t want to go hiking
with him. I either painted or hung out with my friends doing the things I liked
and he spent the weekends doing the things he liked.

After I told him I loved him too,
he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in close while I buried my face in
his neck, smelling that guy scent of soap and sweat. And then as if having the
same thoughts that I was having a moment ago, he asked me if I’d like to come
to a dinner party his friends Megan and Bernard were throwing on Saturday.

I sat up, resting on my elbows. “It’ll
be nice to meet some of your friends.”

“Yeah, they want to meet you too.
I’ve told them all about you.”

“You told them that we fuck like
bunny rabbits?”

He grinned. “Nah, I told them bunny
rabbits only
wished
they fucked as much as we do.”

I laughed. “What did you really
tell them about me?”

“I told them we knew each other in
college, that you work as a barista, that you’re an artist, and of course I
mentioned that you give a fantastic blow job.”

“And what did they say?”

“They thought you sounded great!”

“You didn’t really say that part
about my giving a fantastic blow job did you?”

Ben gave me a look that said—are you
crazy? I couldn’t imagine him being so crude anyway. He was sensual in bed, but
I got the impression he was far more reserved with the other people in his
life. In truth, his friendships sounded superficial to me.

“What about you?” he asked. “Have
you told your friends anything about me?”

“Lots,” I said.

“Such as?”

“I told them that you want to be a
writer, that you’re really into the outdoors, that you’ve got a gorgeous ass,
and that we basically can’t keep our hands off each other.”

Ben peered over his shoulder,
trying to catch a glimpse of his butt.

“Do I really have a gorgeous ass?”

“It’s yummy.” I gave him a little
slap.

“I’m nothing but a sex object to
you. Admit it!” Ben said in mock injury.

“Afraid so.”

He got up to go to the bathroom,
wiggling his butt a little and looking coyly over his shoulder at me as he walked
away. When he was gone, I pulled the sheets over myself and rolled onto my
side, letting my eyes wander around his tidy bedroom. Ben was far neater than I
was. It was just as well we never hung out at my place, because I’m sure he’d
be unable to cope with the mess.

I tried to imagine Ben meeting
some of my friends, wondering what they’d think of him. Ben would be mortified
if he knew some of the intimate details I’ve shared with my girlfriends. You
always hear about men’s locker room talk where they tell each other about the
women they’re having sex with, but I suspect women give far more away. With men
it’s all crude, but women will tell each other everything with no detail too
small. I’ve had friends describe they’re boyfriends’ penises to me down to the
skin color, shape, and taste—though admittedly if they’re describing it that
much, it’s usually because there’s something wrong with it.

“Listen Kate,” Ben said, when he
came out of the bathroom. “I should probably let you know that my old
girlfriend is going to be there on Saturday. It’s no big deal. We have a lot of
the same friends is all, but I thought you should know.”

“Oh, what’s her name?”

“Wendy. She’s very nice. We don’t
hang out anymore, but we’re still friendly when we see each other.”

I digested this information, not
quite sure how I felt about it. I didn’t feel jealous, which surprised me, but
maybe it was because Ben definitely seemed over her. I have to admit I was curious
to see what she looked like.

“How long did you go out with her?”

“A year. We broke up about five
months ago.”

In truth the only question I
really had was if the sex with her was as good as it is with me. I knew I
couldn’t ask him though. Ben was too discreet for that. He’d probably get angry
at me for even asking. 

“Thanks for telling me.”

“Sure, like I said it’s no big
deal.”