Easy Does It #7 'Be Quiet Now. I've Got To Concentrate'

Chapter 7

Be quiet now. I’ve got to concentrate.

            Eve ran into her room, and let her silk robe pool at her feet. She was naked and stretched her arms above her head. Her breasts rose as she arched her back. She could relate to a cat: stretching felt good. There was a strip of blue light pouring through the space in her curtains, and it fell on her in a band, emphasizing her taut stomach and the curve of her hips. “You look hot,” a low voice muttered to her from her bed. Eve had nearly forgotten he was there. Well, not nearly forgotten, she had forgotten. Clearly, he hadn’t been that memorable.

            “You’re going to have to motor there, Chad. I’ve got an emergency.” She reached for the blankets and pulled them off him. He was still naked too, and though no moonlight poured over his firm torso, she could see him well enough. “On second thought…” she said and straddled him. “Just take care of me here for a few minutes and then you can go.”

            “Just a few minutes?” he asked. He lifted his hips, raising her up a bit.

            “Well, that all depends on you. Be quiet now,” she said, “I’ve got to concentrate.”

                                                                        *

Julie’s ad had, indeed, been put up on YouTube and had now had over 1,000 views. She was stunned. Shocked. And watched it again. Wow. That was Julie. That vixen was…her. Take that, Ronny. How’s that for predictable?

She re-watched her ad that would rival any Las Vegas ‘masseuse’ and looked at the clock. Nearly an hour had passed since she’d phoned Eve to come over and review the messages, and she was starting to worry. It should only take two or three minutes to get from Eve’s downtown condo to Julie’s apartment in Heritage Hill. She lived at the top of the hill in a converted Victorian house. There were six apartments and each one was completely different from the rest. Hers still had tile from the 40’s, a stove from the 50’s, and orange carpet in the living room from god knew when. She’d decorated the apartment with cheap furniture from garage sales and antique stores. Nothing matched, and she loved it.

Even though Eve lived just at the bottom of the hill, it could sometimes take her an hour or so to drive the distance, depending on her mood, or her focus. “Why do you insist on driving?” Julie had once asked her. “Just walk up the fricking hill.”

“Me? Walk?” Eve asked. “I am a Michigander. We. Do not. Walk.”

Now, there was nothing for Julie to do but to sit in her warm apartment surrounded by her vintage 1950’s posters from Good Housekeeping to obsess and reminisce, in that order.

First, she reminded herself that there was nothing wrong with her. She was cute, attractive and sometimes sexy. Even though she was all of these things, she didn’t always see it. Mostly she saw someone who was not terrible-looking but could be great looking if she could just lose five more pounds. She never did lose those last five pounds though. She was too attached to them.

If pressed, Julie would admit that she liked her curvy body and that she looked killer in a push-up bra. She liked her body. She was sexy. Womanly. Even when she’d pass a newsstand and see the anemic faces of models looking at her, it didn’t bother her. They all looked so hungry to her. Hungry for cake. So she’d go home, whip up a cake from scratch, and indulge. At night, when she’d curl up with her dog-eared copy of Anais Nin, she’d feel sexy all over again.

            So feeling sexy and her self-esteem weren’t exactly the root of her problems with men. In fact, Julie had experienced a fairly active love life. It seemed that boys (and then as she grew older, men) found curvy women appealing. Julie had dated a string of interesting characters, the trouble was, none of them had held her interest. That was Julie’s real problem. She could walk around all day feeling sexy, but no one really brought that side of her to the surface. That is, until she met Ronny. 

That’s when her real trouble began.

She gave Ronny her heart. She might as well have wrapped it up in a box for him and handed it to him all gooey with emotion.  She loved him fiercely, so fiercely she ignored his ever-growing need for beer and “Nights with the Band”. 

            Even Julie’s grandmother knew Ronny was no good for her, and she reminded Julie of this every time they had lunch together. Julie made it a point to have lunch with her Grandma Mills every few weeks, especially since her parents recently “relocated” to Albuquerque. Julie remembered when she first introduced Ronny to her grandma.  They were eating lunch on Grandma’s porch and she pointed to Ronny. “There’s something wrong with him,” she said. Julie looked at Ronny and noticed a fleck of mustard on his chin.

            “Oh! Ronny, you’ve got something on your chin,” she said.

            “Wha’s tha?” he replied, laying the English accent on thick.

            “Your chin,” Julie said.

            “Oh, right-o then,” Ronny said as he wiped the mustard away.

Grandma Mills leaned over and said, “I didn’t mean that, Julie. I meant there’s something wrong with him there. In his head. He’s a nut-ball.”

            Grandma Mills had always been overprotective of Julie, especially because her parents weren’t protective at all, but this time, Julie didn’t believe her. Later, of course, Ronny proved that there was indeed something wrong with him, namely his penchant for The Two Wets groupies and his tendency to stand Julie up. And then, of course, he left her. 

            Clearly, Julie was cursed. It seemed that she would never get over Ronny because every time she tried, something worse happened that made her look at Ronny with renewed hope. Ronny wasn’t so bad. Sure, he was thirty-four years old and in a band. He had no permanent employment.  He pretended that he was from England. He slept around. But he had good hair and he kissed her with passion. He kissed her all over with passion and that wasn’t such an easy thing to find. 

             She had to come to terms with it: finally and forever, Ronny was gone.  

Before she could surrender to another bout of crying while looking from her picture of Ronny to her Internet ad, her door buzzed. “Dahling…” Eve droned in her fake hoity-toity voice. “It’s me. I’m here to go shopping…shopping for men.” Julie tried not to laugh at the ladies-who-lunch voice, but laughed anyway and buzzed Eve up.

            Julie ran into her bedroom, threw on her lemon colored velour bathrobe over the red teddy, squeezed her feet into her bumblebee slippers and checked her face in the mirror. On a scale of one to five, five being high, her appearance was a negative two. Perfect for Internet dating.

Blunder Woman -- 78.5

78.5

Digression #23 Conversation With Matt

AKA Fodder for Therapy

            It’s at this point that I have to take a little digression, not exactly a U-turn or what have you, but a little pause while we go down this misadventure road to tell you about a conversation I had with Matt. I’m doing this, yes, in self-defense because when you analyze what he said to me, how he talked to me, maybe then you can understand why I went out of my head. And when I look back on it, it seems ludicrous that there was no physical intimacy happening. And I mean none. No more lip smacking, hand holding, or naked pubis areas touching. No dry humping either, the kind that I made Ken and Barbie do when I was a girl. We were just friends, with hinted at benefits. With Matt, it was always hinted at. In my defense, I offer this conversation taken word for word (which means pieced together from my splotchy memory) that happened a few days after my meeting with Lisa when everything was still in the planning session.

            I went over to his house, which had returned to its former bachelor appearance, where Matt had a dinner all ready for us, sitting on a table with two candles lit. The curry was still in the takeout containers, but I found this profoundly romantic and not a symbol that he wasn’t taking me serious.

            After curry and chit chat, here’s the meat of our conversation that night that we had while I snuggled in his arms between the commercial breaks of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report:

            Matt: This feels good.

            Me: What?

            Matt: You. Here with me.

            Me: Mmmm.

            Matt: And there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.

            Me: Yeah?

            Matt: No, don’t look at me. Just look forward. I just want to talk a bit okay? I just want to ask you some hypothetical questions.

            Me: Er, okay.

(I have to say at this point I was in deep danger of throwing up our curry dinner because my nerves were going absolutely bonkers.)

            Matt: Let’s say you were really good friends with someone and you’d never, say, crossed a line with them physically.

            Me: Yeah?

            Matt: Do you think if you crossed that line that you could still be friends with them?

            (WTF? In Matt-speak I figured out he was asking me if we slept together would it change our relationship. No. It would not. Fuck me now!! Ahem. Sorry for the outburst. I very gently and slowly said the following: )

            Me: If you are very good friends, true friends, real friends, then maybe crossing the line will actually, uhm, enhance your relationship. Maybe you will find something even more wonderful than friendship.

            (Subtext here: Maybe you will find love.)

            (Matt turned my face to look at him then, and then kissed my forehead. It was a wildly chaste gesture.)

            Matt: You’re the coolest girl I know, you know that?

            Me: Yes.

            Then we continued to snuggle until I fell asleep in his arms. An hour later after he’d shaken me asleep, I was in The Beast on the way home dreaming of the time when we’d finally, at long last cross that line. Surely he meant soon. Right?