I just don't like you very much," Beth said, with her eyes glowering at mine across the candle-lit table of the Italian restaurant.
"Well, at least the food was good" I replied, thinking I had never had better cannelloni, or sat through a dinner with someone more disagreeable.
"Sometimes, Thomas, I like to imagine different kinds of hell. Tantalus under the burning sun, forever snatching at goblets of cool fresh water only to have them dissolve into sand before they touch his parched lips."
"I like your take on Tantalus" I replied. "Tell me another hell."
"Spending 24 hours in a locked-room with you."
I looked at Beth a bit dismayed, but mostly curious. We had been bumping heads all semester in our Victorian lit class. I would make a comment and she would chortle. She would make a comment and it would seem so off-point I would want to lay my head in my hands in despair.
When your delving into George Eliot or Melville, week-after-week, with the same group of people it gets pretty intimate. And, for the most part, I felt a real bond with my classmates. But from Beth it was scowls and scoffs and enough public words of disdain it was obvious to everyone she thought I was a prick. Probably the whole class thought we once had an affair that had ended terribly. The funny thing is Beth and I had no history at all. This mistake of an Italian dinner together was a well-intentioned dare to us both from a fellow classmate.
"24 hours. It would be interesting" I replied.
"I would die of boredom."
"I'm sure you would find ways to entertain yourself."
"Only if I could do anything I wanted and that's not going to happen."
I looked at her face with intensified interest as she said these words. But Beth had no tell at all; no twinkling eyes, no flash of a smile. The very absence of expected emotion somehow drew me in. I stared hard at her a moment feeling an utterly unexpected wave of warmth towards her growing inside me. But Beth didn't even return my gaze.
"You could," I replied slowly, deliberately, "for 24 hours do anything you wanted."
"Oh, fuck off" she almost hissed.
"Carpe Diem Beth," I said, almost pleading.
"The cheesiest line pick-up line of all for at least two thousand years" Beth shot back.
"Yes Beth, but Horace continues 'Quam minimum credula posturo.' Class will be over. School will be over. This will all be memory. I want to know what your 'anything' is, Beth.
"You couldn't handle my 'anything'."
I stared at her.
"Yes, I could."
The candles guttered low, their flickering light glistening on the cut-crystal. Now it was time for her to stare at me a bit. Then she glanced around. All the diners close to us had departed. Our waiter was occupied with patrons on the other side of the room.
"Give me your hand Thomas" she said.
Taking my large and quite powerful hand in her own, as I reached across the table, she examined it and then turned the palm upward leaving my wrist exposed.
"Wrists are especially sensitive to heat. That's why you test an infant's formula on your wrist."
Still holding my hand wrist-upward, she reached for one of the low burning candles.
"Candle wax is particular," she continued in detached, and almost clinical, voice. "Drip wax from two feet and it's just like little hot kisses. Drip from a foot and there are stinging waves of pain. But drip from two inches or less, and you are in a different world"
I looked at her with a measure of tenderness and curiosity and amazement as she held the candle over my wrist and then stared back at me as she tipped it to a 90-degree angle holding it just an inch from my skin. I wanted to cry-out as a rivulet of wax flowed over my wrist. Then she moved the candle slowly up the length of my forearm covering it with a line of raw stinging pain. I didn't utter a sound or word or even flinch. When she was done she replaced the candle in its holder and we both looked around the room. No one had seen a thing.
"You could do anything you wanted" I said to her.
"I hate you"
"Yes, but we will do this"
"Yes," She said. "Yes."