We got invited to an old friend's house for a winter weekend. My husband and I drove to the city from our country residence each with our own little weekend-sized duffle bags. Drew and Karly's apartment overlooked the city and had stellar views from every direction. The four of us have always enjoyed sitting around their living room, having drinks, eating amazing meals while watching the sun go down and the city lights go on. It's particularly beautiful when it snows.
Drew met us at the door, and shook my husband Ryan's hand, then he embraced me quickly. Though it had been only six months since I'd seen him, Drew looked older, more tired. He looked bent at his shoulders like he was concealing his six-foot frame. He wore head-to-toe black. Black socks, black jeans, black long-sleeve t-shirt. His once full brown hair was thinning at the forehead. And for the first time I felt that my group of friends was really getting closer to 40 than we were 30, and I wondered where the hell the time had gone.
Drew called up the stairs to Karly as we put down our bags and took off our coats. And, in a flash, Karly bounded around the corner as elegant as ever. Her thick, curly raven hair was at her shoulders. The ends of it brushed against the top of her breasts that were pushed up into a dark lacy, purple shirt. She also wore black jeans but sported clean, bare feet with a fresh pedicure.
I stood in the doorway staring at how the two of them matched in all of their perfect urban-ness.
Ryan and I looked suburban. Both of us were in our blue Gap denim. I'd managed to put on a t-shirt without any logos or writing on them, which was my achievement for the day, while Ryan wore his usual computer geek t-shirt hidden underneath a dark fleece full of his favorite cat's hair.
I slid off my tennis shoes and heard someone in the living room sneeze. As I looked around the corner, I was greeted by another old friend from when we lived in the city -- Ben.
"Ben!" I exclaimed rushing toward him to give hugs and a kiss. He was full of smiles at me and he nodded a hello to Ryan behind me. "Where's Emily?" I asked.
"On travel for work this week, I'm afraid," he answered. "Drew and Karly were nice enough to invite me over for dinner with you guys."
An hour later we were all feeling quite full from dinner. Drew outdid himself with the food, while Karly and Ryan poured cocktail after cocktail. We were getting more loud and more boisterous as the evening wore on. The January temperatures were well below freezing, so venturing out into the cold was extraordinarily unappealing. After he poured us some coffee, Drew went to fetch us dessert. I offered to set a fire in their fireplace but it was proving ot be difficult.
"You know it's just a gas one right?" Ben laughed as he saw me struggling.
"It's the flue, jackass. It won't open." I'd had four martinis and my brain power was not what it normally is.
"Here, let me help," he offered. Ben kneeled on the floor beside me and poked his head into the fireplace to check out the flue mechanism. As he sat there, I leaned in next to him to see if he really saw anything different than I did.
"I swear you just pull the lever," I said.
He reached his hand up to touch it, and I pulled myself out of the cold fireplace noticing his smell. I'm not sure how to define it. It wasn't cologne or deodorant or aftershave. It wasn't body odor, at least in the sweaty sense. It was Ben. Warm, comforting, confident -- Ben. He, too, was aging before my eyes. He had obvious crow's feet around his eyes from years of laughter. His hair was graying at the temples and a small beer belly was protruding over his belt from years spent behind a computer eating crap at work. It was not unlike the bellies of any of us in the room. We'd all kind of surrendered our youthful physical attractiveness to a steady but overwhelming career that ensured a sedentary lifestyle by requiring us to work long hours and have long commutes for financial prosperity.
"Meredith, he's got it. Come sit with me," Ryan called.
I smiled at Ben and went over to sit with my husband on the sofa. Karly ran in and poured another martini into my glass from the shaker before leaving again and helping Drew carry out the cheesecake.
We all ate our dessert silently after our initial declarations of appreciation for Drew's cooking skills.
"Maybe we should play a game," Karly asked. "Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, something."
"Let me go see what I have," Drew offered. He wandered down the hall and came back with a small, black square box.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Truth or Dare," Drew answered taking off the top. "Karly and I have only played it with each other but I think it would be more fun as a larger group. The way it works is that someone starts and chooses someone to ask them a Truth or Dare question from one of these boxes. You get to pick who asks you the question, but we go around the room clockwise and each get a turn. The board has 25 spaces. You get 1 point for each successful truth -- and successful is determined by the group -- and 2 points for each successful dare. First one to 25 wins.
"Sounds easy enough," Ben answered.
"Great, then I'll start. Karly, ask me a truth."
Karly leaned forward and drew a truth card from one of the two boxes. "Have you ever been caught by your mother masturbating?"
"Consciously, I have no memory of that and if it happened, I'm glad I don't remember or had the ability to block it."
"Move ahead one," she answered laughing at his honesty.
Ryan looked up, "Ben, ask me a truth question."
Ben picked a card from the box, "How long has it been since you've had sex?"
Ryan looked at me, like I was going to help him figure out the answer. It had been a long, long time. I'm not sure how the interest started waning, but it did — for both of us. We had been in a rut.
"She can't help you," Karly said.
"A few weeks I guess," Ryan said breaking my eye contact.
Everyone in the room looked at me. I blushed. "I guess if weeks is the same as months, he's telling the truth."
"Beep," Drew squeaked. "Survey says?" Ben and Karly shook their heads and Ryan's game piece stayed where it was.
"Karly, give me a dare," I asked. I am a terrible liar and the truth is that if the questions were personal enough to ask about our sex life, they could ask me all kinds of other questions I wasn't ready to answer.
"Pick the most unattractive part of your body and show it to the person to your left for 10 seconds."
"No!" I said. The boys all giggled. "I'm not stripping!"
"It just says body part, it could be your feet," Drew pointed out.
"But it's not," I answered. I was kind of slurring my words and a third of the way through my fifth martini at this point.
I could feel Ben's eyes burn into the side of my head as I stared at our hosts. Then I leaned over and whispered into my husband's ear.
"Is it okay with you, if I show him my least favorite part of my body?" I asked. Ryan looked at me and nodded before he kissed me on the cheek. "Do I have to do this with you guys watching?" I asked again.
"No, it doesn't say you have to," Karly pointed out.
Ben sat in the large leather chair with his legs crossed and a beer in his left hand. I took his right hand in mine. "Come with me, please." I lead him into the kitchen and stood before him.
"I don't know what you're going to show me, but you don't have to... I can just tell them that you did it," he offered.
"Hey, I'm cool with that. I'm pretty sure there's nothing underneath these clothes that anyone wants to see any more," I said as I turned to walk back to the group. Ben grabbed my arm before I could get through the swinging doors.
"There's not an inch of you I wouldn't want to see," he said quietly as he held my elbow.
My eyebrows furrowed at his response in confusion. "What?"
He pulled me closer to him. I could smell his smell again. It was the seductive aroma of self-confidence. "You heard me," he whispered. "Show me."
I lifted my t-shirt over my head and stood in my bra in the kitchen. Slowly I peeled down the straps and pulled them away from me so he could look at my breasts. Karly was large breasted. Her breasts were gorgeous, round and perky. She wore pretty bras all the time and showed them off under gorgeous, stylish clothes.
I felt my breasts were medium and droopy. I looked more like the cover girl on a National Geographic who has had a dozen children than something anyone would ever want to look at.
I counted to 10 under my breath and stared at the sink while he looked at me. When I got to 10, I pulled the straps back into place and put my shirt on. I tried to escape the room back to my drink to let the liquor make me feel less self-conscious, but before I could get out of the room, Ben had his hands on my shoulders and was pulling me closer to him.
"You're beautiful," he said.
"Don't lie," I said. "It's not nice."
