Ellie was easy to forget. She was the type of quiet, unassuming person that never registered on your mind: the polite woman behind the check-out counter, the wallflower at a house party. The oddity of having a respectable, seemingly "normal" middle-aged woman in a freaky-deaky sex house made her stand out when I first moved in, but it was hard to pay attention to her over the outsized personalities and even more outsized sexual appetites of Dawn and Julia. So two months after I moved in, I had not only never had sex with Ellie, but I had never had much of a conversation with her.
All of this made it very awkward when it was just me and her at the dinner table one night. I had spent much of the afternoon making a three-course banquet with all sorts of meats and vegetables, only to discover that almost everyone was bailing on the nightly meal. Dawn and Simon were going to a show, Josh had to pick up some emergency hours at the gym, Julia was away at some sort of conference or convention, and Padma was out on a very mysterious date.
"Well, I hope you're hungry," I said to Ellie when she got home. She had just gotten off work and was still done up in a full suit.
"Oh, I'm starving. I worked through lunch, and all I had to tide me over was a bag of chips."
"You need to eat more," I said. This was not the first time that Ellie had come to the table without having much for breakfast or lunch.
She pinched some of the flab around her waist. "I don't think so. If anything, I need to be less of a pig." Before I could argue, she went upstairs to change.
Fifteen minutes later, we were staring out at a vast smorgasbord of food, and listening to an uncomfortable silence. We both heaped our plates with chicken and risotto, hoping that chewing would be an adequate substitute for talking. After all, if our mouths were full, who could blame us? But even if we would have both been content to sit in silence, there was this kind of strange obligation to talk.
Ellie dabbed at the side of her mouth with a napkin. "So Mike. You've probably told me this sometime, but why did you decide to move in here?"
I shrugged. "I needed a place to stay, and the rent was reasonable. Plus there are... perks. What about you?"
Ellie blushed. "Oh, the same, pretty much."
There was something there, perhaps something buried. I didn't want to pry. "Well, I'm glad you're here." Lame.
We talked a bit more, about the news and how the Blue Jays were doing this year (about as lousy as ever). I told a dirty joke that Dawn had taught me, and even though Ellie had probably heard it from the same source, she still went beet red and laughed nervously.
"You know," I said, as I tried to find room for another spoonful of carrots. "We should really sleep together."
"Excuse me?"
"Well, I'm just saying that it's kind of weird we haven't yet... you know, with the house being the way it is."
Ellie dropped her fork and let it clatter against her plate. "Oh, well of course, since we live together you're absolutely entitled to my body."
"I didn't mean it like that-"
Ellie gave me the stern gaze of a disappointed mother. "Yes you did. You just didn't want me to realize it." She got up and shoved her plate towards me. "I'm not hungry any more. Can you pack it up?"
I felt like I had just been caught up in a tornado and deposited in a wheat field somewhere in the Prairies. "Of course," I managed to say.
Ellie did not storm off to her room. A woman her age does not storm to her room and slam the door. Instead she calmly walked up to her bedroom, shut the door gently, and did not emerge for the rest of the night.
-
The most frivolous four of the house's occupants (read: me, Dawn, Josh, and Padma (but don't tell her I said that)) were playing Super Smash Brothers. Our fingers were in a rapid frenzy as we unleashed cartoon carnage on each other. I was playing Samus, like any reasonable person, while Dawn was constantly picking the "Random Character" option and moaning when Ganondorf or that weird new Pokemon came up.
We were having one of those conversations that begins in smack talk and eventually, through some mysterious alchemy, turns into a serious discussion. Maybe the game distracted me from apprehension and I accidentally said what was really on my mind. I told them about my short and disastrous conversation with Ellie the night before. There was a good bit of laughter at my expense, and then Dawn took me out with a hammer just to add insult to injury.
"So, I guess it's only fair to call you the modern Casanova," said Dawn. "I mean, with an approach like that you could talk any girl into bed."
"Shut up, Dawn."
"I don't think Mike was really out of line," said Padma. "I mean, he let Ellie knew he was interested, and didn't press her when she wasn't interested. I think that we would be better off if people were more direct."
"You're just saying that because you don't have to sleep with him," said Dawn. "It would be different if he was being direct all over you every day of the week."
"Is that an euphemism?" I said.
Josh, playing Bowser, knocked Dawn into the stratosphere. "That's the cool part about living here in this house. You can just be like 'yo, let's fuck' without worrying about all that romance bullshit."
"Have you had sex with Ellie, Josh?"
"Only about a million times." There was just a little of the frat-boy smirk in Josh's voice. Just a little.
"Well, what did you say to her?" I said. "'Let's fuck?'"
Josh shrugged as he grabbed the star and went on an invincible rampage. "I dunno. I don't remember the words we used - it was too long ago. I just remember the moment she walked in the door, she saw me and her body was all 'Woah' and mine said 'I don't normally go for older women, but this one is a fox'. Of course, there were a couple days of flirting and shit. I don't remember the words, but I remember the tension, you know?"
"You know," I said. "I think there's some wisdom in that."
"Nah," said Dawn. "Josh is a moron. Why do you want to fuck Ellie, anyways? You figure if you do all of us you can send the box-tops off and get a prize?"
