Roommates

by Whitney Lyles

  “I’m Max.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Max.”

  “Yes,” Marge said. “Will you be joining us for dinner?”

  “Um, actually I’m meeting my sister and my two nieces in a little while to take them to the roller coaster.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” Marge said. “So what do you do?”

  “I own a guitar sales and repair shop.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Let me show you around!” Elise interjected for Max’s sake. She didn’t want him to endure a Hal and Marge inquisition.

  The entire group followed her throughout the apartment, and she silently prayed they would leave soon. Her parents asked all kinds of questions about Iris and Megan. What they were like. Where they were from. Their bedroom doors were open, and naturally her mother had to look inside. Miraculously, their rooms were cluttered but cleaner than usual.

  “Megan is a lovely girl,” her mother said as she glimpsed a picture near her bedroom door. It was of Megan standing with about five girls who looked as if they had been drinking for hours on end. They all held red plastic cups and wore celebration on their faces.

  “Ha! Look at that,” her mother said, pointing to a poster of Lenny Kravitz. “I remember when you had posters of him on your wall.”

  “And before that she had posters all over her walls of those, what were they . . . ?” Her father thought for a moment. “New Kids on the Block!”

  Stan threw his head back, laughing wildly. “You were obsessed with them. And Milli Vanilli.”

  Her mother laughed, too, and Elise wondered if it was possible for people to choke on their own laughter. “I remember,” her mother said in between peals of laughter. “When you wrote Jordan What’s His Name from New Kids on the Block and asked him if he would attend the sixth grade dance with you.”

  “I remember that!” Stan said, fighting for air as well. “You even included a picture of yourself. Or how about the time Elise started a Kirk Cameron fan club on our street and turned the garage into the club’s headquarters.”

  Now everyone was laughing. Except Elise. Her parents may as well have busted out all the pictures of her from the eighth grade air band when she wore fluorescent spandex and lip synced “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany, her braces flashing beneath the spotlight. Could she look any less cool in front of Max?

  “Ha-ha,” she said flatly. “Laugh all you want. I can think of a million embarrassing things you’ve done.” But funny, she couldn’t think of one.

  When she looked at Max, his lips were pursed, dimples puckered in amusement. She couldn’t tell if he was smitten or laughing at her. She was certain he had been cool for his whole life. She just knew it.

  “Let me show you Iris’s room,” she said in an attempt to distract them from remembering anything else from her cornball past.

  When they moved to Iris’s room, they all crowded into her doorway, and what Elise saw made her arm hair stand on end. Right there, in plain view atop Iris’s dresser, was the tallest bong that she’d ever seen. She didn’t care if her roommates smoked pot, but her mother might have a stroke right there in the hallway. Her parents had grown up in the sixties and were probably the only two people who had never inhaled a smidgen of pot, not even secondhand. Granted, everyone’s parents tell their kids they have never smoked pot to keep their teenagers from calling them hypocrites when lecturing about drugs. However, Elise was positive her parents had never smoked pot. It had been confirmed by her cool Uncle Joe on her father’s side of the family who ordered all the cousins’ cocktails at family weddings in the days when they were underage. Not only had her parents never smoked pot, but they thought it was on the same scale as smoking crack.

  She tried to back out of Iris’s room, and her mind went wild thinking of ways to distract them. She waited for them to flip out or call the police. However, their eyes wandered over the room, and they didn’t say a word. Not a single word about the bong. There wasn’t even a frown of disappointment. It was like the purloined letter. It was in plain view, and they didn’t even notice. Or they didn’t know what it was. At any rate, she didn’t care. She just wanted them out.

  She led them back to the living room. “Well, you guys better get to World Famous before it gets too crowded in there. You know how hard it can be to a get a table.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to join us?” her father asked.

  “Yes, why don’t you come?” her mother said.

  “No. I have a lot to do.” She still hadn’t even checked her e-mail.

  “Very well.” Her mother shrugged.

  Her father extended his hand to Max. “It was nice meeting you, Mark.”

  “It’s Max,” Elise corrected.

  “Oh. Oops. I mean Max.”

  She was just getting ready to close the door behind them when her mother leaned in and whispered, only she wasn’t whispering as low as Elise would’ve liked, “I have something I need to drop by for you. All my feminine stuff for a certain time of the month. I won’t be needing any of that anymore, if you know what I mean.”

  Get out! she wanted to shout. “All right. We’ll discuss this another time. Thank you. And good-bye.” She bolted the door behind them.

  She looked at Max, hoping he hadn’t heard a single word about menopause. “They seemed nice,” he said.

  “Oh. Good. I’m sorry you had to get sucked into all that.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t be sorry. It was fine.”

  They chatted for a little while before Max stood and said he needed to get back to the roller coaster.

  After he left she went to her computer. There was a reply from her agent in her in-box.

  Hi Elise,

  I spoke to the film agency today, and they’ve heard back from mostly everyone, and at this point they have all passed on the project. However, there will be other options to explore. I’ll keep you posted.

  Cheryl

  Any immediate fantasies of buying her own condo in the near future suddenly went out the window. She may as well start looking for a new place. She only had two and a half months left with Iris and Megan.

  22. The Best Steak of Her Life

  “Have you ever been to the Turf Club?” he asked. “No.” She had met him at his house. They had never discussed what they were doing. They’d just decided that they were going to hang out.

  “Good. It will be fun then.”

  The Turf Club was split in two sections. One was a crowded, dark bar people waited for hours to eat in the other half. The second part was a restaurant filled with smoke from the gigantic grill in the middle of it. The place was a novelty in San Diego, and Elise found that she didn’t mind waiting for an hour and a half for a table.

  There was A.1. steak sauce galore, and one big party. She and Max each ordered from a selection of raw meats and then headed over to the big bonfire. Standing around the flames was like mingling at a cocktail party, and Elise immediately started to make friends. Waiting in the bar had seemed to make everyone buzzed and chatty, and Elise found herself discussing s’mores with a girl who had a hoop through her left nostril and enough mascara to raise the stock in Revlon.

  “They should really have a dessert menu here,” she said.

  “Imagine what a hit that would be.”

  She watched as Max doused their steaks in A.1. and flipped them. Then he touched her arm. “Let’s go sit down while they cook.” They headed back to their booth. After Elise sat down, Max motioned for her to come closer. She leaned over the table, expecting him to tell her something that couldn’t be said too loud—like maybe there was a weirdo he wanted to point out.

  “No,” he said, grinning that boyish grin that made her absolutely wild with lust. “C’mere. I mean slide over here.”

  “Oh.” She moved to the other side of the booth, and he put his arm over her shoulders.

  They watched as someone’s T-bone went up in flames. The poor soul put the little inferno out with steak sauce and then picked u
p a totally charred piece of meat with tongs. After several minutes of waiting they went back to the grill. Elise picked up their garlic bread with tongs and watched as Max first picked up his steak, juicy and dripping with marinade, and slid it onto a plate. He was moving the tongs in the direction of Elise’s steak when a skinny redheaded guy in a leather jacket swerved in and snatched it with the tip of his steak knife. She watched in horror as he plopped it on his plate and quickly scurried off.

  “Excuse me,” she shouted. “That’s my steak!” But he didn’t hear.

  Max hustled past her and Elise trailed behind, holding the plate of garlic bread. He followed the meat stealer back to his table. The thief had slid into his booth. He had several friends, and they all looked up at Max and Elise, waiting for them to explain why they were hovering over their table.

  “Sorry to interrupt, man,” Max said, armed with a pair of tongs, “but you took my girl’s steak.”

  “Huh?” he said over the music.

  Max had called her his “girl.” Did that mean girlfriend or fling? It could mean either.

  Clearly oblivious to his mistake, the redhead gazed up at Max through eyes that suggested hours of solid drinking.

  “I said. You took my girlfriend’s steak.”

  Elise never imagined that a stolen piece of meat at the Turf Club would not only make her heart soar with euphoria but also move her relationship with Max to another level. One piece of steak changed everything. He’d called her his girlfriend. She had . . . a boyfriend. Stunned, she stood over their table, paying little attention as Max held out his plate and accepted the redhead’s apologies as he returned the meat. He had called her his girlfriend.

  It took her a moment to realize that Max was walking away with her meat. She needed to follow . . . her boyfriend.

  “Drunk idiot,” Max muttered as they walked back.

  She felt a need to say something, just to clarify that he wasn’t calling her his girlfriend for dramatic effect to get the meat back. This was how people became confused in relationships during the early phases. One person says something in passing, and the other person takes it literally and ends up with a totally different perspective on the relationship. Then when the confused individual ends up dumped, they can’t understand why. She’d seen this happen many times with Carly. Poor communication led to misunderstandings.

  “You called me your girlfriend,” she said as they approached their booth. Still holding a pair of tongs and a plate with both their steaks, he kissed her on the forehead.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No. I just wasn’t sure what . . .”

  He kissed her again, on the mouth this time. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad it doesn’t bother you. Because it’s perfectly fine with me.”

  After polishing off what seemed like the best steak in her life, they rode on the motorcycle back to his studio. She held on to his waist and breathed in the scent of leather and mints. She pressed the left side of her cheek into his back and closed her eyes.

  When they returned, Maggie was asleep on the couch and only lifted her head to look at them while they shuffled past, pulling each other’s shirts off and kissing various parts of exposed flesh. They tumbled onto the bed, and for once she felt perfectly safe letting him remove every article of her clothing. She was dying to feel every part of him covering her. But he was slower, soft, and eventually she met his pace. They felt perfect together.

  The following morning they ate breakfast together. She set his kitchen table wearing one of his T-shirts and her underwear while he stood over the stove, frying bacon and scrambling eggs.

  She had a boyfriend. She was going to have to tell her parents sooner or later, because she even thought she could be falling in love with him. Real love, like he could be the father of her children love. It was going to be hard to tell her mother she was dating a man Marge couldn’t flaunt at one of her women’s league meetings, but she’d have to do it, because he wasn’t going anywhere as far as Elise was concerned.

  She’d tell Stan first. He’d have some advice on the situation, because he was always the one who had stirred up Marge and Hal’s hot spots when they were growing up. To this day both her parents blamed him for every gray hair on their heads.

  Max kissed her on the forehead before pouring them both glasses of orange juice.

  “I had fun last night,” he said.

  “I did, too.” She ran her fingertips over his chest before he pulled her close.

  “I wish I didn’t have to work today. You know you can hang out in the shop with me if you ever feel like ditching your book for a few hours.”

  “All right. I’ll come back later this afternoon. With a white pizza.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  They sat down for breakfast, and Elise wasn’t even hungry. Every nerve in her body was consumed with the best kind of happiness, the bliss of newfound love. She had not been caught in bliss like this in seven . . . maybe eight years. The last time she had felt this way was with Tim. They’d go to dinner and all she would eat was a tiny Caesar salad, and she could hardly even finish that. She was too consumed with happiness. She’d wake up feeling content, knowing that even if she had a horrific day it wouldn’t matter because she was in love.

  Maggie sat beneath Max, begging for scraps of their breakfast, her golden eyes staring up at him with longing. “Quit begging, Maggie,” he said. But she whined and moved closer. “Maggie. Go away.” He pointed to the living room. “Go!”

  Instead of moving to the living room, she inched over to Elise and rested her head in her lap.

  “Nooo,” Max said. “Don’t go to her.” They both laughed. “She likes you,” he said.

  Elise rubbed Maggie’s ears. “My poor dog’s at home. Her bladder is probably ready to explode.”

  “You can always bring her here if you want. Maggie’s good with other dogs. She’d be sweet to Bella.”

  After eating they cleared the dishes. Elise began to wash them, but Max moved up behind her. She could feel the rough edges of his face against her neck as he kissed her throat. “Come take a shower with me.”

  “Okay.” She dropped the fork she was holding in the sink.

  They tried to make love standing up, and at one point he even had her straddled around his waist, pinned to the shower wall. But whoever wrote those love scenes for the movies where people had sex in the shower, had clearly never had sex standing up in the shower. They ended up on the bathroom floor, Elise on top while Max’s wet hair created a puddle on the tile beneath them. They didn’t bother to turn off the water.

  Her hair was still wet when she returned to Mission Beach. She could’ve walked into her apartment and found all of her possessions in the midst of Iris and Megan’s clutches and she wouldn’t care. This was he kind of effect love had on her. This was why it happened very rarely.

  She wondered how on earth she was going to write with her head continuously floating back to the moment he’d called her his girlfriend, or the way he had hovered over her the night before. She decided to head to Starbucks in Pacific Beach for a coffee before she got to work.

  Scrubbles was crying incessantly on the front door step when Elise returned to her apartment. Obviously hungry, Elise wondered how long he had been locked outside. Her roommates were both sprawled across the couch wearing last night’s makeup and watching a Real World: Mexico marathon on MTV. A graveyard of empty vodka bottles and beer cans covered their coffee table, their glass necks sticking up like tombstones. The remnants of a DiGiorno pizza lay on the floor beneath their feet, and if Elise wasn’t mistaken, she thought she had actually seen the pizza there three days ago. They hardly even looked up when she passed them. She wondered how they couldn’t have noticed the cat.

  Before changing out of her clothes from the previous evening she called Carly. She was dying to talk to someone, especially her best friend. She was greeted with her voice
mail and wasn’t surprised. “Call me as soon as you get this. I have to tell you about last night,” she said before hanging up.

  When she returned to the living room, it was a commercial break. “What are you up to?” they asked.

  “I was just gonna head out for a coffee. You guys wanna come?”

  “Yeah. Let’s take the Saturn,” Iris said. “You coming, Megan?”

  “Sure. I’ll drive.”

  “You drove the Saturn yesterday. I’ll drive it.”

  One would’ve thought they were arguing over a convertible Porsche, but it was actually the lavender four-door sedan in their parking garage with cloth seats.

  “I got it washed, though, so I should get to drive it.”

  “I’ll drive there, and you can drive home.”

  “Fine.”

  They both wore pajama bottoms and T-shirts and Elise sort of wished she hadn’t asked them to go. She would have to wait for them to get dressed, and she really just wanted to get her coffee and return. However, the girls slipped on sandals, grabbed their wallets, and headed to the front door in their pajamas.

  They passed the fifteen-year-old minivan that Iris and Megan shared on the way to the Saturn, and Elise now understood why they argued so much over who got to drive their roommate’s car. The gray van had a cracked windshield and was missing every single hubcap.

  Elise climbed into the backseat. As soon as Iris turned the ignition, Megan rolled down all the windows and the sun roof and quickly cranked up the Potter CD in the stereo. She swerved out of the space and backed directly into a metal trash can behind her. “What the hell, Iris!” Megan screeched. “I knew I should’ve driven.”

  “How the hell was I supposed to see that? And you’re the swift one who parked right next to the trash can.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault?”