Screwmates(17)

Texting was an exciting new development in our pseudo-relationship. I fervently hoped we could graduate to sexting soon, but for now, this was exciting. I waited, staring at the phone, touching the screen every time it began to dim, until I saw the little wiggly dots that meant he was texting (or sexting?) back.

The dots disappeared. I waited a little longer. The dots reappeared. I stared. They wiggled. I stared. They disappeared.

Half an hour had disappeared as well. So had half my battery. I sighed, and plugged my phone in, promising myself I'd be cool. It was just that tonight was going to be my first shot at a full-on seduction, and I was certain I had all my ducks in a row. All except for the one that was him. So I needed that confirmation. Soon.

To distract myself, I pulled out my new favorite sketchpad. The one that I'd divided up all neat into variously sized panels. The one I was drawing my sitcomic in. The Screwmates Sketchbook.

Lest you think I was going all Chasing Amy here, the comic was still half fictional. Fanfiction of my own life, even. For example, the characters in the comic had been having torrid sex for some time now. Torrid, multiorgasmic sex. They had mastered, on the first try, the upside-down position from the sex store. Comic Madison (Maddy) was much bendier than real-life Madison.

Lest you think I was going all pornographic here, the sex was still off-page. It was just discussed in great detail during Maddy's weekly coffee dates with Liza, Crimson, and Eva.

Total fiction.

Weirdly, though, it was getting a hell of a response online. Basically every time I opened my browser to upload another page, there were a thousand new followers. Crazy. Pants.

I hadn't exactly told anyone about it, because I wasn't sure it was real. Plus it just seemed like a really awkward convo to have, like "hey ladies, how's life cause I think I might be internet famous now but I can't find a statistic on how many likes you need to qualify". No. I was not going to be that girl.

The girl I was going to be was casually sketching, inking over the best lines, erasing the pencil marks, and not at all shooting mental laser beams at my phone. Finally, it dinged.

Okay.

Whaaaaat. I had waited the better part of an hour for that?! After all that buildup. Overpromising and under-delivering had better not be his bedroom MO, I thought to myself.

When he finally got home, we put on some nice clothes and drove south to the Culinary Center in Overland Park, on the Kansas side of the city.



       
         
       
        

"Toto, we aren't in Missouri anymore!" I said, in my best tremulous Judy Garland voice as we crossed the state line. He chuckled, but I could tell it was just out of politeness. My tummy was starting to feel weird. I so wanted this night to go perfectly, and that was fertile ground for my social awkwardness to start sprouting.

I get so strange when I'm nervous. Always been that way. I had considered taking that part out of the sitcomic, but let's face it. If both characters are perfect, there's no story. So occasionally I even took those two for a test-drive based on what might happen.

Today's episode centered around the cooking class, where Maddy burned absolutely everything, and Markus found her ineptitude sexy. She burned his pants on accident, and he removed them immediately to show her just how uninjured, and yet also searingly hot, he still was.

The double entendres were some of my finest work. I sent a small prayer of gratitude up that Marc didn't seem to know his way around any part of the internet that didn't belong to an academic database. There was just no universe in which I could imagine him being amused by my wild speculation about his horizontal mambo.

My cheeks were bright red as we got out of the car, but he didn't mention it and so neither did I. Only half-pretending to be a little unsteady in my kitten heels, I took his arm. How was it possible that every time I touched him, bright blue sparks flew around the point of contact? Every. Single. Time.

"Welcome to Cooking For Lovers: An Evening of Aphrodisiacs!" proclaimed the sign out front, and Marc did a little double-take. Did I mention the evening was a surprise? Well, that was how seduction worked, wasn't it? If you knew everything that was coming down the pipeline, it would be boring and unsexy. I smoothed down my dress in an attempt to both look nicer and deal with the clamminess of my hands.

"They have wine pairings," I told him joyfully, eager to share my excitement. "You know, if you'd prefer, you can just read the tasting notes and not actually drink."

"Shut up." He was grinning, though, so.

"Aren't you two a handsome couple!" remarked the host as we walked in.

"Oh, we're not-" he started to protest, but I cut him off at the pass.

"Thank you," I said. "Can you even believe this is our ten year anniversary? Thank god we found a sitter, amirite? Good help these days …  my mother always warned me."

"Oh my god, shut up. We aren't a couple. We're just roommates." The panicked look on his face as he explained to the host sort of annoyed me. Which was why-

"Screwmates," I hissed at the host as he yanked me past, and into the classroom kitchen. 

"Not yet!" he called over his shoulder. See, he knew he was being seduced, and handily.

"But soon!" I yelled over him. He'd had the last word too often already.

"I can't take you anywhere," Marc told me.

"Lucky for us, I took you here." Boom. The kitchen smelled fantastic already. It may surprise no one to note that although I would have lied like a rug about it, I couldn't actually identify a single bit of the smell. If pressed, I would have just said it smelled like a nice restaurant, mixed with a hint of Grandma's kitchen.

Later, when I was waxing poetic about it, Marc told me that was bread. I was smelling fresh-baked bread. I never have quite figured out how someone as observational as myself can have such a dull palate.

"Hello, and welcome to a night of romance!" the chef proclaimed from the station at the front of the room. "Prepare to fall in love all over again …  with great flavor."

I so wished I had used that line in my comic.

The appetizer course was that most classic of lusty foods-the oyster. Brief moment of geographical knowledge-Kansas City Missouri only has one kind of native seafood, and that is the mutant kind that comes out of the river that no one eats and is probably dangerous to touch. There's only a single Cajun restaurant in town. So even though I knew oysters were sophisticated and alluring-well, I had never actually had one.

"You've all seen oysters before, but a lot of you probably haven't opened one," chef said, and I nodded pretentiously. If I pretended I was old hat at shucking oysters, then it would only make sense for Marc to acquire the skill. Then I could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labors.

Plus-there was something undeniably sexy about seeing him pry my dinner from the jaws of nature, regardless of how the actual oyster was meant to make you feel.

It was only a very shallow cut he sustained, and considering he opened six oysters, I personally felt like he was a natural.

"Now when people taste wine, they use all kinds of descriptors to tell other people what they're experiencing. You might be surprised to learn that oysters have a taste range just as vast as our favorite grape juices." At this, Marc and I were both nodding arrogantly. We had so many descriptors. Perhaps they were always wrong, but we had pockets full of them.

For example, only five minutes before the oyster shucking, we had both agreed we were enjoying a crisp glass of peach and honey-noted chardonnay.

It was pear and green tea.

My personal consensus was rapidly becoming that the people who wrote those notes on the bottles were just generally drunk. Or flat out making things up. Either way, I just knew we were going to kill it on the oysters.

We adorned our first varietal with drops of lemon juice and dabs of horseradish, and then sipped our little meats out of the shells. Our eyes were locked. They widened together. His watered. Mine did a bit of the same. I swallowed.

So that was an oyster.

"I got hints of ocean … " Marc said tentatively.

"Overtones of mucus," I added. He nodded. I nodded back. It turned out oysters weren't turning either of us on. Unspoken, our thoughts seemed to communicate. Who needed oysters when you could mind meld? I swept our remaining four bivalves (I totally stole that word from Chef) into the trash as Marc refilled our wine glasses.

Appetizer was becoming a very apt name, as my appetite had only grown after we threw our first course out.

My lips were feeling a tad bit numb, which I also chalked up to the seafood, because the rest of my body was starting to feel very sensitive. The heat of the kitchen, the scents in the air, the wine in my glass, and the proximity of Marc …  well, it was all a bit dizzying.



       
         
       
        

I brushed against him more often than I needed to as we prepped our next dish. It wasn't just because I was starving that I was jazzed for it-it was also going to be the fanciest thing that had ever gone into my mouth. There were figs. There was a kind of fresh mozzarella and cream mixture called burrata. And there were goddamn truffles. On top of pasta, which meant automatically that I was going to like it, because a bad pasta is kind of like a bad taco-a myth.