Putting Out Fires (2 page)
Authors: Marie Sexton
“Fine,” I said. “But I still want to do something for him.” “So give him a blow job.”
“Oh God!” I said, trying not to be embarrassed, because my discomfort would only amuse him more. Angelo and I talked about almost everything. “Almost” being the operative term. The one thing we never talked about was sex. His casual attitude about fucking other men was completely foreign to me, and my own modesty about my relationship with Jared was wildly amusing to him. “I meant something besides that.”
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“You’re right,” he said in a tone that told me he wasn’t about to let me off the hook yet. “A blow job’s more of a birthday thing. Do somethin’ you don’t normally do but that you know he’ll get off on.”
“Angelo, you’re
still
not helping.”
“Fine,” he said. “You want real ideas?”
“Yes.”
No!
Of course not!”
“That’s probably not Jared’s style anyway. How ’bout leather?” He looked me up and down in a blatantly sexual way that Angelo had
never
used on me before. I hoped like hell he never used it on me again. “Definitely a harness,” he said. “You’d look good in somethin’ like that.”
Which of course embarrassed me to no end, which only amused him more. It was infuriating, but the truth was, I
had
asked for suggestions. “Even if I wanted to do that, where the hell am I going to get something like that in the next few hours, Ang? I’m pretty sure the Coda grocery store doesn’t sell them.”
“Good point.”
“Any other ideas?”
“You ever let him tie you up?”
“No.”
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“Maybe you should tie
him
up.”
My discomfort was quickly reaching the unbearable point. “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll think of something on my own.”
“Sure you will,” he said, in a way which indicated he was quite sure I wouldn’t. I hated to admit he was probably right.
I was turning to leave when Zach called out, “Matt?” It surprised me, because Zach and I didn’t talk much. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other, but the truth was we had nothing in common except for Angelo and Jared. Most of the time, Zach and I simply had nothing to say to one another.
“Yeah?” I asked, turning back.
“Make him dinner.”
I could almost have kissed him. It was such a simple suggestion and yet so perfect. Jared and I made dinner together a lot, but usually simple things like spaghetti or sloppy joes. More often than not we ordered pizza or ate out. But coming home to a real dinner? I knew Jared would actually appreciate that. How had I not thought of it sooner? “That’s a good idea,” I said.
“I guess,” Angelo said, “if you wanna be all vanilla about it.” But he was only being a smartass for the sake of giving me a hard time. The smile he gave me wasn’t mocking. It was genuinely cheery.
“Here.” Zach wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. The words meant nothing to me. They were Spanish, or maybe Italian. “Ask them for that at the liquor store on the corner,” he said. “They carry it there, and it’s
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pretty good. Open it when you start dinner so it can breathe, and it’ll be perfect by the time you eat.”
I wasn’t really sure about wine, but at least he was trying. “Thanks, Zach,” I said. I turned to Angelo, who was still grinning at me. “Thanks for nothing, Ang,” I said. He happily flipped me the bird, and I laughed. I was just relieved to have a plan.
After that, it was back to the grocery store. I bought steak and bottled marinade and broccoli and potatoes. I paused again in the Valentine aisle, eyeing the remaining bunches of flowers. I couldn’t hand Jared a bouquet of roses without feeling like a complete ass, but I could at least put them on the table. Somehow that seemed acceptable. I tossed one of the smaller arrangements in the basket. I stopped by the liquor store Zach had mentioned and bought the wine and a corkscrew to open it with, because I was pretty sure we didn’t own one. Jared and I never drank anything but Dr Pepper and beer, but I figured the wine was worth a shot. I was trying to do something special, after all.
My first order of business upon returning home was to put the steaks in the marinade. Then I began to unbury our dining room table from the pile of crap that always seemed to collect there. By myself, I managed to keep things tidy, but Jared was a complete slob. I counted it as some kind of victory that I managed to confine the worst of his mess to this one room. I gathered up bills, newspapers, school papers, and coupons that Jared always thought he’d use but then forgot to take to the store. Scooby’s adoption papers and piles of long-forgotten Christmas cards. Coffee cups and paper cups and the pair of gloves I’d been looking for since November. I was starting to wish I’d opted for eating out.
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Finally, the expanse of polished wood that was our dining room table was bare, and I began to contemplate the actual cooking process. I did as Zach had suggested and opened the wine first so it could breathe, whatever the hell that meant. I went out our sliding glass back door onto the patio where our grill sat. Unfortunately, it was covered in snow. We’d had a lot more snow than normal that year. The back of our house faced north, and while the Colorado sun had melted most of it, the area that was ever in the shade of our house was still frozen and possibly would be for another month. I cleared the grill off, shivering the entire time. I opened the lid, turned on the gas, and hit the “ignite” button.
I hit it again and again and again. Still nothing. The grill was only a year old, but those stupid buttons always quit working before too long. I went back inside and hunted for matches. I looked in every single cabinet in the kitchen. I looked in the drawers of the coffee table. In the end, I even hunted in our bedroom, even though I had no idea why they would have been there.
I ran across the street to our neighbor’s house. Jim was a twenty-something college dropout who worked at the grocery store. I was pretty sure Jim was constantly stoned, and the fact that he seemed half afraid of me and wouldn’t ever let me through his front door pretty much confirmed it. Still, he was a nice enough guy. He left me shivering on his porch and finally came back out the front door. “No matches, but I have an extra lighter.”
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He handed me a Bic with an end that was obviously stained with resin. The guy was smart enough to keep me out of his house, but not so smart that he wouldn’t hand me a lighter that had been used to smother a smoldering bowl. I sighed. Sometimes I wished I could turn off my cop brain. “Thanks, Jim. You’re a life saver.”
I ran back across the street, up our steps, pulled open the front door—
Well, I attempted to pull it open. I failed. It was locked.
“Fuck!” Jared always teased me that my habit of locking our front door on the way out reeked of paranoia. I thought it was basic security. I didn’t even realize I did it half the time. This time it proved to be rather inconvenient since my keys were still inside, hanging on the hook by the door. The gate to the back yard couldn’t be opened from the outside—that was also basic security, no matter what Jared said—so it meant I had to scramble over the stupid thing, tearing my shirt in the process. “Fuck!” I swore again. But at least the back door was unlocked, and I was able to get back in the house. Scooby greeted me with unabashed enthusiasm as I stood there trying to warm up.
Of course, about two seconds later I realized I needed to be back outside. I went out to the grill and tried the ignition switch again. Still nothing. So I used Jim’s Bic, turning up the gas.
nothing.
I turned the gas up all the way, alternately hitting the button and trying to light the grill with the Bic. Nothing worked. It occurred to me that if there had actually been propane in the tank, I would probably have blown myself up
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by now. I should probably have been thankful for small favors. Somehow though, I wasn’t.
I debated going to the store and getting a new tank, but five o’clock was approaching fast, and I didn’t want to lose the time. For the first time ever, I found myself wishing that we owned one of those stupid George Foreman grills. I went back inside into the kitchen and stood there waiting for inspiration to strike. Pan-cooking the steak seemed unbelievably lame. Was it possible to cook steaks in the oven? I looked at the controls on our oven, as if there might magically be a “grill steak” setting, and that was when I saw it: BROIL. That was like grilling, right? I turned the broiler on, then opened the door and bent over to watch with wideeyed amazement as the coils at the top of the oven turned a menacing red. Perfect! I’d never broiled anything before, but how hard could it be? Take raw meat, apply heat, and voila! A grilled steak that I didn’t have to freeze my ass off for.
The vegetables would probably take longer, though. I’d been planning to bake the potatoes, but having to use the broiler seemed to negate that idea. The microwave was out because Jared swore that the inside of microwave-baked potatoes always tasted like rubber. I thought he was full of shit, but since I was making this dinner for him, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and mash them instead. I’d never done that either, but it didn’t look too complicated. I peeled them first. We didn’t have one of those fancy little peelers, so I used a paring knife as I’d seen my mom do a billion times growing up. She made it look so easy. My attempt was far less successful. I seemed to peel away half of each potato in the process, but eventually I prevailed. I chopped them up, put them in a pan in water, put the pan
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on the burner and turned the burner on high.
I checked the clock and was alarmed at how late it was. I had apparently spent a ridiculous amount of time butchering the potatoes.
I chopped the broccoli as quickly as I could. This I knew how to do—just a bit of water in the bottom of the pan so that they’d steam more than boil—then tossed them on the burner and turned that burner on high too. There was something else, though, if you wanted to steam vegetables: a lid. I had to dig for a while, but I finally found one in the drawer under the stove. It was glass and didn’t quite fit the pan, but I figured it was close enough.
All that was left was the steak. I still had the broiler on. I took the steaks out of the marinade and put them on the top oven rack and closed the oven door. I checked the clock again. Not bad. I was starting to think I could pull this off.
I took plates and silverware and set the table. I looked for wine glasses. I finally found them on the top shelf, way in the back. I had to pull out a strange assortment of shot glasses and vases and tiny juice glasses—all the stuff we never used—to get to them, but I finally pulled them from the wreckage. I shoved the rest of the crap to the back of the countertop to be dealt with later. The wine glasses had been stored upside down, and their bases were coated with a layer of dust and grime. God knew when they’d last been used. I washed them and put them on the table. I’d need a vase for the flowers. At least I knew we had one of those since I’d just pulled some out while looking for the glasses. I went back into the kitchen to get one and stopped short at what I saw.
Putting Out Fires |
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of one of the saucepans. I pulled it off the burner and looked into it. It was full of little smoking pieces of green charcoal. Confused, I looked at the other pan on the stove.
In my hurry to get things done, I’d put the lid on the wrong pot. The potatoes, in their full pan of water, were just starting to boil, with the glass lid sitting on top. The broccoli, which had been in less than a half-inch of water so it could steam, had no lid at all. The water had boiled away, and the broccoli was now nothing but carbon. Nice.
I tossed the pan of smoking broccoli into the sink and took the glass lid off the potatoes. But something was still smoking.
I put the lid down and opened the oven, and was almost blown over by the wave of black smoke that came pouring out. The steaks were sizzling, burned on top, curling in on themselves, the bottoms still pink. The bottom of the oven was an absolute mess and seemed to be the source of at least half of the smoke. Apparently, you weren’t supposed to put the steaks right on the rack. Maybe I was supposed to use a cookie sheet? Not that we owned one of those anyway.
I looked around for a potholder and of course didn’t find one. I did, however, find a dishtowel. I folded it up and pulled the rack out enough that I could pull the steaks out with a fork. I put them on a plate on the counter behind me. If I could just find a pan to put them in, I could cook the other side, and they’d still be edible. Plus, we had the potatoes. Dinner wasn’t a total loss.
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smoke. I opened the cabinet to look for some type of pan that could go under the broiler. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught something glowing red. I turned to see what it was and groaned.
When I’d taken the broccoli off the stove, I hadn’t turned off the burner. It was still on high, bright red and probably hot enough to light a cigarette off. And sitting right on top of it was the glass lid I’d taken off the potatoes.
I was smart enough to not grab it with my bare hands. I picked up the dishtowel I’d used as a potholder and reached to take the lid off the burner. As soon as the towel touched the glass nob on top of the lid, the entire thing shattered. More than shattered, actually. It exploded. It scared the shit out of me, and I dropped the towel, jumping back away from the flying pieces of glass. A couple landed on the floor, and I could see the linoleum melting underneath them. I stomped on them, as if they were actually on fire, but all I really succeeded in doing was grinding the hot glass deeper into the floor.
