Friends With Multiple Benefits

by Luke Young

  I close my eyes and take another whiff. I’m salivating like crazy and starving, after having nothing more than a yogurt with granola all day, I’m ready for some real food. And this is my absolute favorite, her famous meat sauce over ziti. Because ziti is the gold standard of pasta, just the right size noodle with those little tunnels, which not only trap pockets of delicious sauce, but also allow the prongs of your fork inside for clean and secure lifting to your waiting mouth. They cook evenly, sans ridges like a rigatoni, which invariably ends up being partially over and undercooked and unlike spaghetti noodles, which are so messy, even an expertly spun forkful has the tendency to flop around launching sauce shrapnel everywhere. I say, give me ziti any day. In fact, they should really stop making all other forms of noodles, well, except for lasagna. Ah, lasagna— there’s a good chance I might be clutching my chest right now if she was pulling one of those out of the oven.

  Shaking my head, I return from my pasta fantasy, frowning as I notice she’s not running the cold water while draining. I don’t say a word about it, even though we’ve discussed many times what running boiling water down the drain can do to your pipes. Why risk a fight when I’m about to get a plate full of heaven? I’ll save it for another noodle and another day.

  “When’s the last time we had meat sauce?” I ask.

  Turning to me, she simply shrugs.

  I sit down with my heaping plate before me and dig in. Closing my eyes, I savor the taste moaning in pleasure. I cover my half full mouth with my napkin and mumble, “Oh man, this is good.”

  She sits next to me and I notice her plate contains only a few dozen noodles barely covered with sauce, so I ask, “What’s the matter? You feel okay?”

  “Just not very hungry.”

  “Well, it’s amazing… as usual.”

  After carefully sliding my three pronged fork into three noodles, I scoop under a pool of sauce full of meat, admire the sight for a moment, and then slide it into my mouth. She’s staring at me with a slightly disgusted look. I quickly chew, but not nearly enough, then swallow fighting to suppress my ‘What-About-Bob’ reaction to this mouthful. I catch her rolling her eyes a bit and give her a sorrowful shrug. “Sorry, I’ll slow down.”

  “No, enjoy it.” She shoots me a slight smile and moves her noodles around her plate with her fork before skewering one and bringing it to her mouth.

  Taking a slice of Italian bread, I drown it in sauce and take a bite, letting my lids close for a moment before forcing them open. “Sorry, I know you hate it when I have sex with your sauce.”

  She shakes her head, curling her lip and either fighting back a laugh or the urge to stab me with her butter knife, but I’m not sure which. A memory pops into my brain and I smile. “Hey, you remember when we were dating that summer and your father would always be sitting in that chair in the living room while everyone was in the dining room? From that angle he looked like he was naked in that chair wearing only those little shorts.”

  “Yeah…” She replies, disinterested, with not even a chuckle.

  I’m convinced now she wants to stab me. “You’re not still mad about that show are you?”

  “No, I’m—”

  “Cause I must have set the DVR wrong or something, but I was able to download the entire video to my phone while I was at work. I figured you could watch it while we drive up to the outlets this weekend. You know your birthday is coming up and we could have lunch at that place you like.”

  This seems to catch her off guard as she makes a face, so I ask, “You still want to go, right?”

  “Um, I, uh… We’ll see.”

  I shovel in only two noodles this time, and chew slowly while giving her a controlled smile as I swallow. “I watched some of that show at lunch today and I can’t believe we were at the bar the night that girl went missing. That’s just crazy isn’t it?”

  “Yes, look Ben I think—”

  “So you never met Jordan?”

  “No,” she fires back quickly.

  “He went to Towson too. Do you really think he killed her? I mean, they don’t have any real evid—”

  “Ben, I need to…” Emily begins before closing her eyes and rubbing her hands over her face.

  “What is it?” I ask then take another bite.

  “I think we should…” She takes a deep breath. “I’m… I’m leaving you.”

  “What?” I suppress a chuckle. “What are you talking about?”

  Curling her lip, she looks away out the patio door toward the pool before turning back to me with a tear running down her face. “I can’t do this anymore. I think we should split up.”

  “You’re serious?” I wipe the sauce off my face and push my half full plate away. “I know things between us haven’t been great, but—”

  “Not great?” She scoffs. “Not great. That’s how you would describe this?” She sniffles and grabs a napkin off the table and quickly wipes her nose. “You can honestly say you’re happy?” Looking at me pointedly, she awaits my response.

  “Oh God no. Happy? We’re married.” I shoot her a skeptical look. “Are we supposed to actually be happy?”

  “Yeah, we’re supposed to be happy.”

  “Name one couple you know who are happy?”

  Rolling her eyes, she says, “That’s not the point.”

  “Come on you’re kidding, right? What is it, the anniversary of the first time we held hands or something and everyone we know is going to jump out and yell sur—”

  “Ben, no, this is not a joke.”

  Letting that statement sink in, I poke at the ziti with my fork. “Okay, so…” Suddenly my eyes shoot wide open. “Wait, you’re not seeing someone else are you?”

  “No!”

  I scoff before giving her an evil smile. “That’s right, you couldn’t be. You don’t actually need any sex.”

  She appears to be reaching for the knife. “I do too.”

  “Well I’m right here baby. I’ve been right here for the last ten years, waiting. If you wanted me, you could have let me know.”

  “Oh, I have to let you know. That was my job?” She folds her arms and refuses to look me in the eye.

  “Well, yeah it became your job after I tried and tried for more than a year to put us back on track after all the fertility clinic tests and that whole nightmare you put me through.”

  “I put you through.” Her jaw drops open. “Seriously, I put you through? You wanted a baby just as much as I did.”

  “Yeah maybe at first, but you, you were obsessed… like without a baby we were nothing. You know, I have friends at work with kids and they’re miserable. Yeah, miserable… Broke and constantly doing homework, driving them everywhere, never getting to go out… do you know what time you have to get up in the morning to get your kids off to high school, huh?”

  She just stares back with a bored expression, but I plow ahead anyway.

  “5:30. Yeah, 5:30… Even Matt Lauer gets to sleep later than that.”

  Letting out a shallow breath, she wipes away another tear. “I know you wanted a baby.”

  “I did, but I wasn’t willing to throw us away because of it. You’re the one who gave up on me when we… all… found… out how pathetic my sperm are— your doctor, your family, the fertility doctor, all the nurses… hell, even the receptionists at the clinic looked at me funny whenever I walked past her to that room.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You never looked at me the same way again.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You know it is. In your heart you know it is.” After a few moments of complete silence I ask, “So if you’re not leaving me for someone else, what’s this about?”

  “I just can’t do it anymore and I, I…”

  “What?”

  “I still want a baby. I’m forty five and I don’t have much time.”

  “Now you want a baby?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Um, we could have gone th
rough with the adoption. We just needed—”

  “Don’t start.” She shakes her head and groans. “You’re the one who found something wrong with every baby the lawyer presented us with.”

  “Forgive me for being a little careful after we lost thirty grand on the one and then the other fell through the day it was born. Remember, you cried for a week.”

  “That Bennett girl was going to give us her baby.” She wipes her tears again. “I know she was.”

  “I didn’t trust her.”

  “I did.”

  “The one who wanted us to pay for her breast implants and two weeks in Hawaii?” I look at her, dismayed. “That one?”

  “She only wanted a tummy tuck.”

  “Oh, okay, yeah,” I fire back sarcastically while giving her a tired look.

  We look at each other, but neither of us says another word. I pull my eyes away from her first and focus instead to my only friend in the room, my big plate of ziti. “So, what, my favorite meal is supposed to cushion the blow of all this?”

  “I just thought… I don’t know.”

  “And what?” I sigh and now I’m the one curling my lip and fighting back tears. “You want me to move out?”

  “No, I’m going to move in with my parents until I figure out what I’m doing next.”

  “You have a lawyer?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “When did you decide all this?” I ask.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Can you honestly say you haven’t been too?”

  I nod in halfhearted agreement. “So, I guess there’s nothing else to talk about. That’s it.”

  “No, not right now.”

  Rising to her feet, she moves away from the table and grabs her purse. “I think I’m just going to go.”

  I watch in disbelief as she heads toward the garage door. “Don’t you need to pack anything?”

  “Already did. Everything’s in the car.”

  “Shit, really?”

  She nods her head slowly and gives me a sad look. “I’ll call you in a couple days and we’ll figure out all the rest.”

  “Okay.”

  She turns and walks out the door.

  Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath and run my hands over my face. I suppose it’s fitting that our breakup or whatever the hell you want to call that thing that just transpired between us was as innocuous and numb as the last ten years of our marriage. When I open my eyes, I notice our wedding picture hanging on the wall in the great room. God, she looked so beautiful that day. Shit… I actually had hair. My heart feels like it’s thumping out of my chest and I grip the table with both hands and slump back in my chair looking out the sliding glass door at the trees.

  The house is eerily quiet and I really don’t know how I feel or how I’m supposed to feel right now. I run my tongue around my mouth and the only thing I’m sure of is that I’m incredibly thirsty. In my excitement over getting to this meal, I forgot a drink so I head to the refrigerator and grab a beer. If ever I needed one, it’s now. After twisting off the top, I chug half of it then grab a second and return to the table. I pull the plate in front of me, pausing a moment just looking at it as a tiny smile spreads over my face. Selecting four noodles this time, I scoop up a giant glob of meat sauce and shovel it in and for some reason all I can think is I wish I had watched over her shoulder a few more times while she made the sauce so I’d have a better idea how to do it myself.

  End of excerpt - CHANCES AREN’T is available now.