Dating the Devil

by Lia Romeo

  “So what do you do, Lewis?” I ask him.

  He smiles. “I’m a recruiter.”

  I wait for more, but nothing else is forthcoming, and I have to get to the office. I put the business card into my purse and slip on my heels, wincing as they rub against blisters from last night. “Well. Um. I guess I’ll see you tonight then.”

  “I’ll see you tonight, Lucy.”

  Did I tell him my name last night? I must have. He probably told me his too and I just didn’t remember.

  On my way out, I notice what I was too, um, busy to pay attention to the night before: his apartment is gorgeous. It’s huge—by New York standards, anyway, meaning the whole place is about the size of my parents’ basement in Kansas—and looks like it’s been professionally decorated. The walls are painted red and black and the furniture is teak and leather. There’s a zebra print rug on the floor in the living room, and a painting in bold blocks of color that’s probably an original something-or-other above the couch. It’s very bachelor pad, but tasteful.

  The whole place has an empty, un-lived-in feel, though. There aren’t any magazines lying around half-read, or dirty dishes in the sink, or shoes kicked off next to the couch, or any of the other signs of human disorder that our apartment is full of despite Mel’s best efforts. I somehow get the sense that he’s not there all that often.

  I take a cab uptown, stopping only to buy a cream-colored cardigan at the Gap to make my outfit from last night marginally more work-appropriate. I’d love to go home and shower, but I’ve gotten two more frantic calls from Linda and reassured her that I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. There’s nothing I can do about my hair, a snarl of tangles—I have a quick flashback of him pulling on it last night—so I pull it back as tightly as I can with the rubber band I have around my wrist.

  In the cab, I send a quick text to Mel and Nat: “Omg—met the hottest guy last night and SLEPT w him—and having dinner tonight! Can I borrow an outfit?” Then I pay the driver seventeen dollars (seventeen dollars! This is what I get for having sleepovers in the financial district) and get out, mentally readying myself for a long day.

  Our office is in a grungy building in the garment district. To get in, you actually have to go through the store on the ground floor, which sells silk at wholesale prices, and then up a dimly lit staircase to the fifth floor.

  When Kruger comes in to town for business meetings, Linda rents a conference room at the Marriott. But we do all our work here because of the incredibly low rent she gets from Abdul, the owner of the silk store—and of the building—who Linda is sleeping with. (Okay, that’s just my theory. She calls him a “very dear friend,” but I don’t have any “very dear friends” who take me on Caribbean vacations, and Linda and Abdul spent last New Year’s together in the Bahamas. But Linda went through a rough divorce a few years ago, and I think she deserves any “very dear friends” she can get.)

  Linda is standing outside, wearing a cream-colored cashmere turtleneck . . . and her pajama bottoms. At least my outfit is more work-appropriate than that. She’s wearing glasses and her hair is a rat’s nest. “Lucy, thank God!” she exclaims as soon as she sees me, and begins talking a mile a minute about how incredible it would be if we could actually get the “Good Morning America” placement, and how urgent it is that she messenger the sample over to their offices immediately.

  Upstairs, we whip up a quick press release for the StickVac, which is so new that we haven’t even come up with any marketing materials yet. Then we take a few “beauty shots” of the vac against a black background, and one “action shot” of me, in my black dress and heels, vacuuming with it (okay, so maybe it’s a good thing that I’m still wearing this outfit!)

  A few hours later, we’ve put together a credible press kit, which we messenger over to Linda’s producer friend along with the sample. And when her friend calls to tell her she’s planning to feature the StickVac on Friday’s segment, Linda gives me a huge hug and tells me she couldn’t have done it without me, which almost makes up for the nine a.m. phone call (almost).

  It’s two p.m. at this point—plenty of time to go home and nap before dinner (okay, and stop at Aldo to buy a pair of leopard print pumps, which will be perfect with the sexy black silk top I’m hoping Nat’s going to let me borrow). Except that when I walk into the apartment, Nat is having a séance in the living room.

  Nat’s father died when she was twelve, leaving her with a lot of money (which is why she can afford to live in New York without really working, aside from the occasional modeling job) and a strong belief in the supernatural. Every few weeks, she tries to contact her dad in the great beyond, which involves pulling the shades, lighting candles and incense, and playing AC/DC—his favorite band—at maximum volume. She says sometimes she feels his presence, though she hasn’t yet succeeded in having an actual conversation . . . though, what with the AC/DC, I’m not sure how she would.

  So after trying to nap for an hour or so, I give up, take a shower, and (once the séance is over) drag Nat to Starbucks for lattes and gossip. Mel is spending the day hiking in the Catskills with Brandon. But Nat is excited enough for both of them, squealing over all the details of my wild night and telling me all about her own, which featured unsatisfying sex with the banker, and then much more satisfying sex with a guy she used to date, who sent her a late-night text shortly after she’d kicked the banker out of bed. So now the guy she used to date is obsessed with her again—he’s texted her fourteen times today already—and it’s going to be so annoying to convince him all over again that she’s not actually interested (despite the satisfying sex). I try to look appropriately sympathetic.

  Back at the apartment, Nat helps me get ready for dinner—her black silk top, my own dark denim jeans, the leopard print heels, and smoky eye makeup, which, despite having taken the same tutorial at Saks that Nat and Mel did, I can never manage to do on myself without looking like a Gothic clown.

  I take the subway downtown, having spent enough on cab fare today already. I’m half-expecting him to stand me up, but he’s waiting outside on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and looking unbelievably handsome in jeans and a navy blazer over a pale blue button-down. I start to blush just looking at him.

  The restaurant is small and romantic, dark wood on the walls and candles on the tables. We’re escorted to a tiny table near the window. Lewis takes a quick glance at the wine list, then orders a bottle of ’84 viognier.

  “If you like pinot, I think you’ll like this,” he says. “I’m trying to expand your horizons, but gently.” He says it with such a sexy sardonic smile that I can’t be irritated.

  While we’re sipping the wine—which is excellent—he asks me about work. To my relief, he’s easy to talk to. (I wasn’t sure, given that the night before we hadn’t, um, done much talking.) He asks all the right questions in all the right places, and over grapes and brie, and then a delicious roasted chicken dish that we share, I find myself telling him all about it: my tiny, cluttered office, my low salary, my frustrations with spending my days describing vacuums. A few times I try to ask him questions about what he does, but he always turns the conversation deftly back in my direction—which is honestly such a nice change from most of the men I date that I let him.

  And then he says: “I could get you a new job.”

  “What?” I sputter, spraying tiny drops of viognier onto the table. He’s enough of a gentleman not to notice.

  “I know some people at some of the bigger firms. Edelman, maybe, or Cohn & Wolfe. I’d just have to trade in a couple of favors.”

  “Seriously?”

  I’m not sure why I believe that he could actually get me a job, especially with the economy the way it is. Maybe it’s the confidence with which he says it. Maybe it’s his apartment, which has to be upwards of five thousand dollars a month—anyone with that much money has got to have some connections. Or maybe it’s just that he’s so incredibly sexy that I can’t imagine anyone denying him anything.

>   I have a vision of myself, dressed in a slimming black suit and sky high heels . . . never mind that I can’t walk in anything much higher than a couple of inches. I’m striding along the sidewalk, heads turning admiringly as I walk by, towards a set of double glass doors. I toss my hair, pull open the doors and enter the sun-filled lobby, then ascend the staircase to my office (without tripping on my sky high heels, of course) and begin making phone calls to important media people.

  “Besides,” he says, “Kruger’s a pretty big client. And you’ve had a lot of contact with them, right?”

  “Sure, yeah. I talk to their CEO all the time.” I’m always calling Jeff Boseman to go over product details, and we have strategy meetings with him at least once a month.

  “So if you were to jump ship . . . you might be able to bring the client with you?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Would that be . . .?”

  “Necessary?” he says. “Probably. With the economy the way it is, nobody’s hiring anyone who can’t prove they can bring in business . . .”

  The vision in my head changes, and now I’m picturing Linda. She’s sitting on the floor of our tiny office, surrounded by piles of clutter—which she undoubtedly would be without me to organize everything for her. She’s wearing her pajamas and tearing at her hair . . . because the business she’s spent the past four years building . . . that she and I have spent the past four years building . . . is gone.

  “I can’t,” I say. He gives me an incredulous look. I did just spend the past half hour complaining about my job. “I can’t do that to Linda.”

  “You don’t owe your boss anything,” he says.

  “I do, though. She gave me a job when I first moved to the city and nobody else would. I can’t just up and steal her only client.”

  “It wouldn’t be stealing. If the client chose to come with you, it would be because they felt you were the best woman for the job.”

  “Yeah, I—I know, but I can’t. I really can’t.” He looks down. Somehow I feel like I’ve disappointed him. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your offer—I do, I really do, I just—Linda and I have worked together for a long time, and I just wouldn’t feel right about it.”

  He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. “Dessert?”

  Half an hour and half of a decadent chocolate mousse later, I find myself in a cab headed back to his apartment. I’d planned to give him a goodnight kiss, go home, and finally get some sleep, but the goodnight kiss had been so electrifying that when he’d hailed a taxi and asked me, “One stop?” I hadn’t even wanted to stop kissing long enough to say yes.

  So now we’re wrapped around each other in the back seat of the cab, and being at least somewhat sober this time, I’m embarrassed about it . . . not embarrassed enough to stop, of course, but enough to be relieved when we’ve made it out of the cab and into the privacy of his apartment. We’re lying on his king-sized bed and I’m down to my red lace bra and thong (my best set), and he’s kissing my collarbone, leaving tiny, fiery imprints on my skin, and I’m fumbling with his belt buckle, though I’m too distracted by his lips to be able to actually unfasten it. And that’s when I smell something burning. And I don’t mean figuratively. Sure, my skin feels like it’s on fire . . . but something is actually burning, too, and it’s somewhere nearby.

  When I was young, about five years old, I was in the kitchen with my mom while she was cooking dinner. I wanted to help, so I stood on tiptoes to stir the boiling pot of spaghetti, and my long, straggly brown hair got too close to the gas burner and caught flame. I started screaming, and my mom grabbed a rolled-up newspaper and frantically beat the flames out. I escaped with nothing more serious than hair that was long on one side and singed shoulder length on the other, and an exciting story to tell my friends the next day at school. But what I’d never forgotten was the harsh, sulfurous odor . . . the same odor I’m smelling now.

  “Stop,” I say, sitting up and pulling away from him.

  “What?” He tries to pull me back down and start kissing me again.

  “Do you smell that?”

  “What? No. I don’t smell anything.”

  This isn’t exactly surprising. I have an unusually sensitive sense of smell. I can’t even wear perfume because it smells so overpoweringly, cloyingly sweet to me. “Something’s burning,” I say.

  “No it isn’t,” he says, and bends down to graze my breasts with his lips.

  “No, seriously.” The burning smell has gotten stronger, and it seems to be coming from the front hallway. I get out of bed, wearing only my red bra and thong.

  “Lucy, wait,” he says. “Everything’s fine. Come back to bed.”

  I ignore him and follow my nose down the hallway. The odor’s getting stronger. It seems to be coming from the front hall closet. But how would something have caught on fire in the closet? I don’t see any smoke coming out from under the door.

  Well, maybe it is just in my head. I open the closet door . . . and scream.

  The inside of the closet is a raging inferno of flames, from floor to ceiling, leaping and twisting and hitting me in the face with a blast of heat. I slam the door shut again. He’s in the hallway now, and I grab his hand, pulling him out the door. “Fire! Fire! Your apartment’s on fire! We have to go! We have to run! Come on! Quick!”

  – 4 –

  FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Lewis and I, along with hundreds of other people, are huddled on the sidewalk outside his building. I’m shivering from a combination of shock and cold, wearing nothing but my underwear and a blanket that Lewis had the presence of mind to grab on our way out. I’ve wrapped it around me sarong-style, but it doesn’t come down very far, and there’s a lot of bare thigh visible.

  I would be embarrassed, except that the woman next to me is in a camisole and a thong. She’s explaining to the crowd of men who’ve gathered around her that she sleeps this way, and she was so disoriented when the fire alarm woke her up that she didn’t think to put any pants on. Though somehow she did have the presence of mind to slip on a pair of feathered mules. She’s tall and blonde, and I can’t help sneaking envious glances at her perfectly toned, tanned ass, so different from my white, dimply one.

  Lewis, however, hasn’t even glanced in her direction. He’s wrapped me solicitously in the crook of his arm, and he’s telling me not to worry, everything’s going to be fine. His fingers are five individual prints of heat on my bare skin. I have the sense that I should be reassuring him, given that it’s his apartment that’s on fire, but he doesn’t seem particularly worried.

  In fact, he seems as completely at ease here, standing on the street in his socks and jeans and half-unbuttoned shirt, as he did in the bar last night or the restaurant earlier this evening. I wonder if he ever went through an awkward phase, if there’s a pimply-faced Lewis with braces and a bad haircut hidden in photo albums somewhere in his mother’s basement, or if he’s always been this effortless, this comfortable in his own smooth, tanned skin.

  After a few minutes, the firefighters come downstairs, sweaty and streaked with ash, and tell us they’ve put the fire out and everybody can go back inside. Lewis squeezes my shoulder. “See?” he says. “I told you everything would be fine.”

  Everybody except Lewis and me, that is—says the tall, dark-haired fireman, older than the others, who has the words “Deputy Chief” on his helmet. He has to ask us a couple of questions. Lewis asks him if we can talk inside, and I hurry gratefully into the warmth of the lobby. Late September nights in New York are unpredictable, sometimes balmy and sometimes cold. This is one of the cold ones—it couldn’t be much more than sixty degrees. A pleasant temperature in a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, but not such a pleasant temperature in a thong and a blanket.

  Inside, I clutch my blanket tightly around me, trying to shield my mostly bare body from the stares of five uniformed firefighters. Although they are kind of cute . . . young, clean-cut, well-muscled, eyes bright in faces streaked dark with soot. But none as good-looking as Lewis, I
decide with satisfaction. I used to play this game when I was with Ben—every time I saw an attractive man on the street, I’d ask myself: “Is he as cute as my boyfriend?” With Ben, I often had to admit that the answer was yes. Ben was boyishly handsome, and he looked nice in a suit, but he was basically ordinary. But in the last twenty-four hours, I haven’t seen a single man I find as attractive as Lewis. Not that Lewis is my boyfriend, of course.

  “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” the assistant fire chief is saying. “A fireproof closet.”

  A fireproof closet? Why would anyone want a fireproof closet?

  “What made you think to do that?” the fireman continues.

  “I didn’t,” Lewis says. “It must have been the previous owners.”

  “You didn’t put in the sheet metal? Or the flame-retardant rubber around the door?”

  “No,” Lewis says. “I had no idea. I don’t even use that closet—I’ve got plenty of storage space in the bedroom.”

  “Do you have any idea how the fire started?” I ask the fireman.

  “Well, that’s the strangest thing about it. Like you said, Mr. . . .”

  “Mephisto.”

  “Right—there was nothing in there. If there had been, we would’ve seen ashes. So how does a fire start in a fireproof closet with nothing in it to burn?”

  He looks at us as if he expects us to answer his question.

  “I don’t know,” Lewis says. Suddenly there’s a dangerous edge to his voice. “But I hope you’re not suggesting I had something to do with it. Because I have an excellent alibi.” He looks at me and smiles sideways, and I blush bright red.

  “No,” the fireman says, “There’s no evidence of any accelerant—no traces of gasoline, turpentine, anything like that. So unless you started the fire out of thin air, then no, I don’t think you had anything to do with it.” He frowns, shaking his head. “It’s damned strange, though. I’ve heard of these spontaneous combustion events . . . but I never thought I’d actually see one. You folks were lucky, that’s all I can say,” he says.