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"Who can tell what type of partner is right for someone else? We can't even judge that for ourselves. Speaking of which! What's the full story on this apartment and the guy who owns it, huh?"
Emma felt her cheeks redden. "Why should my getting this apartment have anything to do with romance?"
Beth raised a brow. "No way you can afford this place on your own. Belltown is muy trendy, and trendy means bucks. So come on, spill! Or better yet, let's go have lunch and then you can spill over the food. I'm starving! But let me go to the bathroom first."
There was no shortage of restaurants in Belltown, and the apartment was within walking distance of both tourist-choked Pike Place Market and the main shopping district in the center of the city, home to upscale malls, department stores, and boutiques. They decided on a bistro a block and a half from the apartment and settled into a booth by the window, where the spring sunlight could warm their skin.
Two baskets full of bread, a bowl of lobster bisque, and another bathroom trip later, Beth put down her spoon and sighed. "Ohhh, that's better."
"You're not going to have room for your entree."
"Ha-watch me. But now, tell me what's up with the apartment."
Emma played with the remains of her salad, driving a candied pecan through an oil slick of balsamic vinaigrette. For the past twenty minutes she'd been debating how much to tell Beth, trying to guess her reaction if she heard the whole truth.
"Like I said, the apartment belongs to a rich man whose house I was cleaning. It's been empty for a few months; he hasn't had time to find a tenant and he thinks he wants to sell the place soon, so he's letting me stay there for a very reasonable price."
Beth gnawed a crust of bread. "Mm-hm. And is he single?"
"Well, yeah," Emma conceded.
"How old?"
Emma shifted in her seat. "Thirty-six."
"Good-looking?"
"Maybe."
"Uh-huh.Isee."
Emma met her eyes, trying to keep hers i
"Has he made a pass at you?"
"Maybe." A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. "And it's not like I haven't wanted to lay my hands on his fine ass."
"Emma!"
"What?!"
"Naughty girl." Beth gri
Emma shrugged.
"He must want you, too. Why else would he let you have the apartment? I bet he's going to make excuses to stop by and 'see how you're doing.' He'll bring instructions to the microwave or pretend there's a leak in the bathroom faucet."
"He hardly needs to make excuses. I offered to make him di
"Emma!"
"There's nothing wrong with making him di
"Of course there's not. I'm just surprised. I've never known you to make a move on a guy."
"They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach." Emma gri
Beth snorted. "I think there's another organ that takes priority. But you're a fabulous cook, and men love food. Have you ever thought about going into catering?"
"No," she said, glad to change the topic. "Being a personal chef crossed my mind, but I'm not going to pursue it for fear of getting sidetracked from architecture." A faint thought flitted through her mind, a distant sense that the pieces of her puzzle had not been put together correctly. She'd offered to cook for Russ the first time she met him…
"Makes sense, I guess," Beth said. "But back to your love slave: I never knew you were attracted to older guys."
The thought Emma had been trying to capture dissipated as she switched her attention to Beth's comment. "He doesn't seem older, except that he doesn't walk around with a baseball cap on sideways, doesn't wear a gold chain around his neck, and I can't imagine him sitting around with his buddies drinking beer and talking about how 'hot' some girl is."
"Since when do guys grow out of that?"
Emma shrugged. "He just doesn't seem that way. He drives a hybrid, for God's sake. Granted, a Lexus high-performance hybrid, but still a hybrid."
"That means nothing. Hybrids are status symbols now: they say, "I'm smart enough to care about the environment, and rich enough to act on it." And a Lexus performance car screams, 'I have money. Fuck me!' Granted, it screams it in a more gentlemanly ma
"So what if he is looking for sex? It's not like I don't want that myself."
"But you don't want to be his young little sex trophy, either, stashed away in his apartment to come pork whenever he feels like it."
Emma scowled. "Why not? Why not for once just have fun with sex, instead of trying to tie it up into a big complicated relationship? I don't have time for a relationship. I don't feel like nurturing some guys ego and having him suck up all my free time. I have better things to do!"
Beth gaped at her.
The waitress set their lunches in front of them. "Is there anything else I can bring you?"
Emma flashed her a smile. "No, thanks."
The aroma of chicken cacciatore stirred Beth back to the present. "I always thought it was true love and Prince Charming you were waiting for. I never thought you cared about sex for the sake of sex."
Emma dug into her grilled salmon. "Yeah, well. Just because I didn't have any for a long time doesn't mean I didn't want it."
"But do you really not care about not having a relationship along with it?"
"I just…" she started, but then couldn't find words to explain what she had not yet completely reconciled within herself. "I just know that I'm horny and that I want to devote my energies to my career right now. Can I have sex on a regular basis with the same man and not get emotionally involved? I don't know. I've never tried."
"Can you even enjoy it that way?"
"I'm willing to give it a shot."
"I had a few relationships like that, where by the end I didn't care about the guy," Beth said. "Whenever we had sex, while I was lying under him and he was grunting away on me, tears would roll down my cheeks. The worst part of it was that the jerk never even noticed."
"Jeez, Beth. If you were crying during sex, why did you keep doing it?"
She shrugged. "The relationships usually ended a couple weeks later. It became a pretty good warning sign that things had gone sour."
"I should think so."
"The weird thing was, I didn't know that I felt nothing for the guy anymore until I started crying. It's like my body knew, even if my brain didn't."
Emma shivered. "I hope that doesn't happen to me."
"If it does, don't ignore it. No orgasm is worth feeling like crap."
Emma tried to shake Beth's words off. "I wonder if men ever feel that way?"
"I can't imagine that they do. An orgasm is an orgasm is an orgasm to them. What's not, to like? I mean, they pay hookers for sex, and that's got to be about as 'I don't care about her' as you can get."
"I guess you're right," Emma said weakly.
"Isn't there a famous quote that goes something like, 'Men don't pay women for sex. They pay them to go away after.'"
Emma was getting queasy. She wanted Russ to like her; to respect her, even. To enjoy spending time with her. "I read somewhere that when a man comes, he gets the same burst of oxytocin that a woman gets when someone hugs her."
"What's oxytocin?" Beth asked.
"You know, it's that hormone that makes people bond to each other. Mothers to babies, women to men. You'll supposedly get big bursts of it when you breast-feed."
"God, I hope so. At the moment I feel like this baby is the alien that took over my body."
"Anyway, women get bursts of oxytocin when they're touched. Men only get a healthy dose of it when they come. It makes them feel love. Supposedly." Emma shrugged.
"Which would explain why they declare their devotion after they've had their little 'moment.' And here I always thought it was gratitude for sex that prompted that 'I love you.'"