Frustrated

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Ellie sat the bowl of mashed potatoes down and surveyed the table's other contents before sitting down as well. It was dinner time, Devon and Chuck were both there, and even Sarah, who she hadn't seen much of lately, had joined them. She and Chuck seemed to have fixed whatever difficulty they'd been having. Devon was present for dinner, for once. The day at the hospital had gone fairly smoothly. Ellie should be happy and content.

But she wasn't. Devon still, in the past month, hadn't opened up to her and had brushed her off with a smile and a quick peck on the cheek when she asked him what was wrong. She had fought against the feeling that he was somehow slipping out of her life. But she had passed the worried stage, by now, and was working up to plain and simple resentment. Almost two months had gone by during which he hadn't been very interested in sex, or her in general. He'd also managed to be gone whenever she had time off. The sheer number of times this had happened made Ellie rule out coincidence. She was tired of making excuses for him.

And there were still these internal issues she was having over That Man. After their brief but surreally momentous conversation in the Buy More parking lot, he must have had difficulty getting time off from work, because he'd still been around. Aggravatingly, arousingly around. Since yesterday, though, she hadn't seen him, so he must have managed it. This hadn't, unfortunately, done anything to make her less grumpy.

"Haven't seen your friend Casey around, lately," Devon chose that moment to comment. Ellie stopped herself – just barely - from shooting him a suspicious look. Of course he hadn't been eavesdropping on her thoughts! But lately, everything he said sounded like an evasion of the real subject - that being whatever he was dealing with that he wasn't sharing with her.

Chuck blinked, and for some reason shot a quick glance at Sarah before he replied.

"Yeah, Casey ... took a few days off."

Sarah complacently took a bite of green beans, but there was something about Chuck's glance at her that struck Ellie as odd. Those looks happened kind of frequently, between any two of those three: John, Chuck, and Sarah. It made Ellie wonder sometimes.

Chuck shook his head. "Something's been off with him lately."

That comment got Sarah's attention (as well as Ellie's), though she picked up her water glass and took a swallow before questioning her boyfriend. "What do you mean?"

Chuck shrugged. "If I didn't know better, I'd say he has woman troubles." His eyes met Sarah's, and they shared a smile over something the rest of the table wasn't privy to. Ellie frowned. That was just rude. And no, her annoyance did not have anything to do with wanting the details of whatever Sarah and Chuck knew about John that she didn't. Nope. Nothing whatsoever to do with that.

Sarah smiled blandly at Chuck's statement. She did a lot of bland smiling, Ellie reflected as she took a long drink from her wine glass. Then Sarah shook her head, and her expression became amused.

"I don't know what kind of woman would go for a guy like Casey," she told Chuck.

Ellie's eyes narrowed to slits. She felt it happen, and without a look toward Devon forced them back to neutral with an effort. She could tell that perky little blonde exactly what kind of woman would go for a guy like Casey.

She could, but she wouldn't.

Devon thought he had it figured out, though. "He's the kind of guy who likes the helpless type," he contributed, grinning. "Somebody who wants a big, strong guy around to get rid of the spiders and order her meals."

Ellie shot him a disbelieving look. Was he for real? How more off-base could he get? And he wasn't done. He picked his water glass up with an air of authority that grated over her nerves, and nodded superiorly at Chuck and Sara.

"And its women just like that who like guys like him back."

Oh, that was enough.

"Since when are you the expert on attraction, or anything else to do with sex?" Ellie spat the words out before she thought them through. From the paused postures around the table, a lot of the annoyance she was feeling with her fiancé had seeped into her voice. All right, it wasn't annoyance; it was straight-up anger.

She shook her head, and attempted to dial it down a little.

"I, ah, just mean ... not all big, strong men like little needy women." Her frustration began to rise again in spite of herself. For an intelligent and educated man, how dense could Devon be? "Sometimes a half-way intelligent, real man comes along who actually wants to be with a woman who's resourceful, who pulls her own weight, and who can stand up for herself." The volume of her voice was rising. She pressed her lips together and tried to reign in all that frustration she heard spilling out, but wasn't successful. Devon had ducked his head and was shoveling roast into his mouth. Sarah was looking to Chuck for guidance, and Chuck had his head tipped to the side while he gazed at his sister in confusion.

Ellie heard the words she'd just spoken echo in her head, looked at Devon's chipmunk cheeks as he tried to swallow all the food he'd put in there, and had a revelation. She, herself, was as far from the 'little needy woman' as she could get. And Devon - God bless him, Devon who needed a woman to manage him more than any man she'd ever met – he'd somehow decided he wanted a clingy type. Someone to depend on him.

She tried to picture that. She failed. Devon just wouldn't be able to make it on his own, much less if he had someone else to steer through life. The very thought was ridiculous. Where had he come up with this? As she thought back over the past few months, though, her suspicion was confirmed. All his little comments about being 'soft' and 'feminine', his inciting her to use feminine wiles on John Casey (of all men, he'd picked That Man), even his wanting her to wear a dress every so often ... he was trying to make her into something she couldn't be – emotionally dependent.

She had been staring sightlessly off at a wall, she realized, when Chuck leaned over the table to wave his hand in front of her face. She started, and tracked on her brother's earnest expression.

"You OK there, El?" He asked with concern.

Ellie looked at him, another hapless male who had let a woman screw him up and only seemed to be getting his life back on track due to another woman, and she pushed her plate away. What was it with the men in her life? Did she turn them into these adult-size children?

"Men," she said, turning her head to Sarah, because she just didn't want to talk to a member of the opposite gender right now. And scraping her chair back, she stood, leaving a tableful of surprised people. Behind her, she heard Chuck's confused "What ...?"

She left the room, too. And then the house.

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John Casey's windows were dark, and his vehicle was gone. It was a good thing, Ellie told herself. Otherwise, in her state of mind, she'd have gone right over there and tried to use him to prove to herself that there were grown men, mature men, responsible men who could survive on their own, and yet still desire an independent woman like herself. That would have been a big mistake, unworthy of her and disrespectful of him. Instead, she paced around a couple of times, and then when the door of her house cracked open and Devon stood silhouetted in its frame, she left the courtyard. She didn't want to talk yet.

She did a circuit of the block, and then the neighborhood. The nights were cooling off a bit as summer came to a close, and the clear air helped to clear her head. After a couple of hours, she felt ready to go back and face the music.

Chuck and Sarah had cleared out when she re-entered the house. Devon sat on the couch, one ankle resting on his opposite knee. He'd been drumming both his hands on his foot; he stopped abruptly when she opened the door. He got to his feet quickly, and approached her with his hands out. She let him kiss her cheek, and ask her how she was.

"I'm all right, Devon." She wasn't going to apologize. "I'm just getting really tired of you hiding whatever it is you're hiding from me." There. He had a chance to tell her, once and for all, that he wanted her to be something she wasn't. She was giving him an opportunity to be honest.

He didn't take it.

"I've been a little preoccupied, I know," he admitted, hanging his head and giving her a sheepish look. "I didn't mean to take any of my problems out on you. There's some stuff at work ... but I don't really want to talk about it right now. Maybe later, OK?"

Ellie stared at him resignedly. Stuff at work? What could possibly be going on there that she, who worked at the same hospital, wouldn't understand? He was giving her the run-around. But she couldn't force him to share. And she was tired.

"All right, Devon," she sighed. "But this is becoming a big issue between us. I'm not going to wait forever."

He swallowed. Then he nodded. And they went to bed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * ** ******

John Casey came back home the next week. It was both a relief and a torture. A relief, because she'd spent much of the time he was gone fighting off mental pictures of him doing what he'd said he might do – find a woman. People in her surroundings spurred these images at the oddest moments. If she worked with the extremely well-endowed E.R. nurse who was charge on afternoon shifts, she wondered if that was the type he'd picked. Or maybe it would be the teeny, twiggy little barista at the coffee joint where she usually stopped on the way to work. Or would her friend Magritte, a nearly six-foot-tall Nordic type without an ounce of body fat anywhere, appeal to him?

She tried talking herself out of what had become an obsession. She had a handsome (if sometimes vacant-headed), smart (if naïve), fit (if sporadically jock-ish), sweet (if frequently adolescent) man who was a successful doctor. John Casey, a man with apparently no ambition whatsoever given his job, shouldn't be such a draw for her. Her own brother, whose lack of direction she deplored, had a higher-level job than That Man, and was probably ten years younger.

But her brain wouldn't obey her attempts not to think about him.

So it was a relief to look out her window as she was pulling her hair into a ponytail Wednesday morning and see that his vehicle was parked out there. He must have gotten home last night. And then it was torture, because his door opened and he walked out. And despite the fact that he wore an ugly Buy More shirt and a facial expression that she could only describe as sullen, all her thoughts about his lack of ambition went right out the window. Because That Man was just that ... all man.

She told herself that she hoped he'd worked out all of his sexual urges in the past week. She told herself that if he didn't desire her, her life would be that much easier. She told herself that they would be able to return to being relaxed, friendly acquaintances. She'd worked herself up to half-believing these lies when he paused in his walking, almost as though he felt her eyes on him. He stood still for half a second and then his eyes moved unerringly to her window. Though she stood at an angle inside a darkened room that he shouldn't be able see into, Ellie shrank back against the nearest wall. He started walking again, but his eyes moved from her house in a slow assessing circle, scanning his surroundings. He had sensed her. What was he, psychic? His right hand had gone to the back of his waistband, and was holding something under there. It almost looked as if he had a gun, which was laughable. What would he be doing carrying a gun to his salesman job?

Still, he looked tensed to handle a threat. And as he opened his car door, he shot her house one last look. Ellie stayed indoors until he was gone, despite her arguments with herself.

At work that day, nothing was much different than it had been for the past months. She did rounds and was half-way successful at concentrating on what she needed to concentrate on. She had time for a lunch break, though, which was bad news, because without work to occupy her mind it was John who did. Even with Magritte sitting across from her, telling a lively tale about her recent weekend home to see her parents, it was John staring around the courtyard that morning that held her thoughts.

"You in there?" her friend wanted to know, leaning forward to catch Ellie's wayward gaze.

"Yes. Yes, sorry, I'm just a little distracted."

Magritte nodded. "You've been that way a lot lately. Something going on with Devon?"

Ellie tapped her coffee cup, looking at her friend and debating whether to tell her the whole miserable story. Devon's making himself so scarce I'm forgetting what he looks like, and I really need to get my sexy neighbor off ...hmm. Uh, where was that going? My mind. I'm out of my mind? Yes, but that wasn't ... Off my mind. I was thinking that I need to get John Casey off my mind.So, yeah ... spilling to Magritte exactly what was going on inside her head right now was a really bad idea. Or at least potentially extremely embarrassing.

"I'm fine. So your mother's a pimp now, huh?"

Magritte coughed, choking on a surprised laugh. After she wiped her eyes, she rolled them. "I sure felt like she was pimping me. She must have paraded me in front of half-a-dozen guys, all in two days. Why can't she accept the fact that someone can be straight, single, in their thirties, and happy?"

Ellie shook her head. "I don't know. That's what moms are like when they have single, thirty-something daughters, I guess." Not that Ellie would know. She regarded her friend assessingly. Magritte was striking, fun, and successful. She liked men. Why wasn't she with one?

"Do you want to get married at some point?"

Magritte shrugged. "Maybe. My tastes are kind of unique, though. I like the strong, silent type, you know? The big muscled kind that can handle most things without a fuss. Who's a little less interested in his career than he is in me. Somebody who can make me shiver just by looking at me. Not a lot of those in this town." She waved a hand around the hospital cafeteria, disparagingly. Ellie followed her gaze, ticking off the men within view. Stringy and whiny-looking. Cute but metrosexual. Loud jock. Fit but taken. Not one of them matched Margrite's 'type'.

Ellie knew one man who did, though. Make you shiver just by looking at you, indeed. She stared at her gorgeous, single friend and had a brilliant idea.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"This is a terrible idea." Chuck's voice was matter-of-fact, but his eyes were intense. Maybe even a little worried. Which was absurd, because Ellie felt strongly that this was a very good idea. An excellent idea. Maybe the idea of the century.

"Why not?" She challenged.

Chuck scratched his head. "Uh, Ellie ... I can't really explain it. But just take my word for it, Casey isn't going to compromise ... uh, he's not going to be interested in anyone you set him up with. He's got, um, other priorities."

"'Other priorities'? Really, Chuck." Ellie laughed. "Women are pretty high on every single straight guy's list. Have you had a girlfriend so long that you've forgotten?"

Chuck shook his head, and continued to object. But he finally caved in and agreed to invite Casey to dinner the next evening. And Ellie called up Devon, who was out somewhere doing God only knew what (he hadn't seen fit to inform her), and told him that he would be present at dinner tomorrow night. If he wasn't, they'd be redefining their relationship. It was time to force him into truthfulness. Way past time, in fact.