The letter 's' is among the most common consonants in English and appears frequently in many words. Given the pattern "_a___e", this could be a word like "sample", "saddle", or similar. Since I've already guessed the common vowels 'a' and 'e', I'll try a high-frequency consonant that could potentially appear in the middle positions. The letter 's' is a good candidate as it often appears in various positions in English words and can be part of common letter combinations.