Chapter Text
“Will you meet me here again tonight?” Ben asks her quietly, trailing a hand up her back. Rey looks into the hotel bathroom mirror to meet his gaze. She is wearing a blue pencil skirt, and his hand slips beneath the tailored fabric and the cotton underneath to touch her.
The answer to his question should be no. Her suitcase is sitting neatly by the front door. She could leave and never see him again. She can practically hear her friend Jessika’s voice in her head: The only way to ruin a one-night stand is to make it a two-night stand.
Ben’s brown eyes darken when she doesn’t answer immediately. His fingers dip into her folds, teasing her. “Rey. Stay with me again tonight.” He moves behind her, pushing his bare chest against her back. The hand that isn’t touching her rakes her skirt up her thighs. Her breath hitches as he presses her hips against the smooth marble counter.
“I have to leave for work,” she whispers. He suddenly removes his hand from where it is trapped between her body and the counter, and she thinks for a moment he is going to let her leave. She fights her disappointment, until he uses both hands to drag her underwear slowly down her legs, letting them pool around her black heels.
She hears every catch of his zipper as he releases his cock. His eyes meet hers in the mirror and though her smaller frame is blocking his reflection, the tension in his arm and shoulder tells her that he is pumping himself. She almost turns around to replace his hand with her own, but then she hears the obvious crinkle of a condom wrapper and thanks god for the hundredth time that at least one of them was prepared for this. Ben bends her down against the counter, making her shiver at the slight coldness through her thin blouse, but his hand on her back is warm and soothing.
“I want to see you again,” he tells her quietly. The words are so at odds with the filthy way he is touching her, the way he is touching himself. “I want to get to know you better.”
“Better than this?” she moans as his length drags along her folds. He lines himself up with her center.
“Have dinner with me,” he murmurs. “Please.”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He plunges into her and she cries out at the feeling of fullness. The rhythm he sets is slow, steady.
“Oh god,” she whispers. She can’t believe what she’s doing. She presses her forehead against the counter, giving up any hope she had of being on time for work.
“Yes?” he says quietly.
She’s making sounds that she didn’t even know she could make. Mewling, desperate sounds, wordless and meaningless. His hand moves back between her body and the counter to touch the soft thatch of curls between her thighs, before moving lower to her clit. He moves his fingers against her furiously.
“Rey, answer me.”
“Yes…yes…yes…”
She pushes back to meet each thrust, her walls pulsing around his cock, her nails fighting for purchase on the smooth surface and finding none. She looks up and her eyes find his in the mirror. She doesn’t have words to describe the way they look together. He keeps rocking against her gently, drawing out her pleasure.
“Please,” she begs him. “Please come with me?”
He does, letting himself thrust into her just a little harder. Just enough to put him over the edge he’s been holding back from. He doesn’t make a sound, just stares at her with his lips parted and his length buried deep inside of her. He waits until she rides out her orgasm, until her hips still and her breathing steadies.
She hates it when he leaves her, his softening shaft slipping out of her. She reminds herself that she is going to see him tonight. She shouldn’t be this reluctant to leave him.
He drags her underwear back up her legs, kissing the backs of her thighs. She sighs when he tugs her skirt down gently, straightening it and smoothing it with his hands.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he says, kissing her on the back of her neck.
“Oh my god!” exclaims Jess.
“Please, Jess, quiet.”
“Oh my god,” the engineer mock-whispers across the table.
“I know,” Rey says, digging her fork into her salad. She hasn’t eaten since she left Seattle. Her stomach has been growling all morning, but every other part of her is satisfied, if a bit tired.
“Was he good?” Jess asks curiously.
Rey blushes self-consciously. Usually Jess is the one who comes in to work with these kinds of stories. In fact, Jess might have purposefully switched suitcases with a cute guy if she had thought of it first.
“Yes.”
“Are you seeing him again?”
“Tonight. We’re having dinner.”
Jess grins. “You won’t make it to dinner.”
“Jess!”
“Use the vibrator,” Jess says shamelessly. “He already knows you have it. It’s probably been driving him crazy. I’m surprised he didn’t bring it up.”
“What? No! No, no, no. That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just not,” Rey says faintly. “I mean, it’s kind of unnecessary.”
Jess’s eyes light up like Rey has just handed her a double chocolate chip cookie. “So he’s really good, huh?”
“He…that’s not…I didn’t mean…”
Jess smiles knowingly.
“God damn it, Jess.”
Ben calls her at three-thirty that afternoon. Rey slips away into the sixth floor stairwell.
“Hi.”
“Hi. This meeting is taking longer than expected. I’m going to be late,” he tells her.
She doesn’t say anything. She’s spent the entire day thinking about him. His hands, his lips, his cock. The satisfaction he’d left her with that morning has slowly ebbed into an intense desire to be with him again, and she bites back her disappointment. Her thighs press together, as if to try and quell the ache inside of her.
“Ben,” she says finally. “I’ve thought about you all day.”
“Rey.” His voice is strained.
“I can still feel all the places where you touched me. I can feel where you were inside me.
“Fuck.”
She thinks she hears a door shut somewhere on his end of the phone.
“Are you alone, Ben?” she questions.
“Only for a minute.”
She wonders if she dares ask, and then decides that if she embarrasses herself, he’ll be back in Seattle in a day or two and she can forget all about this. “Are you hard?” she manages to whisper.
“What do you think?” he bites out, frustrated.
“And you only have a minute?”
“Rey, I…I have to go…but I’m going to make it up to you tonight.” His voice is heavy with promise and it sends heat pooling low in her belly.
“At dinner?” she asks innocently.
There is a silence in which she can practically see him struggling. “I’ll meet you at the hotel. There’s a card for you at the front desk.”
“What time?”
“I’m not sure. Eight. I’ll let you know if it will be earlier.”
Ben could murder Hux.
Their two-hour meeting with the client had turned into a six-hour interrogation, with Snoke’s eyes appraising his every move. Ben’s shoulders ache with the stress of the day, but he can’t seem to bring himself to care that Hux had come off looking significantly better than him in the meeting. Suddenly the First Order’s protection of their obviously corrupt clients seems so incredibly wearying to him. You will help me build this company into something greater, Snoke had promised him. Ben was supposed to be negotiating the business’s contracts, dealing with mergers and acquisitions…not rescuing powerful billionaires who want him to lawyer their way out of paying their taxes.
Ben brushes aside his discontent, watching the high rises of lower Manhattan blur together as they pass. He has a stunning woman waiting for him in his hotel room. His cock stirs at the recollection of Rey’s admission, spoken low and desperate into her phone.
I can feel where you were inside me.
He’d wanted to quit then.
For the first time in ten years, he’d wanted to write again.
Rey keys into Ben’s hotel room at exactly 7:10 p.m. The bed is made. Her and Ben’s matching suitcases are lined up against the wall from where housekeeping had swept, the two identical black bags making her smile.
She slips out of her heels, throwing her cell on the nightstand, and then finds the bag that is hers and unzips it. She rummages around for something to wear later, finding the black cocktail dress she packs on all of her business trips in case anyone ends up going out for dinner. It’s nice. Simple and flattering, with a neckline just low enough to be slightly risky and a pretty lace back.
Her eye catches on her vibrator, dark purple and half-hidden in its corner of the suitcase. She breathes out a shaking sigh. Ben is going to be another hour. A part of her is a bit angry at him for being late, even though she knows it is not his fault. She uncovers the toy from where it is nested beneath her underwear, feeling its smooth weight in her hand.
She steps towards the bed, setting the vibrator down against the white sheets. She can’t help but mentally compare the toy to Ben. Her throat goes dry when she realizes how much bigger Ben is, his cock perfectly shaped for his broad frame: a couple inches longer than the toy, and so thick that she’d felt her walls stretch to accommodate him.
She kicks off her skirt angrily, wishing that he were here now. She wonders if he’ll be angry at her for using the toy. But then she thinks of Jessika’s words to her at lunch. Maybe…maybe he’ll only be angry if she uses it without him. Maybe his brown eyes will darken and she’ll tell him that this is really all his fault for being late.
She strips off her blouse, discarding it on the floor. She lays back in the center of the bed, moving back so that her head is resting on a pillow. She starts slowly, touching her breasts over her bra, letting the day wear off of her. Her nipples harden and chafe against the fabric. She pushes her right hand beneath her underwear, not stunned at all to find that she is already wet. She touches herself for a few minutes, debating about whether or not she should. This is Ben’s hotel room; he could walk in here at any moment and find her…
She reaches for the vibrator, pressing the button at the base of its length. It comes to life in her hands, a gentle buzz against her palm. She pulls down her underwear, kicking them away, opening her thighs and shivering against the cool air of the room. She sets the toy against her clit and sighs in relief. She had fought against touching herself all day, forcing herself instead to focus on her work. Or trying to focus, at least.
She moves the vibrator down along her folds, wishing that it was Ben here with her. She fuels herself with images from the night before: his tongue darting out to taste her, his hair in her hands as she pressed herself against his mouth, the look of pure desire on his face just before he claimed her. She pushes the toy inside of her.
It’s disappointing at first. The toy’s widest point is inside of her, and still it isn’t enough. Its base hums quietly against her palm. Once it rests fully within her, Rey leaves it there, withdrawing her hand and closing her eyes to focus on the sensation. After a few minutes, the constant rumble in her core makes up for what the toy lacks in size and width. She starts to tighten around it, the pulse of the vibrator sending little waves of pleasure through her. She reaches down and touches the button again, and the steady vibration intensifies.
Her phone rings.
“Damn it,” she gasps, reaching for the cell buzzing against her nightstand. “Ben?” she whispers into the phone.
“I just left. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
She throws her head back against the sheets. “Okay,” she manages to say.
“Are you at the hotel?”
“Yes,” she gasps. She considers turning the toy off to continue the conversation, but the bit of residual anger she has keeps her from doing so. A part of her wants him to know the cost of having kept her waiting.
There’s a quiet moment.
“Are you…Rey, I…”
She wishes she could see his face.
“What are you doing right now?” he asks her. His tone tells her that he already knows.
“I’m using the vibrator you found in my suitcase.”
More silence. The vibrator hums insistently inside of her. The sound of his voice coupled with the deep thrumming in her core is a powerful thing.
“Turn it off,” he commands, not denying that he had found it.
“Why?”
“God damn it, Rey. Turn it off. Or so help me god, I will not touch you tonight.”
They both know it’s a threat he won’t be able to go through with, but the command in his voice makes her tighten around the vibrator. “Ben…”
“Rey. I promise when I get to you, I will make it worth the wait, sweetheart. But I want you to turn it off.”
She doesn’t know why she finds the term of endearment so disarming. Sweetheart. She reaches down between her legs, killing the hum of the vibrator. She is tempted to continue using her hands, but resists. Her arousal is wet against her thighs. She pulls the vibrator out of her reluctantly.
“Rey.”
She whimpers in response.
“Where is it?”
“On the bed.”
“Good girl,” he breathes quietly.
She shivers, her breath stopping at the quiet praise. Her heart pounds against her ribcage.
“I’m going to treat you so well, Rey,” he tells her quietly through the phone. “I’m going to touch you everywhere. Everywhere you can’t touch yourself.”
She shuts her eyes. How is it that a man she met less than twenty-four hours ago can say things to her that she’s wanted to hear her entire life?
“And then I’m going to take you out to dinner,” he says softly.
When he arrives at his room, Rey is on his bed, her lacy black bra and underwear dark against the white sheets. She is devastatingly beautiful, her body on display, her hazel eyes following him into the room. He stands at the foot of the bed for a moment, drinking her in. There are bright spots of color on her cheeks. Her eyes are lidded and dark with arousal. He’s kept her waiting too long.
The vibrator is next to her on the bed, and she looks at him accusingly, as if it’s his fault that she’d been forced to touch herself with it.
“Were you good for me, Rey?” he asks, his throat dry. He’d heard the silence on the other end of the phone when he’d praised her with the pretty words - good girl - and he wants to test whether it was a good or bad silence. Her lips part and her breath hitches in her chest. Her thighs shake a little in anticipation. Ah. She’d liked that. He makes a mental note.
“Yes,” she says quietly, a blush staining her cheeks. His cock strains against the fabric of his pants.
He tilts his head, considering her. “But you didn’t wait for me.”
She blinks prettily.
“I waited for you, Rey,” he tells her. She presses her thighs together, pushing her hips back into the mattress desperately, and he fights the urge to pull them apart and bury himself inside of her.
“Are you…are you mad at me?” she asks suddenly. There is a subtle shift in her voice. He realizes that she wants to confirm this before they do anything else.
He is stunned at her vulnerability. “No. No, sweetheart.” He walks close and bends over the bed, kissing her reassuringly, his palms supporting his weight on either side of her head. Her hands wind through his hair, tugging him closer. He slants his mouth against hers, parting her lips with his tongue. He draws back to look at her. “I’ve thought of nothing but you all day. I’ve wanted you all day.”
Her hands smooth over the front of his suit jacket. “I thought of you. When I was…” She looks away, embarrassed, her eyes flickering down to where the toy is resting on the bed. “I shouldn’t have…”
“That’s not why I stopped you, sweetheart. I’ve known you for what? Twenty hours?” He smiles, shaking his head a little. “I don’t make the rules about what you do to pleasure yourself, Rey. I could know you for a lifetime, and I still wouldn’t have that right. "
“Then why did you stop me?” she asks curiously.
“Because I was selfish. Because I wanted to be inside you when you came,” he admits.
She smiles, and it lights up his whole world. Then, shyly, she confesses, “I liked what you called me on the phone.”
“Sweetheart?” he muses, knowing full well that’s not what she means.
“I…yes, that. But also…”
“You’ve been so good for me, Rey,” Ben murmurs, watching as her fists grasp at the sheets. The muscles of her back shiver delicately. He reaches around between her hips and the mattress, grinding the heel of his palm against her clit, waiting for the little gasp that tells him he’s found the right cadence. “Such a good girl.”
He thrusts deeper into her, loving the way she feels around him at this angle. He has never in his life spoken to a woman like this, never needed to tell them so explicitly what they do to him. His need to say the words seems to correspond to a similar desperation in her to hear them, her body responding incredibly to his soft praise.
“You feel so perfect, so tight around me. Do you know what happens when you’re this good for me, sweetheart?”
“No,” she practically sobs.
“You don’t know how good girls get rewarded?”
She shakes her head, trembling beneath him.
“Answer me, Rey.”
“I don’t k-know.”
He speaks low into her ear as he moves inside of her. “They get to come.”
“Please. Please.”
“You can come for me, sweetheart,” he murmurs, threading a hand through the dark hair that is spilling over her back. She shakes her head, pushing up and back against him, taking him deeper. “You’ve been so good, Rey, so good. Come for me, Rey.”
She screams his name.
They eat dinner at a tapas restaurant. When they bring out the small plates, Rey scrunches up her nose, wondering how she could possibly get full on the tiny portions. But the plates keep coming. Ben orders everything that sounds good to him. And when she realizes that he doesn’t care about the prices on the right hand side of the menu, so does she.
The servers bring little empanadas and a rabbit dish with rice, ceviche and tostones, a plate with three little seared scallops arranged prettily in a row. Rey doesn’t know anything about wine, but whatever they’ve brought her is incredible, deep and smoky and she has to stop herself when she finishes her third glass.
By the time they are finished eating, she is stuffed.
“Do you come to places like this often?” she asks.
“Not really. Seattle has good restaurants, but the ones I like there are more casual. Local places. In New York, I only know what the guidebook tells me.”
Rey feels as though the wind has been knocked out of her.
“Ben?”
“Mmhm,” he murmurs. His eyes trail along the neckline of her dress, and she half-expects him to ask for the check right then and there.
“When do you leave?”
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
He makes love to her into the early hours of the morning, drawing it out, making her gasp and shiver. When she comes, it is nearly silent. Her orgasm is raw and stunning and she hates him for it. A single gasp and she shatters around him. He kisses her everywhere he can reach. Her forehead. Her collarbone. Her shoulder. Her stomach. The back of her knee.
Stay, she begs him with her body, unable to say the word aloud. When he falls asleep, his dark lashes long against his pale face, she counts the dark dusting of marks across his cheeks and above his eyebrows. Eventually sleep claims her, too, the exhaustion overcoming her dread of the coming dawn.
In the morning, he wakes her with his head between her thighs, and this time she parts her legs willingly and lets him do to her everything she couldn’t give him their first night together.
She says nothing as he packs his bag. They walk down to the lobby together. She rides with him to the airport, kissing him in the back of the taxi, wishing they could do more. He buys airport coffee for them and holds her hand across the table, his thumb brushing across each one of her knuckles. They wait together up until the last possible moment, when he drags her to him, kissing her one last time. She tells herself that she’ll forget the way he tastes soon. It will hurt less soon.
They don’t talk about it, but they both know they shouldn’t call each other. Pretending that they don’t live across the country from each other will only make the separation worse. He doesn’t promise her anything, and she’s grateful for that.
Just before he gets in line for security, Rey watches as he leans down to double check the name on his old flight sticker. And then he rips his old tag off and puts the new one on.
The day after Ben returns to Seattle, there is an email in his personal inbox from his father’s best friend.
He doesn’t open it. He doesn’t want to look at it. He throws himself into the job, Chewie’s unread email in the back of his mind, making him angry and volatile. He takes it out on Mitaka, on the receptionist, on Hux’s personal assistant. He finds flaws in everything, his own discontent gnawing at him. Leaving Rey has left him raw and wounded, suspicious of Snoke and doubting himself.
He almost deletes the email, but her voice whispers in the back of his mind: Don’t. Ben, don’t leave this unresolved. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
He gives in and opens the email, but a part of him already knows what it will say. It’s a single line, gruff and gentle at the same time and very Chewie.
If you want to see him, it has to be now.
He warns the receptionist that he will be out the next day and only drives slow enough on the highway to avoid getting a ticket.
“Hey, kid,” Han Solo says.
Ben hovers in the door of the hospital room. Against the florescent light of the hallway, the room seems dark. His father is attached to a machine, hooked up to IVs and several devices that check his vitals. His silvering hair is blue in light of the monitor. He looks worse…so much worse than when Ben had seen him last.
Ben pulls a chair from the wall, moving closer to sit at his father’s side.
“I’m so glad you came home,” Han says. “We missed you.”
There is a tightness in Ben’s throat, a burning at the back of his eyes. Because this place - this prison cell disguised as a hospital room - isn’t his home. His home is the ranch house with the wrap-around porch and the green-blue lake. His home is the shadows that roll over the hills to the east when the clouds drift over them, the smell of pinewood trees and cinnamon in the kitchen. His home is the grease on his father’s hands at the end of a long day of working on the Falcon with Chewie in the shop.
A dark voice inside of Ben whispers that he doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve the forgiveness that is waiting in his father’s eyes. He’s been the worst kind of son: angry and resentful and careless.
“You look tired,” Han says heavily.
"I had a work trip.”
“They work you too hard at that company,” his father mutters, his breathing shallow as he observes the face of his son. Ben knows what he sees: pale skin and dark hair and the strain of his job.
“Dad, I don’t want to argue. Not now.”
“Snoke’s using you,” Han replies, as if he hasn’t heard him, his voice like sandpaper. “He doesn’t care if this job crushes you, Ben, as long as he gets what he wants. You know it’s true.”
Han lifts a hand to his son’s face, and Ben wants to rip out all of the things that connect his father like a puppet to the machines. The calloused touch of his father’s thumb against his cheek pulls him apart at the edges, the weight of the last ten years pressing on his chest, suffocating him. Somehow things are simpler here than they are in Seattle, away from all of the greed and the corruption that Ben pretends he does not consent to every day with his silence.
“I should have come sooner,” Ben whispers, stunned at his own selfishness. Grieving for the lost time. “I should have…but it’s too late.”
“It’s not. Ben, leave Seattle. Come home.”
Ben takes a deep breath, wondering if his father will understand. “I’m being torn apart.”
Ben doesn’t go back to Seattle after his father dies. He emails Hux his letter of resignation the day after the funeral and stays at the ranch house in Alderaan to keep an eye on his mother.
At first it feels like he’s made the wrong decision. There’s no place for him here anymore. His mother is still Senator and even though his father is gone, she has a purpose and a drive that he had never quite been able to find in himself.
He takes care of the things he can fix around the house, cleaning out the gutters and fixing the holes in the porch. While his father had been sick, the house had fallen somewhat into disrepair, and there is no want for work. His mother watches him occupy himself with the mundane tasks. She sits on the porch in the evenings after work with a glass of wine in her hands, a light shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She watches him mow the lawn and pull out all the weeds from the hedges. When he’s done with that, he starts on the cabinets in the kitchen, remembering that she had complained about them before he’d moved away.
“The books need balancing,” she tells him one morning before she leaves, looking at him as though he’s a ghost that will disappear at any moment. “I can give you the receipts.”
So he does the ranch’s finances, which have been neglected for months. Eventually he has done everything he can think to do, but he isn’t bored. For the first time in a long time, his mind is awake. During the day, he pulls out his laptop and sits on the porch and begins to write. One early summer evening, his mother comes home to him sitting by the living room fire, doing nothing at all but thinking and plotting and imagining. “Ben?”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t you…” She hesitates, as if she’s afraid to say anything to him for fear of shattering the fragile peace they’ve built. “Do you need to go back to work?”
He looks at her, stunned. Surely he’d told her?
“Mom, I quit. Two and a half months ago.”
She sits down next to him. Her hair is graying and her eyes have lines at the corners, but a happy, soft smile graces her lips. It reminds him of the way she’d smiled when he’d come home from exploring in the woods as a boy, dragging all manner of dirt and mud back into the house with him.
“Are you writing again?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Good,” she whispers. “Your father would like that.”
When BB-8 lands on Mars with Black Squadron on an early morning in December, Rey cries with everyone else. The first images come back grainy, and there’s a sharp fear that maybe the droid’s photoreceptors were damaged in the landing. But then the newer images come through: the small sun over a craggy red horizon, clear and beautiful. It’s everything she’s ever dreamed it would be.
Maz calls her from her little house in Jakku. She still uses a landline. “I’m so proud of you, little girl,” the old woman says, and Rey cries all over again, sniffling into the phone. “I’m so proud of who you’ve become.”
Rey is interviewed with Finn and Jessika for Time Magazine. Her name is on the front page of every newspaper, right next to a picture of her and the team standing with the little spherical droid that had taken them over two years to design. Resistance Technologies expands overnight, and she is promised the funding to do anything she wants.
Two months later, after securing a partnership with NASA, they finally get the communications systems working, and Poe Dameron sends them the first message ever sent by a human being from the surface of Mars:
Do I talk first or you talk first? I talk first?
The line stretches through the Barnes and Noble on Eighty-Sixth Street.
“A good turnout,” Ben’s agent tells him, clapping him on the shoulder and putting a bottle of cold water on the table next to him. “A bit unexpected.”
Ben smiles faintly, because it isn’t unexpected to him. He had known, the moment he’d started writing. Rey had poured off every page, her presence finding its way into every line. He remembers vividly her faith in him, her faith in his writing.
“I think I know what it is,” Lor San Tekka tells him finally. His lined face is withered with age, his hair nearly white. The publisher had advised Ben to approach other agents, younger agents. Agents that could see him through his entire career. But he trusted San Tekka to tell him the truth, to be brutally honest with him when he needed it.
“What?” Ben says, signing a copy and handing it back to its new owner.
“You were so young when you wrote Force Bond. When I read it I thought…this is good. There’s potential here. There was the grand vastness of space, the darkness, the war, the grit. There was the intensity and the fervor and the restlessness of youth. It was written for everyone. You wrote it for everyone, and of course if you write a book for everyone it will find its way to someone.” Lor looks out over the room. “This one is different.”
“Oh?”
“When I read Balance, I know it was written for someone. I can feel the intimacy dripping off the spine,” San Tekka says.
“And that somehow touches more people?” Ben asks skeptically, his gaze filtering through the crowd of the book launch.
“Humans are voyeurs,” laughs Lor. “We like to feel like we’re intruding on a story that doesn’t belong to us. We like to be taken away from ourselves for a little while. And that’s what you’ve done here, Ben.”
Ben isn’t sure what to say. He motions the next person in line forward, taking a sip of his water. He has somehow expected Rey to be here, as though by writing this book and returning to New York, they will somehow find each other again. He knows he could just call her; he still has her number saved in his phone. But a call seems so inadequate when they have not seen each other for so long. So instead he looks for her face among the crowd and prays that her curiosity will bring her back to him.
A pretty Asian woman steps toward the signing table, her hair done up in a long ponytail. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” he replies. “Should I make it out to someone?”
“It’s for a friend. Rey.”
His pen hovers over the page. “Rey?” he repeats faintly. It’s not a very common name, but it could be a nickname, he tells himself. Short for Rachel.
“R-e-y,” the girl spells out. “She loves your work. I don’t think she knows the sequel’s out, or she’d probably be here herself.”
Ben doesn’t trust himself to speak. He looks down at the blank page, wanting to write a hundred things.
I miss you. I want you. I wrote this for you.
He signs the book quickly, and hands it back to the woman.
“I saw something that’s going to make your day,” Jessika tells her over lunch.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. That author you like. Kylo Ren.”
Rey stiffens. “What about him?”
“He just released a novel.”
“You’re thinking of a different author,” Rey says, not allowing herself to hope.
“No. It was a big deal. There was a book launch at Barnes and Noble last night. I had to wait in line for like twenty minutes at the register. I’m standing there thinking…god, can’t a girl just buy a Rachelle Montclair book on a rough Thursday night to get her through the last day of the week, you know? So I ask the guy next to me what the fuss is all about, and he tells me about this recluse author that published his sequel after ten years. Of course, I had to go and see for myself, and you know what? He’s fucking hot."
“What?” Rey asks blankly.
“Kylo Ren. He’s like…massive. Dark hair. Nice guy. He seemed really quiet and nervous about the whole thing, which was actually somehow still hot.”
“Jess, you think everyone is hot.”
“I didn’t think the guy in line next to me was hot.”
Rey sighs.
“So you don’t want the signed copy I bought for you?”
Rey sits on the subway with her copy of Balance perched delicately on her lap. She doesn’t want to open it until she is at home, in her bed, with a glass of wine and a bag of popcorn. She knows she shouldn’t judge the book by its cover, but she can’t help staring down at it with a strange, fluttering feeling in her chest. Force Bond had a simple, dark cover, with the title and author’s name printed in white lettering. Balance is done in the same style, except instead of black, the cover is light gray. She traces her hand over the silvery font at the bottom. Kylo Ren.
The cover tells her nothing about the sequel. Like its predecessor, the book has no blurb on the back, and she is a little relieved because she doesn’t want to know anything until she opens it and starts reading. She finds herself thumbing at the pages nervously, watching as the F train goes from Queensbridge to Roosevelt Ave to Kew Gardens, and a terrible, heart-stopping thought occurs to her. The story could be bad.
When she reaches her stop, she practically runs all the way to her apartment.
She avoids reading for an hour. She eats dinner and cleans her bathroom, pretending like she hasn’t been waiting since she was sixteen to know how her favorite story ends. But then she has no excuse.
She crawls into bed, feeling like a teenager. For a moment, she is in her bedroom in Maz Kanata’s little one-story house, a mile from the Jakku train tracks, with glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. She cracks open the cover, the sound of the spine opening for the first time sending a shiver through her. Her old copy of Force Bond is falling apart, the pages soft and worn. This book is new, hard, crisp. The first page is blank, and across it is scrawled a messy note: Rey. Thank you for waiting. -Kylo Ren
It’s obviously not directed to her. He probably signed every copy this way. But it brings tears to her eyes and she has to stop before she even starts reading. She finally turns the next page, where a short, simple acknowledgment is printed.
For the girl in the white dress in Terminal B.