Chapter Text
“Did you really have to pick a college on the other side of the country?”
“What?” I lifted my head off Ben’s shoulder, yawning. My bedroom was semi-dark, illuminated only by a small TV in the corner with a built-in VCR. The credits for Pretty Woman were rolling across the screen, which meant I had fallen asleep sometime after Julia Roberts told the woman in the clothing shop, ‘big mistake.’ It was a shame I had fallen asleep, because I loved the movie.
Ben’s fingers absently brushed through my hair, and I decided I was too tired to care. He really shouldn’t do stuff like that because it made our friendship weird—but Ben was kind of weird himself.
My eyes struggled to stay open. His body was as warm as an electric blanket, lulling me back to sleep. His soft breaths tickled the top of my head. I knew no one would care if he stayed over—my mother and his mother had been best friends since they’d attended a birthing class years ago while pregnant with us.
“Rey. No—hey!” Ben nudged me with his arm. “Stay with me.”
“Let me sleep,” I grumbled, with a pout on my lips.
“Tomorrow is the weekend. You can sleep all you want then.”
There was a child-like plea in his voice, and I often thought, like now, it marred that deep baritone he possessed. The kind that could have been sexy, if he only figured out how to use it.
Resigned, I lifted my head and rested it on his chest. My sleepy eyes met his bright ones. He regarded me with something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Affection, maybe. His fingers still gently stroked in my hair.
“What was the question?” I asked.
“Your college…it’s so far.”
“Far, far away,” I agreed.
“There are other places with good engineering programs. Closer.”
“And they require buckets of cash or loans,” I replied. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “I have a full-ride scholarship to Jakku University. My mom’s not rich like—” I stopped. Our parents' vast wage gap was something we never discussed. “This is big for me.”
“You didn’t even apply to the one in this town or the next. How do you know you wouldn’t have gotten the same scholarship?”
He was right that I hadn't applied to our community college or its sister university, and that decision had been intentional. While he waited for my response, his fingers tugged a little too hard on my hair and I tried not to wince.
Ben hid his feelings well, but I knew he could be a bit emotional sometimes. Sensitive. I was probably the only person privy to that side of him; he and his mom were not as close as me and my mom.
His hand almost seemed to hold my head in place as if afraid I would up and run away. I kept my tone purposely light as I said, “Why are you surprised? I love to travel and the world is so much bigger than this everyone-knows-your-family-tree town. There’s nothing here for me.”
I saw the hurt in his eyes as instant and devastating as if I had slapped him. His fingers tightened their hold on my hair, causing pain to bloom across my scalp.
“Hey,” I said, trying to swat his fingers away.
For the briefest of seconds, he held on tighter rather than letting go. But then his hand was gone and he was swinging his feet over the side of the bed and standing up. I didn’t need to see his face to know he was trying to hide his anger, possibly even tears—though they were rare.
When I had been accepted into the program, my first thought was how I was going to break the news to Ben. I had finally told him everything while we ate pizza and played sega genesis earlier that day, but he hadn’t said much beyond a grunt of acknowledgement. Now it seemed like he’d spent the last several hours stewing and was ready to talk about it.
“Ben, you’re my best friend. I’ll come back for visits. And my mom lives here, so you know I can’t not visit her.”
“You’re leaving me.”
I sighed. I knew that abandonment was a fear of his; his absent dad had always promised to stay and never did, and his mom…well, she wasn’t the most attentive parent. Neither of us had any siblings to rely on, but at least I had my mom. It had to be frightening for him to be so alone.
I tried to reassure him. “I’m not leaving you. We can talk on the phone every night if you want.”
Ben didn’t respond.
The silence stretched. The next time Ben spoke again, his voice was low and coarse. It sent a shiver up my spine. “When we were kids, you used to tell me how all you wanted to do was to get married and have kids. No less than four, no more than—”
“Six,” I finished with a laugh. I rolled on my side and rested my cheek against the palm of my hand as I regarded him. “Wasn’t that fun? Pretending we were married and naming our three boys and three girls. You were so sweet to make us a house out of sticks. Think it’s still up at your grandpa’s cabin?”
“It’s still there,” he said, quietly and wistfully. He sighed, then clasped his hands in his lap. “Jakku has a high crime rate. Do you really think you’ll be okay in a city that big?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Ben glanced at me from out of the corner of his eye. “You still sleep in a room with glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling.”
Said stickers were above me, and I looked at them. “They don’t glow any more.” I meant it with humor, but it came out with a hint of sadness as if it too signified the end of my childhood.
The mattress creaked as Ben laid back beside me. He studied the ceiling. I tried not to notice how he was wearing the shirt I had bought for him last year, or the cheap watch on his wrist I’d gotten from a claw machine when we were twelve. Even the friendship bracelet I had made for him was still around his other wrist. Mine had broken off years ago.
“I put them there for you. You were afraid of the dark after your grandmother died.” Ben’s voice was full of memory and tenderness.
I was about to say something nice and maybe sentimental, when he placed his hand on my stomach. My t-shirt was slightly drawn up, exposing my midriff. The touch didn’t feel platonic. Even less so when his fingers spread out and his thumb traced a pattern on my hip. I held my breath as he met my gaze.
“What if we stopped pretending,” he said hoarsely. “I’d marry you…”
“Ben—”
Then his mouth was on mine and I froze in shock. His lips were clumsy and insistent and I could taste the blistex he always wore on his lips. I felt suffocated, made worse when his arms caged around me, pressing me deeper into the mattress.
This wasn’t a kiss. It felt like a declaration, like he was trying to claim me. I shoved him hard until he let go. “Dammit Ben!”
He scrambled up and off the bed. “That was—” he stuttered, backing away. “Not like me. I’m not sure why I did that—I’m so sorry. I’ve never kissed a girl before.” Then his face went all shades of red as if he didn’t know that I knew that. My anger evaporated, replaced by pity instead.
“Hey,” I smiled, wanting very much to go brush my teeth but not wanting to hurt his feelings. “It’s okay, I understand. You made a mistake. Look, Ben, you and I have something that’s not going to be lost just because I move away. You don’t have to marry me…I love you.”
He smiled, looking like my sweet Ben again. My sweet Ben who had a high IQ and zero social skills. We had known each other from the cradle to graduation, and now I was going away and he was going to have to survive without me. I felt guilty, which was silly. We were eighteen and I couldn’t hold his hand any longer.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. He meandered to the window where he always snuck in and out, even though he could just as easily go through the front door. “Hey Rey?”
I hadn’t moved from the bed. I heard the VCR spit the tape out, which meant the entire conversation and kiss had happened in a space of ten minutes. The TV went blue, illuminating his features enough that I could see his smile had contours to it that were not as innocent as I originally thought.
“I love you too.”
And then he left, and I felt something cold in me stir. Was it fear?
No. Ben was good. We were best friends.
But I got up and made sure he was truly gone before I went back to bed.