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“Beth, you said you would go to the New Year’s Eve party,” Alma calls from the bed. Beth’s just stepped out of the shower, her hair grazing her shoulders like it always is when it’s wet. Throwing her gym clothes into the laundry bag, she’s prepared to turn on some music and spend her last few hours of the year finishing her book, Colle’s chess masterpieces by Fred Reinfeld.
“Can’t I stay here with you?” she asks, glum that her own mother doesn’t seem to want to spend New Year’s Eve with her. “Just because it’s eighteen years and older doesn’t mean it’ll be fun.”
Alma sneezes and clears her throat. “I stayed out a little too long — I seem to have been struck by another virus while I was skiing today. I should rest.” Beth studies her mother, lounging in her favorite housecoat with the special ultra-soft tissues with extra lotion she has to bring everywhere, because they’re the only ones that don’t irritate her nose.
Alma’s voice is bleary and a little slurred when she says, “Don’t hang out with an invalid for tonight. Your father might be calling for some of the legal work anyway, since he didn’t get it done before we left.”
Beth winces. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
Her mother is waving her off now. “The fireworks show is supposed to be really fantastic.”
Sighing, Beth places the back of her palm to her mother’s forehead, which is so warm, another fever, and then washes her hands. No use in getting both of them sick. “Alright. Fine.”
“More to life than chess, my dear,” Alma says sleepily, nodding off already.
Beth shakes her head disbelievingly and kisses her mother on her forehead. She slips on a choker and a dress, a deep emerald v-neck number with a thin belt of black diamond sequins that she had purchased from Lulu’s. Alma had approved of the front, even if the whole thing was a smidge shorter than dress-code-compliant. And, bless her, Alma had wholly missed the other side of the dress. Her darling church-going mother would not approve of Beth’s exposed back. It might be chilly on this Colorado night, so Beth also slips on her favorite leather trench coat and her flats.
Before she slips out the door as quietly as she can, she places her Reinfeld and her travel chess set into her bag. Most people these days use cell phones, but consider Beth sentimentally attached to the physical board and its pieces between her fingers. She may be dressed for a party but tonight she will read.
+
The empty gymnasium smells like a unique mixture of ham and roses, and at this point Benny’s too afraid to try to figure out why. There’s a small table in the corner, across from the door, with a few squeaky metal folding chairs. In those chairs he sits, across from Arthur in his mustard-yellow turtleneck and navy jeans, and Hilton in his signature black polo-khaki combination. Despite there being plenty of room, Arthur and Hilton’s hips and elbows are touching as they examine the board, Hilton’s arm slung around the back of Arthur’s seat.
“Benny, Benny, you can’t move there. You’ve got to stay open. Don’t lock yourself down to just one piece, like the g-pawn,” Hilton chides like a patient father.
Arthur chirps, “If he looks center, you take it downtown.”
Does Benny regret agreeing on attending this ski vacation as a fourth wheel to Arthur and Hilton and Cléo? Very much so.
Did he insist on a chess game on their last night at the lodge just to spite everyone? Probably.
Are Hilton and Arthur being infuriatingly placating and chill while Benny’s been grumbling? More so than usual, which is saying something.
Do they know it? Absolutely.
Benny sighs. Trying to avoid this theoretical draw, he tries again, moving his white rook to h1, pinning black’s h-pawn.
“And you moved here, because?” Arthur asks.
Benny tries not to roll his eyes impatiently. “The three queenside pawns, here. Now his king needs to move now or it’ll get stuck later.” Hilton moves the black rook two squares over. And in half a dozen moves, his c-pawn has reached the seventh rank, queening a foregone conclusion, unless the duo across from him sacrificed their rook.
Arthur whoops, “That’s it, man! Sweet.” He is far too happy for Benny, who tries not to roll his eyes. That’s his friends for you — smart bookworms who are just glad to be there. Gregarious to a fault. A kernel of fondness wriggles into Benny’s mind, and he smiles.
This is just a training game, from Fornaut’s Alekhine’s Games 1938-1945. Hilton and Arthur had been quizzing Benny, but it looks like they’re going to need some harder games.
“Boys?” They hear Cléo’s voice call from the door. “Did we really fly all this way to play more chess?”
Benny catches Arthur and Hilton’s eyes. They laugh in unison. “Yes.” She walks over, the clink of her glass heels resounding around the gym.
“You look beautiful,” says Hilton admiringly, taking in Cléo’s gold sequin minidress, black eyeliner smudged into something smokey and enchanting.
Arthur whistles. “Are you a model or something?”
Cléo flicks Arthur’s arm. “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard you say that—” though she’s beaming proudly at the compliment. She turns her gaze to Benny in admonition. “It’s the last night of vacation.” She spins so her skirt twinkles under the yellow lights. “The party, remember?”
“Right,” Benny says, his smile just that more forced. “The party. New Year’s Eve.”
“At the Freestyle Club, in two hours.” She raises an eyebrow at their outfits, more appropriate for a library than a party. She wrinkles her nose especially at Benny’s basketball jersey, which had been on sale, okay? That's the only reason why he's wearing it. “Now, chop, chop.” She claps her hands, causing them all to jump. “Go, shower up.”
Benny turns to all three pleadingly. “One more. Come on, last move.” Cléo sighs but relents.
Quickly, he queens his pawn and moves through the sequence, knight defending the key attack squares for the king, the queen snapping up pieces like a child on an Easter egg hunt, until the black king is lonely and defeated. His mind is racing through the game again and again — why move this bishop and the long-range threats it opened, what else he could see in the sprawling web of possibilities for this game. Too fast, he’s had to move through this one.
“Brilliant moves,” Hilton says approvingly and tousles Benny’s hair, breaking his reverie.
“Quit it!” Benny warns, jerking away. Arthur high-fives Hilton as he packs up the chess set and they start to amble back to the hotel room.
+
The party has three foosball tables, a karaoke machine, a startling number of balloons, Christmas lights dangling from the ceilings, and those party hats that Benny had thought were a vestige of bygone bar mitzvahs. A boy his age in a cartoonishly large and red cowboy hat tips his hat toward him and winks, “Howdy, partner.” There are three vuvuzelas being blown. He spies an underage couple walking tipsily with flasks of presumably liquor, a really pretty girl with orange hair reading a book by the fireplace, and two girls making out in the corner of the room. He feels the pop of a bubble on his right hand — who the fuck is blowing bubbles?
He’s totally lost. As soon as they walked in, Cléo had yanked Hilton and Arthur to the karaoke machine, where they wait in line to undoubtedly dazzle the room with their years of classical singing training and a cover of a deep-cut Evanescence song no one has heard of. So now he’s totally alone.
Fourth-wheeling. Never again.
+
Beth’s nestled comfortably into her own little couch and table, fire warming her legs. She really should’ve brought AirPods to tune out the noise. Oh, well. It’s not so bad, compared to the basketball games Methuen would sometimes make them attend, sometimes, charity tickets for the little Christian orphans donated by the oh-so-generous University of Kentucky Wildcats.
She’s playing Colle-Delvaux, 1929, in an attempt to understand the Colle System, which would allow her to develop her minor pieces pretty solidly and give her a decent endgame, probably. It’s not her favorite, but neither is this fucking party, so whatever. She wants to delve a little more closely into the lines, so she takes out her chessboard and sets it up.
In the distance, she hears the wheezy blowing of a party favor and a boy’s voice saying, “Stop looking like a fish out of water on the murderous rampage. Here. Here is a chessboard.” He sounds about…three feet away? Also, they’re talking about chess? At this New Year’s Eve party?
Confused, she looks up. Oh, god. The boy is pointing at her chessboard. The speaker is sporting hair nearly as long as hers, though a brown that blends in well with the shadows of the room. The light isn’t great. She finds Fish-Out-Of-Water-Boy and, well, he’s a sight.
She registers his black Nirvana t-shirt with its frayed hems, his protests of “Hilton, Christ, I’m fine, really.” His jeans are super skinny and kind of perfect, his legs a shape that really appeals to the least evolved part of her brain. His hair is so stylishly windswept it has to be deliberate. He’s currently being dragged by the arm to the fireplace. She’s ready to write him off as some punk kid, especially since he’s toddling off-balance. Apparently, Boy-With-Brown-Bob, Hilton, has a strong arm and practice dragging him to places.
“I can just play in my head,” Boy-With-Good-Hair tells Hilton.
“No, you cannot, dressed like that, you antisocial freak,” says Hilton, who sounds exasperated. “C’mon, you might have fun.”
He releases Boy-With-Hair-That’s-Nicer-The-Longer-She-Looks-At-It, who is glaring. Beth doesn’t really want to look, so she just flips the next page of her book.
“You know what? Someday you might thank me for this,” Hilton calls as he leaves.
The Boy-With-Really-Fine-Hair takes the seat next to her, where he deliberately keeps his eyes off any one person, trained instead on the chessboard, as if he can’t help himself. He enunciates carefully at his friend’s back, “Go to hell.”
“Or not,” mutters Hilton, sauntering away with a cheerful spring in his step.
Beth is bewildered, and the boy next to her looks like he is wishing the all-mighty God whose domain is Colorado Ski Lodges would swallow him now. She follows Hilton’s retreat, just as he jumps on stage with two others, a girl with black hair and a stunning gold dress and legs for days and an equally handsome boy with a neat clean-cut trim for hair and an all-navy outfit. Together, they start belting a song she doesn’t recognize with a lot of guitar riffs. She’d be impressed with how good they sound, but she’s still not sure what to make of this whole situation.
+
In Benny’s ranking of his favorite people in the world, Hilton has just plummeted to rock-bottom, where he can rot with Benny’s grandfather. Arthur heckling him about his wardrobe choices is nothing compared to this mischievous imp of an eighteen-year-old boy.
He genuinely didn’t need to play chess tonight. He was going to be fine! Watching his friends! And eating pretzels! There’s also chips with chile con queso and cupcakes and apple juice. He would’ve been perfectly happy.
But nooooo with seventeen more o’s, Hilton had to spot the girl take out her chessboard, and Hilton had to punch him in the shoulder in excitement, and Hilton had to stop, drop Benny off, and roll away, like a coward, assuming the two will be friends.
Like all chess players want to know each other, or something. Really.
He’d barely had time to swipe an apple juicebox from the table. He doesn’t want to look at the girl, who was probably just focusing on her book, studying for a tournament like he wishes he could be.
He eyes her board, a small travel set, set up with a game. White has solid development and defense against a transposition to another variation but not much else. From his reading, and in front of him plain as day, Benny knows white’s kingside attack is coming, with the black king’s knight either exchanged or driven away from the center. This takes out the guard of the h7 square, and the white bishop can move there for the start of a mating attack. A Greek gift sacrifice, they call it, like the Trojan Horse. He almost reaches out a hand to start the game, since she’s really taking her time with this. He remembers that moving someone else’s chess pieces is not socially acceptable behavior.
Her chessboard is cheap, he can tell, but well-loved and well-used. Even plastic, the pieces bear the scuffs of use. This girl is, at minimum, an enthusiast.
He finally looks at her, leather jacket and dress and all, and is startled when she darts her head away. She’s been looking at him, too.
“You don’t play on your phone?” he asks quizzically.
She shakes her head, not looking up from her game, black moves bishop to b7, guarding a pesky knight while developing one more piece. “I like to feel the games for myself.”
He respects that. Online chessboards aren’t his favorite, either. Even today, years and years after DeepBlue, engines are still imperfect. A sharp mind can spot just as much, if not more, than one with proper thought.
He continues to sip his apple juice in silence, the sugar recharging his brain. He remembers a game he’d found that uses this system even more effectively. “Have you ever played through Colle-O’Hanlon, 1930? A very well-known game that uses the Colle System.”
She looks up at him, startled that he seems to know things about chess. Her eyes are huge and striking and, right now, inquisitive. It’d be a good look on anybody, but especially her. She shivers slightly, shaking her head no, then shrugs off her coat, revealing a shimmery green dress.
Oh. Fuck.
He thought he’d been into leather jackets before. No.
He’s into this, this dress she’s wearing right now. She looks like a rockstar.
He tries not to choke on his words, or worse, have his voice crack. “You’re not the only person who reads Reinfeld.” He reaches over, takes his book and flips to the page to the bishop sacrifice. “It’s a twenty-move game.” He almost begins reciting it from memory and then remembers that’s unnecessary.
+
Has she always been this attracted to people’s wrists? His move hypnotically when he gestures, as he can recite almost word-for-word what her book says. She’s met boys like that, who read an article on the Internet and quote it verbatim and think that makes them more intelligent than her.
Still, she…didn’t actually know what he’d been saying. So if he’s faking his intelligence, it’s paying off. And she kind of likes his voice. This boy is even kind of cute. She starts to smile.
“Though Reinfeld’s got it all wrong, the sacrifice isn’t the brilliant move he thinks it is.”
She looks at him skeptically, eyebrow raised. The game won the First Brilliancy Prize, beating out a ton of Alekhine games. He juts his chin toward her board. “Go ahead, set it up, think it out.” He leans back comfortably, propping his feet up on the ottoman.
Beth takes a second to get to the position he’s discussing. She stares at the board for some time, working through the combination. What the hell is he talking about? The sacrifice is the move she’d make, the most melodramatic and, honestly, interesting move. “The sacrifice works, as long as black’s king is on g8.”
“Look, a sacrifice is really only sound if black obtains no advantage from declining the sacrifice altogether. If black plays Kh8 instead of taking the bishop, now what? The bishop has nowhere to move. Or, black takes once he’s eliminated your exposed knight, so the net benefit on material is nothing.” Beth grimly sees what he means: now, they exchange queens, and black moves his g-pawn up, leaving white no defense against the knight creeping on g7 or the rook cracking its knuckles on h8.
The boy that she’s starting to hate continues, “Instead, white should move bishop to e2 so he can optimize the use of his bishops and centralize his knight on d4. Colle was being too temperamental here and could’ve lost it all. O’Hanlon moves Kg8 and all white can hope for is a draw.”
She sneers at the board, her mind’s gears turning in every direction. “There’ll be a massacre of black pawns in the way. And no…wait, white forces a win.” She gestures to the chessboard and plays out the combo — she just needs to bring the bishop out for the mating net. “It’s still a promising attack.” Beth is vaguely aware that the volume of their voices has raised, and there’s a crowd of interested watchers gathered around him, but she keeps her eyes level with his. She’s not backing down.
He revises the sequence back to the 12th move, then demonstrates the fourteenth move of the game. He leans in close to her, voice icy. “No, black only loses the advantage here, with rook to h8. It’s too much to expect queen to d3, check, he misses that rook can take the pawn here. He should’ve moved his f-pawn up a square, he’d be more than ahead on the exchange.” When he’s staring at her like that, the rest of the world falls away so easily, though jury's out as to whether that's a good thing. She plays the game out, and, ah, gross, he’s right again.
She’s brought back by a whistle in the crowd. Turning to the noisemaker, she sees the boy from before — Hilton? He’s smirking and she swears he says, “Ta-da” to the girl she saw him with at the karaoke machine earlier, whose eyes are darting between her and the blond boy by the fireplace. The boy next to her also looks at Hilton, who rolls his hand as if to say, vamanos, get on with the pleasantries.
The boy sighs and turns back to her. “Benny.” He holds out his hand to introduce himself. There’s a swagger of victory, even amusement, in his manner that she can’t stand.
“Beth,” she says, taking it but feeling on the verge of tears. She hates losing arguments and games and everything, really. Quickly averting her eyes from him and the crowd, she turns on her heel to leave.
+
Benny feels slightly responsible for her looking so upset, and Arthur’s doing his motherly you-know-what-you-need-to-do face from afar, his arms wound tightly around Cléo and Hilton’s waist, so Benny follows after her footsteps. She’s sipping a cup of something outside, where people have started to crowd, and she’s staring fixedly at the forest in the distance.
“Beth.” She doesn’t turn to face him. “Beth, I came to say a couple things.” She turns to him, her bottom lip jutting out in annoyance.
Benny takes a deep breath and says sincerely, “You’re really good. And it’s been really cool getting to talk to you tonight. And maybe I’m a little pessimistic about the bishop sac.”
Beth smiles uneasily. She is really pretty with her hair whipping about her face in the wind. “Thank you.” She sips her glass outside, while Benny drinks his apple juice. He keeps playing the sequences in his head and realizes another move — he adds offhandedly, “Also if I were Colle on move 17, I would’ve moved knight takes f7, check, instead of rook takes d6. You want to have a more active attack.”
This is the wrong thing to say, because he can feel the temperature drop ten degrees as her smile falls in a nanosecond and she huffs, “Dude, really?” She’s now biting the inside of her cheek in rage.
Ohh-kay. He stares at her, nonplussed. It’s a night of unexpected twists.
“You fucking asshole,” she snaps. “My attack is just fine.” Wait, what? He never said anything about her style.
It’s not like Benny hasn’t been called a “fucking asshole” before, frequently he’s been called worse, and Benny could walk away, and rationality is telling him to he should to avoid escalating this. But you know what? This is his last night of vacation, and he is really annoyed with Arthur and Hilton and Cléo and being at this ski lodge, especially since he knows they’ve gone off to suck each other’s faces off, abandoning him, again. And the one person who actually had something interesting to say is acting like a thin-skinned toddler who’s taking a Colle game that's not even her own so seriously. She’s glaring at him so petulantly, over what? Him being right? He wants to laugh, half-wants to shout, and he chooses the latter, heatedly hearing his voice crescendo, “Chill the fuck out, my friends are wrong all the time and they’re okay.”
“Friends? And I suppose you’ve never done anything wrong in your life?”
“Mostly,” he smirks. Everything about his voice and smile are hard.
+
Beth is furious. Who the hell approaches her to apologize and then do the same exact thing he was supposed to be apologizing for?
“You arrogant—”
She’s interrupted by a shout behind them: Ten! Nine!
The New Year’s countdown has begun. Well, that’s not going to keep her from shouting at him. “You arrogant jerk, there’s no way that the knight move is stronger, you need it for a defense against the threat of—”
Eight! Seven!
Her voice carries over the chants. So does his, he’s still arguing, “No, if you keep the knight where it is, there’s a perpetual check and you uncoil the spring of pressure on black—”
Six! Five! Four!
She’s shouting back, arms tensely crossed to keep from shoving him. Beth notices they’ve edged a comfortable distance from the crowd, around the corner where they’ll miss the New Year’s fireworks show. No audience for their fight, and no roaming eyes to watch Benny’s Adam’s apple throb and Beth cheeks turn pink as their faces inch ever closer to each other, as if proximity has ever been a persuasive technique.
Three! Two! One!
He’s responding up a storm, arms gesticulating. She can’t hear him at all, and maybe they’ve lost the thread of conversation, but she thinks, God, he talks too much. The lights casts his face in a fiery mix of red and orange.
Happy new year!
The noises of kazoos and vuvuzelas and cheers outside blast them both with energy.
Maybe if they hadn’t been glowering each other in the eye at this very second, she wouldn’t be tempted, but as circumstances have it, she is.
Against the first bang, pop, whoosh of the fireworks, she moves to kiss him just as he does the same, transferring the pressure compounding in her head intensely against his lips.
This kiss isn’t soft or pretty or fragile or uncertain or bland, all of which unfortunately describe every other kiss Beth has ever had; this one is angry and intense and tastes like apples. She bites his lip immediately, harder than she means to, and she hopes it causes a jolt of pain in him. Her hands clasp his cheeks, as if to lock him in place. Don’t you fucking move, Benny Whatever-Your-Last-Name-Is. He opens his mouth to nip at hers, steal her breath from her throat, and she can’t resist wrapping her arms around his neck to pull him closer and closer, her back against the table next to them. Every inch of her needs to touch him, now. His body is so so warm, and she’s been craving this kind of heat for so so long, too long without even realizing another human could provide it. She used to think nothing could ever compare to a bottle of gin sloshing like lava down her esophagus, but Benny’s breath and quiet groans, swallowed so only she can hear, are a pretty damn satisfying substitute.
He seems to feel the same. His arms snake around her waist, not gently, not tenderly, but forceful and challenging as his personality. I see, she thinks, we’re going to continue the discussion about the bishop here. She silently thanks God for the back of her dress being so open, because his hands are exploring every inch of her back, her body inadvertently arching into every place his fingers press. He could so easily slip his hands underneath her dress, sweep her away to a room where he can rip this off and touch her anywhere he wants.
She needed this snap, the release valve of a casual hookup, all her nights of frustration about her father and the tranquilizers and planning the next steps of her education and career bleeding into this random stranger. She needs to shed the shreds of Beth Harmon now, lose herself into an alter ego who actively tries to kiss insufferable people.
There’s an ache between her legs that’s unfamiliar but screaming. Every time she hears the cheer of the crowd get louder at a particularly spectacular firework, she grinds herself closer to him, the thin layer of her underwear hitting his jeans, and her heart has never raced so fast. Something is yearning for her to push through the fabric, which she can feel is soaked; it might be something through his jeans or a finger or his fist, as if Beth has the time or deductive skills to reason through any of this. Hiss go some faraway comet fireworks. “Fuck,” one of them says, she couldn’t tell you whom. She’s not sure how she’s pulling at his hair and scratching his chest under his t-shirt simultaneously, her mind is on total, animalistic overload right now.
She secretly glories in how uncomfortably tight his jeans must be. Good. Let him suffer. In the meantime, Beth has bigger fish to fry, because he’s pressed her against the wall, and his fingers have found their target: they’ve found the exactly right angle to slide in and out, each movement creating sparks in the back of her eyelids. Every time someone has tried this with her, it’s always been so painful and clumsy that she needs to stop after they’d barely touched her. Not the case here, with the wrists she’d admired earlier wrapping perfectly against her thigh, and her body welcoming the pressure his first finger brings, then two, then three. She thinks harder, and he obliges without her needing to say a word. His mouth is still fastened to hers, so she moans into it gracelessly, “More, more, please.” As her voice drops involuntarily to a whisper on the last word, she feels a rush of white-hot ecstasy rush to her legs to her brain back to her toes. Oh my god, oh my god, oh…
Even as the waves of pleasure roll through her, Benny doesn’t stop sliding his fingers into her, but his pace decreases just slightly, enough for her to catch her breath. With his tongue, he teases her neck just right, drawing whimpers that she’s never heard herself make before. She doesn’t want him to stop, don’t stop, except she’s given him far too much of herself just now. She can’t articulate words, and it takes a particular sharp bite from Benny for her to finally step back, quivering still. Resting her hand against the wall, she stumbles just far enough from him that she can grasp their position, the chilly air stinging her legs. Gasping slightly and drinking him in, she relishes his expression, so still he could be stone if not for the thin gleam of sweat on his brow, the flush in his cheeks, the sheen of his lips marked with her teeth, the bite marks she can spy on his neck reddening into a nasty bruise. Her eyes trace downward to find his chest heaving beneath his t-shirt, and she notices the desirous twitch of his fingers toward her that he restrains as they both assess their next move, the crumbling of reason in his eyes that tells Beth if she seized him again now and dragged him to the closet by the buffet room, he’d be hers for the rest of the night.
His pleasure is predicated, of course, on not revealing her total lack of inexperience in this area. Still, there’s something about the rhythm and ease of his movements that tells her he has enough prowess to for the both of them. Physically, he’s so close to her, she can count every pore on his skin, inhale the faintest musk of woodsy bergamot which he probably absorbed from the last person who came onto him with their lips, probably earlier this night. Most people get, at best, a New Year’s kiss. He gets a hookup, a girl he can point to and say smugly, “Yeah, I’ve been inside her.” Ugh. Total fucking fuckboy who thinks he knows chess better than she does, who’s probably expecting her to return the favor of getting him off.
“Fuck you,” she says viciously, smoothing out the creases of her dress where he had just been gripping her. Every part of her is on fire, burning like Carthage and Alexandria and Carthage again. This is for…everything tonight. This’ll show him.
Heart pounding with every footstep, she releases his hand which she hadn’t realized she was holding, and stalks back inside the lodge, refusing to look back. If he says something, she doesn’t hear it. Her vision a blur of the lounge and then lobby, she wills a conflagration to consume it all.
Beth pushes past a couple so busy kissing they don’t even break for air and briefly glimpses the one throuple she saw earlier locked to each other at the doorway. Alma better be asleep when she gets back to the hotel room. After she’s wiped her own lipstick from her face, Beth will rant to her about this stupid boy with stupid hair and stupid outfit from the ski lodge and probably look him up in the hotel directory so she can properly pummel him in a tournament game and definitely not kiss him again.
Is it too much to hope that he’s registered under his Chess.com username?