Work Text:
I.
The grey of winter is starting to fall over everything once more. Sitting in the cafe at the edge of the park, Ben snatches the chill from the low, cooling sky and holds it to himself like a blanket. It matches his grey inside. It’s familiar, like the shape of furniture with a sheet thrown on it. It covers the people at the office who drift around it like ghosts. They’re ghostly because they never talk to Ben, he’s either too anonymous or too important to them. Having the power he does; means both.
He bites into his pastry, and a glaze-soaked raisin pops on his tongue.
Worried students and hurried suits mill around the edge of the park, along with unworried hipsters and unbothered cops. The squirrels dart around with unshelled pistachios, a sliver of green in their paws, and the pigeons hop and peck at things that are food and aren’t food.
And then, he sees her again.
It’s the third time in five days that she’s stretched at the gate, triangulated limbs and long leans. Her workout gear isn’t clingy or sleek, it’s practical, warm. She’s still using the same hot pink ear warmer that shouts like only hot pink can, and it hugs her bun that’s the colour of maple syrup poured over snow. One of the old men who perch at the chessboards every day comes up behind her, with a firm and fatherly handclap to her shoulder. He says something to make her smile while he walks on, and she nods with real pleasure and beams at him.
Ben replays that smile over and over in the graveyard of his work and home, how it illuminates her whole face, her tidy nose and her shining eyes, with a light that he’s only seen in paintings.
II.
He used to go to the cafe to eat a sugary pastry in peace, where his boss would not see him and sneer that sweets are for children.
Now he sometimes skips the pastry, but he always sees her. The floor-to-ceiling windows are salt-streaked and everything looks glazed with grime or ice or grimy ice, but her beauty comes through it, like the only thing in colour in a black-and-white film. Ben looks for as long as he can, on the edge of a blade to turn away if she might see him. He belongs behind a salty grey veil, and she belongs in the sun, leaving a smear of hot pink in the eyes of everyone who sees her on her run.
III.
The bike messenger is on the ground too, overlaid with an ultralight frame, spinning wheels and a grease-caked chain and he is panting with pain, but Ben is still going to kill him. He’s going to smash this insolent stubble-faced hothead until his stupid rainbow-glare sunglasses are a permanent part of his skull. But first, he’s got to pull off his sweater and put it under her head, because the messenger knocked her down and he has a helmet but she, a jogger, doesn’t.
“There was ice! I’m sorry! I hit ice! I hit ice!” The man is shouting to explain to the other people who’ve gathered, now that his lungs can draw air. He’s encircled by a barista from the cafe with a more beautiful mouth than most men have, a tiny elderly woman with a wire shopping cart and a shower cap on, and two men in three-piece suits. Ben can’t tell who else is with him and the jogger or how cold he is, because all that matters is her opening her eyes. She does, and her pupils move in concert, and Ben is awash with relief.
“Hey, don’t move, you got clipped by a bike,” he tells her.
“Did I at least fall gracefully?” She murmurs.
“As gracefully as you do everything,” Ben says. He immediately hopes that she won’t remember this and think about it after the chaos has dissolved.
“You’ve never seen me belch the alphabet,” she tells him with one corner of a smile. When the siren sings its piercing song along the block, her eyes widen, everything else about her tightens and closes. She doesn’t have insurance.
The asshole with a bike isn’t critical, so one of the EMTs saunters over to them before hopping back in from where he came. He shines a light in her eyes and touches her head, asks her questions low and slow. “Whassyer name, sweetie?” He adds at the end.
“Rey”, she says, as if she doesn’t mind that Ben hears. He’s glad that he gets to. Ben repeats it in his head like the notes of a scale while the EMT tells her the signs she should seek medical attention. His slicked-back hair glows with stripes of red, blue, red, and then he’s driving away.
When Rey hands his sweater back to him, he says, “Thank you,” as if it was a gift from her and not something she was borrowing all along. He gestures with it, bundled between his hands. “I’m Ben.”
IV.
The rain comes as the snow is leaving; it washes the salt streaks away. Ben sits in the window closest to the park gate and when Rey sees him there, she will smile and wave; he waves back.
Sometimes he smiles, too.
He sucks in the dry, paper-laden air at the office and feels tender and sore, the way a sprout feels when it scrapes through the crack in its seed. The way a hatchling’s beak is raw with chipping its shell.
It’s been so long since anything was different for him. He was inside of what was, like a low rolling fog, and now what could be, is a bell at the back of his mind.
V.
The ground drinks, it softens. Pungent mud flakes under the sun. A red wheel somewhere is turned by a man with a wrench and the fountains turn on again. Ben doesn’t have to look for Rey’s hot pink headband anymore. He doesn’t have to crouch in the cafe and linger for a glimpse of her. Ben can sit in the sun, and when she runs, walks or trots near, she’ll skip over to him.
The talk is small, friendly and unassuming, like a grocery-store bouquet, but it brightens Ben up and Rey doesn’t seem to mind. It always wraps naturally and then she is off like a kite in a gust of wind. Ben watches her go, pictures her living her life, picking up a can of corn in the grocery aisle, doing a crossword in pen and regretting it three-quarters of the way through. Furtively sniffing every box of dryer sheets on offer at Dollar Tree and picking the one she hates the least. Getting a text asking her to cat-sit. Unlike most of his other thoughts, it always makes him feel good.
VI.
Even though it’s early, the park is soaked with humid heat. July is all around, and even though she just started she’s making herself known, like a roller-blader blasting music from a bluetooth speaker clipped to her waist. Ben suddenly thinks that maybe Rey won’t be, or shouldn’t be, running in this heat. She tells him that he is right by tripping up the path from the other direction, wearing denim cutoffs and flip-flops, carrying one shaved ice in each hand.
“Ben! Want some ice?” She asks, gesturing with a neon-yellow one. The other is neon green.
“Where is this from? And at breakfast?” But she’s bobbing with excitement in front of him and pushes it at his chest, so he takes it. Like a gentleman.
“Oh, we’re auditioning food trucks for a thing,” Rey explains. She takes a huge mouthful and talks around it as if she’s a nine year old at a birthday party. “They prepped stuff for us to try right before they open for the day, it was the only time we could all do it.”
Ben slurps up the neon yellow. It’s banana, juvenile and fake. He’s eating shaved ice, under the sun, with Rey. Everything is perfect.
VII.
It’s Saturday. All of August has been hazy long days at work, the arctic phantom of the AC making his skin ache from goosebumps. Sometimes even on Saturdays. On most weekends, Ben leaves his usual bench empty, if only so that Rey has a break from him. Everyone’s always needed a break from him; his parents, his teachers, his friends. He thinks it’s a law of the Universe; nobody wants to hear every day from Ben.
But maybe? A voice says in his head. Maybe you could help Rey pick out dryer sheets at Dollar Tree?
I’d say; “Fuck the dryer sheets”, and get her those expensive wool balls instead, he replies.
Something to look forward to, it answers, and even though it’s coming from inside him, he trembles to hear that thought.
Ben rubs his forearms again, and thinks about the bench, about how it’s surrounded by crumbs and pigeons in winter and ruby-gem leaves in fall, pollen-stained and rain-warped and sun-warm in other seasons. Maybe he should pay it a visit on this last Saturday of August, and even if it’s not a time of day when Rey would run past it, he can sit there, and dream of her.
VIII.
Nothing to look forward to. That’s what he has. Ben is grey on the inside and his life is grey, grey like metal and stone and old fake images of ghosts.
Rey does walk by the bench that Saturday. Ben had already noticed the tent in the distance, on the grass, and a trickle of people in festive clothes walking across the bridge towards it. The hum of the generator at the shaved-ice truck nearby cuts in and out over the trickle of the creek. For once in his life, he thinks about a wedding that he might be in, and not just at. A snipped thread that suddenly has more to unravel. This thread is tied to Rey, Ben thinks to himself.
The sun beats, throbbing light, heat and life onto everything, and as if Ben conjured her by saying her name, Rey appears on the path.
In white.
Rey is in a white gown, simple lines, like everything she wears and likes. Her skin is pearl-perfect and her eyes and lips are made luxe with makeup. Her hair is sleek,elegant, petted into waves by a professional hand. She is carrying a bouquet, pointing it down towards the ground as if it’s a casual moment, and not her walking down the path she runs, and over the bridge, to her own wedding. The woman trotting next to her, laughing with secondhand happiness in a pink dress and matching feather fascinator, puts an arm around Rey’s waist as they gaily stride on the far side of the path.
She doesn’t feel Ben’s presence, look for him, or see him at all. Ben leaves the bench, his fists and stomach clenched, and furiously works at his zen-bare desk until three in the morning. He falls asleep in the Uber and dreams about destroying the bench with an axe.
IX.
Ben doesn’t go back to the park in August, or when September pulls her lazy yellow mantle over everything. He does work that doesn’t matter and talks to people he doesn’t care about and eats things that are good for him but taste like dust.
At the gym, he stares and stares at the mirror and wonders where he came from, and why.
He’s the second-to-last person in the office, and the last person steps through his door.
“Do you still go to the cafe near the park in the mornings?” Gwen asks without waiting for an answer, because she thinks she already knows what it is. “The interns didn’t get enough muffins for the board meeting tomorrow. Our trending isn’t great and we don’t need low blood sugar making everyone cranky. Can you grab some danishes, or something? Thanks”.
Then she’s gone and Ben doesn’t have energy or time to tell her he doesn’t do that, the park is cursed and looking and thinking about it is a punch in the heart. He sucks in some breath, and prepares himself for tomorrow’s pain.
X.
A Maybach has nudged a BMW SUV and the drivers are in the street, screaming and blocking everything, so his Uber is late to the cafe. Which means that Ben sees her. He sees Rey, doing her lunges at the gate, in grey capri joggers and her hair in a ponytail and the blue windbreaker of hers that he loved because once she left it on the bench to fill up her water bottle and he traced a heart on the left sleeve when she wasn’t looking.
Her eyes flash like diamonds in a cartoon and she runs to him, as if she noticed that he’d been away. As if it matters, when she has a husband who must be a breath of fresh air like her, who is bound to be handsome and kissable and would give her enough wool dryer balls to last a lifetime.
“Ben! How have you been!” She says. As always, her energy is contagious, so Ben tries to buoy his voice up to match hers, and mostly succeeds.
“Oh, you know…. Work,” He says apologetically. He’s really saying, sorry I thought we could belong together, sorry I hoped for you to let me in. Sorry I am filled with grey, and among your splash of colours, I forgot. I should never have let myself forget. His hands shove into his pockets and he folds in and in, like an origami shape. Rey leans toward him and Ben realises that he needs to offer something more to her, some kindness.
“H-how’s married life treating you?” Ben chokes out, because hearing about her happiness will give him hopeless daydream fuel, and he wants to be a person she shares her happiness with, which is all he can hope for.
Rey’s face, usually so smooth and clear like a well-cut gem, scrunches. Ben despairs to see that her scrunch-face is just as loveable as every other one.
“What, me? I…”
“I saw you,” Ben blurts. He almost never runs on with a sentence, but it hurts and he needs to relieve some pressure. “At the end of August. The wedding in the park, your dress was nice. I was out, on a Saturday, because there was extra work and I needed to warm up outside the AC.”
Her scrunch melts into a smile, with the dimples he’s spent days chasing.
“Oh, that wasn’t my wedding,” She explains. “My best friend Rose got married in pink. She put her bridesmaids in white, said it looked better. She’s very non-traditional,” Then she laughs delightedly, as if everyone has a friend who would do a topsy-turvy wedding in the park with a shaved-ice truck.
Ben doesn’t and he never has, but he loves that Rey does. He loves it so much. He laughs, too.
“So,” Rey says with her voice like a flute as their laughter glides to a stop. “Are you doing anything this weekend?”
XI.
Rey comes to Ben’s family’s Thanksgiving dinner. His mother smells like Shalimar and hugs her under the hallway chandelier and says; “My dear, I’ve had dreams about you. Flowers grew where you walked.” Then she goes to take the sweet potatoes out of the oven.
Ben spends New Year’s Eve playing Cards Against Humanity with Rey’s friends, and drinking the IPA nobody else wanted from the back of the fridge. The handsome barista from the cafe is there and Rey says his name is Poe and not to believe a word he says. Ben tries not to, but when Poe claps him on the back at 12:44 AM just as the world is quieting after the fireworks and says; “I was going to threaten your life if you ever hurt her, but something tells me you never will,” he believes him completely.
The night before Passover, Ben frets and paces in front of the stove while Rey blithely taste-tests his attempts at bubbe’s charoset. He gets so grumpy that she marches him into the shower and washes his hair.
“Put on the black pocket tee with the hole,” she calls out from around her toothbrush. It’s soft and he wears it often as pyjamas. “I like to pet your nipple through it”. He knows this, and when they’re in bed she snuggles up to him and creeps one finger through the hole in his shirt and pets him just like she promised.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you about Rose’s wedding,” Rey whispers into the charcoal-soft night of their room.
“I hope it’s that you caught her bouquet,” Ben murmurs back. When she squeaks with agreement and nuzzles her scrunched up nose against his neck, he looks to the confetti of stars outside the window and quietly says, “It’s all true.”
“What is?” Rey asks. His curious Rey, always running to embrace meaning.
“Love,” Ben says. And wherever they are, it is.