Chapter 6 #4
“I,” Ben says, meaning to continue with, perhaps, “don’t think so,” or, “would rather you didn’t,” or something else along those lines.
But he doesn’t have time; both men are crowding up against them and snapping the selfie a second later, then shouting, “Thanks!” as they retreat, their tittering crowd traipsing after them.
“Good Lord,” Ben says, blinking, as the group vanishes into the crowd as if it was only a horrible mirage.
“Was that—am I awake? Am I hallucinating? Is there… peyote in those short rib pierogies? Because, admittedly, okay, I ate like six of them, but if I’d known they were full of hallucinogens, I would have stopped at four, tops. ”
This, Ben knows, is not helpful. He is babbling; babbling, in his experience, is almost never helpful, and almost always even total silence would be better.
But he’s forced himself to look, wincing, at Pete’s face, and it is frozen in an expression Ben’s never seen: a stone wall, rigid with tension, the veins unusually visible along the side of his neck.
It seems to pull the words out of Ben against his will, like salt leaching bitterness from an eggplant, or sugar relaxing strawberries into a loose, lazy sauce.
“I need a drink,” Pete says, eventually. His voice is flat, empty; Ben swallows.
“You have a drink,” he points out.
Pete looks from Ben to the drink in his hand, cocks his head, considers. After a moment: “So I do.”
Pete lifts the drink, which is, in terms of information Ben can tell by looking at it, in a medium-sized glass and brown; Pete drinks the drink.
When Ben, not an hour ago, had been miserably drowning his own despair, he’d been doing it in small, determined sips of a clearer beverage that had contained quite a lot of soda.
Pete does not drink like that. Pete downs the whole glass in one long, unbroken swallow, his throat working rather distractingly, without pausing for so much as a breath.
Ben has never once been able to take a sip of anything that wasn’t significantly watered down without coughing—he has shamed his father for years, being drunk under the table at restaurant parties even by Renata.
But Pete throws his drink back with the slightly unsettling ease of the long-time chef who came up in an era where you had to learn to hold your liquor if you wanted to keep pace.
It’s impressive. Worrying, but impressive.
Pete winces when he’s finished, wipes the back of his mouth as he says, “The man has awful taste in booze.” Then, his face sliding back into that same stony expression, he adds, “Need, uh—another drink. Sorry.”
“Me too,” Ben says, his brow furrowing. “If you want, we could—”
“The bathroom,” Pete says, slightly wildly, and then he’s off, slipping between party guests and disappearing into the crowd.
“Crap,” Ben mutters, craning his neck trying to see where Pete’s gone, and then giving it up almost immediately as futile.
Figuring he might as well, he does go ahead and get another drink, although this time, already one round deep, he allows himself the luxury of something tart and sweet off the night’s specialty drink list. It has some ridiculous name, which Ben forgets as soon as he orders it.
It is served up to him in quite a large glass, and after a single sip Ben knows it is a beautiful, delicious, perfectly balanced mistake; it doesn’t taste a bit like alcohol, just like lime and elderberry and very faintly of juniper.
It will punish him tomorrow—the hangover will be brutal, a thrashing—but he figures he’s already in it, so he takes several more sips, and finds a certain resolve hardening within him as he swallows.
Drifting, as ever, to an open spot against the wall, Ben decides slightly drunkenly to formulate a plan.
He has to think like Pete. He knows Pete, right?
Sort of, anyway? He didn’t know that Pete had a boyfriend, okay, that’s not great.
But, counterpoint, Pete’s boyfriend probably doesn’t know that Pete’s left eye starts twitching when he’s about to beef something up in the middle of a four-hour cooking shoot, so who’s really in the dark here?
Ben takes another steadying sip of his drink—he has to focus.
He’s Pete; he’s thinking like Pete. Where would Pete go, if he was kind of, not to put too fine a point on it, losing it a little?
Probably he doesn’t want to be around people, because he does seem to run off, whenever he can, at least in Ben’s experience.
Also, Ben himself wouldn’t want to be around people if his brain was throwing up options like “Squirgle” as words, either, so he thinks the logic follows.
This is a party full of people; there is nowhere at this party without people; so Pete has left the party, at least temporarily.
He could be on another floor, but Ben has to assume and hope that they’re locked off, or otherwise closed to guests.
He could have gone home, but Chris is still here—naturally, Ben can see him across the room, merrily chatting with someone dressed as a box of Cheerios—so by the rules of basic logic, Pete’s still in the vicinity somewhere.
Maybe he went out front? But there isn’t anywhere to hide out there, since the facade opens right out onto West Twenty-Third Street, and costumed people are still spilling into and out of the party through the main doors.
A single word occurs to Ben, bright and clear and obvious, the refuge of unhappy city-dwellers the world over: roof.
He makes his way, a little tipsily, out of the main party and over to the elevator bank he passed on entry, hits a button, does an embarrassing little fist pump when the doors open, which he’s very glad no one is around to witness, and steps inside.
He is pleased to see a button labeled Rooftop Terrace, and even more pleased when, upon pressing it, it lights up and stays lit, and the doors ding shut.
Ben is whisked up to a glass-fronted elevator bay with doors that, as advertised, open onto a large rooftop terrace.
It’s obvious this warehouse has been here many decades, maybe even centuries, and has lived many lives; there are brick archways leftover from a time that Ben could bother to place, if he cared more, was less drunk.
As it is, he sips at his beverage and follows his hunch, wandering vaguely across the open rooftop until—
—there. Leaning against the far wall, weight balanced on legs kicked out in front of him, bent nearly double and looking, honestly, somewhat tragicomic in his floppy hot dog costume, is Pete.
For a hanging second, a little part of Ben—his sober self, maybe, or his single self-preservation instinct—claws its way to the surface.
It informs him, in rather a shriller tone than is entirely necessary, that what he should do, right now, is turn back.
Pete came here to be alone, physically ran away specifically from Ben in order to achieve some solitude, and Ben has no business tracking him up here like a bloodhound.
But—God, Ben had gone through this phase in middle school, or maybe early high school—oh, he doesn’t remember now.
He’d been young and angry, that was the important thing, an unhappy, slightly smelly little cauldron of unfamiliar hormones and haunting new insecurities and the creeping suspicion that maybe he wasn’t going to find himself developing an interest in girls any day now.
Little things would set him off and he’d blow up, say something about how it was so stupid and they were all stupid and being alive was stupid, because he was in that awkward period of teen rage where frustration cut off access to his inner dictionary.
Then he’d storm out and go stand outside, committed as a postman, stubbornly waiting in the rain or the snow or the dark of the night until he felt less like he was going to explode.
Ben wanted to be alone in those moments; of course he did.
Ben is so, so good at being alone. He wants to be alone when he locks himself in the bathroom on twenty-seven so he doesn’t scream in Jessica’s irritating but undeserving face, or when he stays in his apartment on a Friday night instead of trying his luck at another meetup group or speed dating event.
It’s better, in his experience, to be alone when you’re on fire—easier to avoid burning anyone.
Easier to keep anyone from knowing who you are in that kind of agony, to sidestep the sick vulnerability of being seen that raw.
But he would be lying, wouldn’t he, if he said he hadn’t wanted someone to come out after him, every time.
If he said that he hadn’t been desperate, standing out there sizzling in front of the restaurant in whatever weather, for someone to step through the swinging doors and dump a bucket of ice-cold water over his head.
If he said that, when he’d eventually stopped doing it, it was for any reason other than wanting to cut away how much it hurt—to ache for that relief, to have it never, ever come.
It’s this that pushes his hesitant feet one in front of the other, footfalls sure but largely silent, regretting leaving his peacoat behind downstairs as he makes his way across the rooftop.
Pete doesn’t seem to notice him coming, doesn’t look up, but as Ben gets closer, he can see that Pete’s back is heaving under the cheap fabric of the hot dog costume.
When he’s a few yards away—far enough that it will be easy to slink off if Pete makes it clear he wants Ben to go—Ben takes a deep breath, and squares his shoulders, and says, “Hey.”
Pete, unsurprisingly, jumps. It’s an impressively small jump—Ben would have flailed like Kermit the Frog, not remotely intentionally—but his whole body seems to shudder, after, and he quickly turns his face away.
His voice is low, rough, when he says, “Uh—hi. Sorry, I’m—you’re not catching my—best moment. ”