Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Ben can almost feel his blood pressure dropping as the elevator rises towards the thirty-fourth floor, a weird, inverse reaction.
Pete’s telling him some story about one of Miranda’s previous crimes—something about a cancelled shipment of very particular cheese—and while Ben’s not paying a huge amount of attention, the sound of his voice is calming.
Slowly, he feels his shoulders lower from where they’ve been bunched up around his ears and allows his breathing to settle into something that less resembles a rage-induced pant.
It occurs to Ben, too late, that this perhaps was not the most alluring side of himself to show to Pete.
Renata’s always told him that he’s like a cartoon character when he gets into that particular mood, stomping and stamping and looking like he should have steam coming out of his ears; it’s not one of his more attractive qualities.
But when Pete quirks an eyebrow and says, “Feeling better?” he doesn’t sound annoyed, or resigned, or like he thinks Ben’s made an ass of himself. He looks entertained. “I am sorry, you know, about the lost sleep. I know some of that’s my fault—”
“Oh, shut up,” Ben says, no rancor behind it at all. “I didn’t mind doing it, it’s just that it didn’t have to be done. He only needed forty—”
“Okay, okay, let’s not start that again,” Pete says, laughing, as the elevator doors ding open. He steps behind Ben, puts a hand on each of his shoulders, and begins frog-marching him out of the elevator. “Come on, that’s it, onward. No more talk of Dave.”
“Dave,” Ben mutters darkly, though his heart’s not in it.
He’s too busy enjoying the warmth of Pete’s hands against his shoulders, the way he could close his eyes and tell himself this moment was happening in another context, in another place.
Somewhere private, where they could be completely alone, and Chris was guaranteed not to be around.
Somewhere they would be unlikely to inconveniently fall asleep, or get distracted, or otherwise be pulled away from what sometimes, to Ben, feels like a personal altered gravity between them, like they’re asteroids falling into the sun.
The motion-triggered overhead lights flicker on one by one as Pete pushes Ben down the hall towards the test kitchen, leaving his hands on Ben’s shoulders long after he could have pulled them away.
It occurs to Ben, in a moment of brilliant, sparkling clarity, that he doesn’t have to close his eyes to imagine the ideal conditions to find himself in with Pete right now: He’s in them, accidentally but entirely.
All he has to do is play his cards right.
And, well, okay, live with a little bit of guilt, probably, about attempting to seduce Pete away from his hot, mean boyfriend in hopes of being his…
well, somewhat less hot and still fairly mean boyfriend, but!
Ben wouldn’t be mean to Pete, that’s the important thing. The critical crux of the issue.
When they reach the kitchen, Pete stops pushing. He does, however, squeeze Ben’s shoulders lightly as he says, “Drink?” before letting him go.
“God, anything,” Ben says, feeling drunk just on the proximity to him, the sheer privacy of the moment.
Obviously, anyone could come up to the test kitchen tonight, but Ben can’t imagine why they would.
It’s all closed down for the weekend: everything in its proper home, all the dishes put away, all the surfaces sanitized, various floor mats hung over the sinks to dry.
It would be a pain to come in here and cook now; you’d have to get everything set up and then broken back down again, at least for whatever station you wanted to use.
Easy enough to make a drink, though. Pete grabs a few highball glasses out of the dishroom, liberates a jar of something labeled only with Pete’s from the Keeps fridge, and then pulls a few bottles off the liquor cart in the back corner.
He pours and mixes for a minute, tasting off a tiny spoon, then nods and dumps the mix into a cocktail shaker with a large cube of ice he snatches from the freezer.
He lifts it to shake and—pauses, glancing down at his outfit. Sheepishly, he says, “Okay, can I be honest here?”
“Oh, definitely,” Ben says, as much out of curiosity as kindness.
“My sister really does have expensive taste,” Pete admits.
“But I’m not exactly rolling in it, so I may or may not have left the tags on this coat?
And… the sweater? So I can return them? And I feel like—” He glances grimly from the cocktail shaker to his station and shakes his head.
“I know there’s not any cameras here now, but it feels like tempting fate, doesn’t it? After so many mishaps?”
“Oh, definitely,” Ben says again, because it’s that or say, “You know, just to be safe, maybe you should get totally naked. And I, too, should get totally naked. And then we, once totally naked, could determine our next steps from there. What do you say?” It doesn’t seem like his best move.
He doesn’t have to make it, anyway. To Ben’s absolute delight, Pete nods, and takes off his jacket, which he drapes carefully over Brogan’s station, out of harm’s way.
Then, with a little shrug, he pulls the sweater up over his head, too, revealing that he is wearing nothing but a ratty black tank top underneath, one that looks like it has seen better days.
Oh, hell, Ben thinks, dry-mouthed and distant, I’ve miscalculated here. He’s too hot and I’m going to die, but then Pete picks up the cocktail shaker. Ben watches, transfixed, as Pete shakes the drink, lost in the ripple and flex of the muscles in his shoulders, his arms.
Pete, does your boyfriend know you’re here sexily shaking drinks at me as though I have some sort of bartending fetish and you’re determined to show me a good time?
Ben neither says this nor wants to say this; it’s a thought that pops up unbidden, determined to sully his happiness, and Ben wrestles it quickly aside.
“What, ah.” Ben pauses, noticing his voice is coming out as more of a dried-out croak than anything, and clears his throat. “What are you making?”
“Oh, remember that drink you let me try at the Halloween party?” Pete grins when Ben nods, and, tragically, sets the cocktail shaker down, breaking the seal, putting ice in their glasses, and pulling a tiny strainer from a drawer as he talks.
“Well, it was good, but I kept thinking about it, because I thought it could be, you know, better. So for the last few weeks, I’ve been letting these finger limes infuse in this mezcal, and I strained that out as the base and shook it with ice and simple syrup and a little bit of the lime pulp.
Oh, except juniper wasn’t quite right with the mezcal, so it’s a brown sugar grapefruit simple now, and as I lay it all out, basically it’s a totally different drink, but.
” He sets a glass in front of Ben and strains the cocktail into it as he finishes, his smile going small and sheepish.
“I’m still going to call it the Hot Dog Panic Attack. ”
“How could you not?” Ben says, after a beat in which he wrestles back the urge to attempt a vault over the counter for reasons of sheer attraction, which would both be embarrassing and, likely as not, end in the emergency room.
Ben is a lot of things, but athletic? Not so much.
He contents himself, instead, with saying, “Didn’t seem like a great experience, but a great name for a cocktail. ”
“I don’t know,” Pete says, still smiling.
“It could have been worse. If you have to have a panic attack, and that panic attack has to be while you are, for all intents and purposes, a hot dog, I think doing it in such good company is probably the best-case scenario.” He takes a sip of the drink while Ben, sure he’s flushed bright red, searches for a response to this, and adds, sounding satisfied, “Mmm, yeah, that’s how I wanted this to taste. Go on, try it. I think you’ll like it.”
Ben doesn’t doubt at all that he’ll like it; he’s concerned that one single additional sip of alcohol is all that stands between him and letting go of the paltry remains of his self-control.
But he picks up the glass anyway, holding eye contact with Pete as he swallows for far longer than he should and releasing an embarrassing little moan of satisfaction when the beverage—nothing like the one from the Halloween party and somehow akin to it anyway, managing to be both brighter and smokier while hitting in the same refreshing, citrusy spot—has finished sliding down his throat. “God, that’s sublime.”
Pete doesn’t reply; as Ben greedily takes another sip, he notices Pete’s eyes are fixed on his throat and nearly chokes as he swallows.
At this point, a little voice begins to sound in the back of Ben’s mind.
He can barely hear it through the haze of desire and, admittedly, growing tipsiness, but it’s saying something along the lines of, “Hello, Benjamin, it’s me!
Your conscience! Things are going a little far here, my good man, wouldn’t you say?
A bit beyond the old pale? So this seems like the perfect moment to point out to Pete that he does have a boyfriend, and that you, Ben, have never been involved with any sort of cheating, and that even if he is, okay, the hottest human being who has ever shown even a glimmer of interest in you, that doesn’t mean—hey!
No! Oh, God, wait, don’t make me go back there, there are so many neuroses running around—”
Having shoved this voice firmly back into the recesses of his mind, Ben turns his attention, once again, to the man before him. Pete’s taking a pull from his own drink, then grinning down at it, smiling in satisfaction.