Chapter 12
TWELVE
A few hours later, as though it was all some kind of wild fever dream, Ben finds himself wandering dopily around JFK, smiling at every Hudson News as though it’s a wonder of the world.
He feels… different, inside his skin. Like his glorious hour and a half with Pete pulled his soul out of his body, gave it a good shake, laundered it, darned up the holes, and slipped it back into place, just in time for the afterglow to be cut short by the insistent ringing of Ben’s “LEAVE FOR THE AIRPORT NOW, YOU IDIOT” alarm.
Pete had been good about that, though. Pete had been good about everything.
Pete had been… good. Ben can’t quite stop thinking about just how good he’d been, how skillful and attentive, how playful, how responsive. Some of the sounds he’d made—
—no, Ben cannot think about this here, in the migraine-inducing fluorescent lighting of JFK’s underwhelming halls.
This is a place for waiting for an airplane, boarding an airplane, or partaking in one of a variety of miserable side-quests that can occur between one and the other.
It is not a place for remembering what Pete’s body had felt like against his, or under his hands, or the way he’d kissed Ben goodbye and whispered, “Fly out of LaGuardia next time, yeah? It’s closer to the office; you wouldn’t have to go just yet. ”
Ben can see, now, that this would have been a great opportunity to say something like, “I think you’d better take me to dinner before you go dictating my airport choices,” or, indeed, “Will next time be before or after you break up with the hot guy who considers you a party ticket, your commitment to whom we have never otherwise discussed?” Instead, he had squeaked, “Next time?”
Pete had just grinned, and shaken his head, and kissed him again before sending him off, saying he’d take care of the various surfaces which needed re-sanitizing. It was a good kiss, one Ben is reliving in spite of his internal admonishments not to, when he hears, once again, from his conscience.
“It’s not that I don’t understand why you did it,” it begins, hesitant in the back of his mind.
“But I wonder, I do, if you have considered the consequences. Considered them thoroughly, and all the way through to the end. If, for example, you were walking through the airport, and you happened to see Chris, walking directly towards you—”
“Oh my God,” Ben breathes, stopping dead in his tracks and then, in a moment of true insanity, ducking behind a vending machine so as to remain unseen.
He tries to tell himself it’s a waking nightmare, a hallucination born of guilt, but no: Chris himself is indeed walking towards him.
That’s bad enough on its own, but he appears to be with—
—walking hand in hand, with, actually—
—stopping to kiss another man, a man who is not Pete, right here in the middle of John F. Kennedy Airport. For anyone to see!
In this particular moment of Ben’s life, a variety of seemingly unrelated things are true.
True: He has had several drinks over the course of the night, and is still, if he’s honest, a little less than sober.
True: He has, for some weeks, been harboring a private well of rage for Chris for many reasons of his own, and to see him stepping out on Pete like this is simply a bridge too far.
True: Ben does happen to know Pete is also stepping out on Chris, extensively and with great enthusiasm, because Ben was there and ecstatic for the entire event, and it was only about an hour ago.
And, true: Because of all of the above, the smart thing for Ben to do is put his head down, let them pass, and keep his big mouth shut.
But when someone blows your mind in the bedroom—or, as the facts run in this case, the Gastronome test kitchen—it apparently takes out a few of your critical brain cells.
Surely, it’s this, or perhaps a combination of this and his unwise second, post-coital Hot Dog Panic Attack that has Ben striding ferociously out of his hiding spot, stalking across the floor, and, when Chris has broken apart from his damningly not-Pete paramour, snapping, “Well, well, well. Aren’t you supposed to be in Weehawken? ”
Chris stares at him, visibly confused. “No? What?”
“As if you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Ben says, crossing his arms over his chest. “What would your boyfriend think of you being here, huh? What about that?”
“Who even are you?” Chris demands, his brow creasing. “What would my boyfriend think? I’m with him! Right now! Behold!” He holds up their joined hands, as if in evidence, and adds, to him, “What do you think, babe? About me being here?”
“I think you better not be cheating on me with some guy in Weehawken,” the man says, but mildly enough. “But as far as I can tell, all your dad’s neighbors are ugly, so. I’m not that worried about it.”
“Thanks, baby,” Chris says, sounding touched. “Your trust means a lot.”
“So,” Ben splutters, a growing and embarrassing awareness that he’s maybe been projecting here starting to surface, “so—so if this is your boyfriend, then, you’re, what, using Pete? For free tickets to things?”
Chris’s eyes bug for a second, and then his hand flies to his mouth and he says, “Oh my God, you’re the ketchup guy. From the Halloween—Luke, remember I told you about the—”
At this point, Chris’s Boyfriend—Ben’s going to go ahead and assume his name is Luke—cuts in. “Oh, you mean from the food—”
“Right, and Pete was all—”
“And this is him,” Luke says, giving Ben a brief once-over, “and he thinks that you and Pete…” He, too, puts a hand over his mouth, but Ben realizes with a sinking feeling that he is concealing laughter. “God, I’m sorry, I’m going to go stand over there until I can get myself under control.”
He walks off as Chris puts his hands on his hips and stares at Ben.
Ben wilts under the 5,000-watt intensity of Chris’s stare; he thinks glass would probably wilt. “Okay, I can see I’ve read this wrong somewhere, but I was—”
Chris, looking irritated, holds up a finger.
“Stop; I’m trying to work out the fastest way to explain the enormity of your mistake, because I have things to do, shockingly enough, with my time.
So, you know Pete pretty well?” Ben nods.
“You know about him changing his name, back in the day?” Ben nods, wincing slightly. “You know what his name used to be?”
At Ben’s final nod, Chris nods back, then makes a thumbs-up, points it at himself, and says, sounding very annoyed, “Chris Castillo. His cousin.”
“His… cousin.” Ben stands for a long, silent moment, horror seeming to have turned all his blood to an icy sludge. Then, hideously, before he can stop it, what comes out of his mouth is, “Are you sure?”
Though Ben can’t see him, he hears an enormous whoop of laughter from somewhere nearby that sounds suspiciously as though it came from Luke.
Chris does not look amused. “Am I sure that he’s my cousin?
Well, let’s see. His father’s my uncle, check.
My father’s his uncle, check. But, wait, are our fathers brothers—why, who could believe it, they are!
Like, what do you mean am I sure? He’s my cousin!
He’s been my cousin since the day I was born.
Are you asking if I think he’s been bodyswapped?
Because my answer is no!” There is another peal of laughter at this point, which confirms for Ben that it’s coming from Luke, wherever he’s gone to, since Chris snaps, “You shut up, Luke, this isn’t that funny! ”
“I don’t know,” Luke calls back, “I think it’s at least medium funny.”
“I personally would like to die about it,” Ben says, in the brightly brittle tones of someone who has moved past simply being mortified and into a plane of existence where mortified is the only thing they’ve ever been, or shall ever be again.
“If that’s helpful at all. I’m going to go and, um, stop having this interaction as fast as possible, if it’s all the same to you.
Thanks so much, and sorry for the, um, interruption to your morning, and is there any chance that maybe you won’t tell—”
“Pete? About this conversation? No,” Chris says, flat, one eyebrow up.
“There is no chance of that. None whatsoever. I’m already anticipating retelling this story at every family holiday for, and this is an estimate, the rest of my natural life, so.
Nice seeing you—what was your name? If you give me a fake one, I’ll just tell him that, too, you know. ”
“Ben,” Ben says, on a sigh, “I’m Ben, and I’m sorry, and I’m leaving,” and then he’s hurrying away to one last peal of laughter from Luke, before he can screw up anything else.
The flight that follows is punishing, in that Ben tries to close his eyes and get some rest but can’t quite manage it.
Either he’s treated to a Technicolor replay of everything that happened with Chris, or he experiences two or three moments of exquisite memory of his evening with Pete, before the thought of how Pete will react to what happened with Chris crashes in to spoil his fun.
All in all, by the time he lands in Michigan, weathers an uncomfortable Uber ride, and lets himself into his parents’ building around 5:45 a.m., Ben is vibrating with tension, semi-hungover, and sure to his bones that he’s ruined everything.
He crashes onto the twin bed in what was once his childhood bedroom and is now ostensibly the guest room, expecting to lie awake in anguish until he hears his family start getting up.
Since this room’s actual purpose has become housing his father’s model plane building hobby somewhere his mother doesn’t have to look at it, there is, if nothing else, plenty for his exhausted eyes to behold.
It’s reminded him for years of a page from an I Spy book.