Chapter 16 #3
It takes him a second to orient himself in the chilly evening air, half-blinded by the haze of headlights, streetlights, and brightly lit signage that is New York at night.
He spins around in the light snow that’s currently dusting over the road, briefly lost a few blocks from home, before he recognizes DeWitt Clinton Park just behind him.
That means it’s nearly a straight shot to Rockefeller Center, and Ben knows he can’t be more than six or seven blocks away.
Granted, they’re avenue blocks, and that means it’s probably a twenty-minute walk—does Ben have twenty minutes?
Damn: If only they hadn’t been hustled out so fast last time due to the blaring fire alarms, he’d have a better sense of how long it will be before Pete steps out of the building.
Of course, Ben could just call Pete. He could get back in the cab, even, and sit in traffic for as long as it took for the driver to take him, along with his suitcase, back home.
He could send Pete a text, or an email, setting up a time and place to meet; Ben could even go down to Castillo’s one day this week, if the most important thing was seeing Pete in person.
But the most important thing to Ben, in this moment, is not seeing Pete in person.
It’s seeing Pete right now, this instant.
It’s not wasting another second they could be spending together on stupid misunderstandings, or problems born of corporate vampires, or having mistaken his cousin for his boyfriend.
All his life Ben’s believed in waiting and seeing, in not getting too invested, in adapting to whatever situation arose.
He’s done his best to crush down his impulses to say harsh, judgmental things, or to insist that any given situation be handled his way, even if he knew to his bones that his way was right.
It’s not that those impulses haven’t been there all his life, but he’s had the decency—or, what he thought until now was the decency—to manage them, keep them under control.
Life has, as a whole, taught him roundly that it’s better that way.
Safer. Not worth the danger inherent in sticking your neck out. Not worth the cost of the argument.
But tonight, after watching Pete lay it all on the line on live TV for a chance, just a chance, that Ben would forgive him—tonight, Ben looks deep within himself and finds there is a man of action after all.
And so, with Mrs. C’s words about risk and Pete’s whole impossible speech fighting for the opportunity to ring loudest in his ears, he runs.
Man of action or not, Ben is not much of a runner.
He never has been, for the very good reason that he was, until this moment, totally unable to understand why anyone would ever want to be good at it.
Survival situations, sure, but Ben is more or less doomed in one of those anyway, having been crafted since birth for very exacting indoor specifications. He hadn’t ever seen the point.
He sees it now, though, as he huffs and puffs his way across the island as fast as he can, dodging and weaving around pedestrian traffic.
The thud of his feet on the ground matches the drum of his heart in his ears, and as he hurries past cheerful holiday window displays, and under lampposts wound in spruce garlands and thick red ribbon, he finds himself wishing he had ever in his life cared about cardio.
The wish becomes more of a fervent prayer to a higher power when Ben sees, approaching at speed, two women carrying a Christmas tree.
Their vibe suggests they’re a couple, which would normally make Ben vaguely happy in the oblique way seeing a queer couple always does.
In other circumstances, perhaps he would smile, and nod, and they’d all walk away with that indefinable sense of having been seen by one another.
However, the women are carrying the tree slung low between them, about two feet off the ground—at, Ben thinks grimly, precisely kneecapping height.
Also, Ben has seen them too late to slow down without eating the pavement hard, and so is definitely, absolutely not going to be able to stop in time to avoid a collision with them.
With no other option, Ben shrieks, “I’M SO SORRY,” and leaps into the air, barely clearing the tree and sending a scattering of needles across the ground. “SORRY!” he cries again, though he can hear the women cracking up behind him, without looking around.
As if in response to this—as if in response to every uncharitable thought Ben has ever had about the holiday season—the rest of his journey is essentially a Christmas-themed obstacle course.
He nearly collides with a very foul-mouthed Santa at the intersection of Fifty-Third and Eighth Street, and then heartily offends a red-and-green-swathed, Broadway-bound couple only minutes later, by shrieking a swear word of his own when they step out of a cab right in his path.
Barely dodging them, he makes it through the crowd of people always massing in the theatre district and then spots a stand of rentable bicycles.
Heartened by the thought of wheels, he pays for and attempts to extract one, only to discover to his absolute rage that some incompetent bastard has, in stringing the bike stand with twinkly lights, run those lights through the spokes of every bicycle.
At this point Ben, pushed past any semblance of composure, tips his head back towards the sky and lets out a brief, wordless yelp of frustration.
Someone nearby says, “Hey, man, chill out—try to get with the spirit a little, you know?” When Ben turns to look, he spots the speaker on a nearby stoop: a fellow New Yorker drinking something concealed by a brown paper bag and wearing an upsettingly well-rendered Grinch costume.
This could, Ben knows, be a stress-born hallucination, but probably not.
It is New York City, after all. A drunk stoop Grinch is hardly the weirdest thing he’s ever seen; just last week a guy outside the local laundromat barked at Ben, a full, unsettlingly accurate dog bark, and Ben hadn’t even stopped walking.
Still, he doesn’t have time for indulging the Grinch, or for untangling twinkly lights from bicycle spokes, or anything else. Grimly, without saying a word, he leaves both the bikes and the Grinch behind and once again takes off running.
“This… is… Stupid,” he pants to himself after a few minutes, when he’s only a block away from Rockefeller Center.
It is stupid, and the closer he gets, the more difficult that is for Ben to ignore.
What, exactly, is his plan? Is he going to go inside the building and say, “Hello, Ben Blumenthal here, I don’t have a visitor’s pass or any permission to be on the premises, and I look like I’m seconds away from expiring, which, in fairness, I am!
But a guy on one of your shows just said my name like fifteen minutes ago, and that guy has only set this building on fire the one time, and it was only a little, and it wasn’t my fault at all—”
No. Even in the safety of his own head, Ben can’t imagine a version of himself he’d let inside of any building, let alone one currently recording a live television show.
But—when else, then? Is he going to wait outside like a creep until Pete leaves?
What if Pete’s already left? What if Ben chooses the wrong entrance to stake out and misses him entirely?
Would he have been better off heading to the ferry, maybe, and hanging out there on the theory that at some point Pete will have to return to New Jersey?
None of these thoughts slow his footfalls, though, so he’s approaching the building, dashing along the sidewalk that runs above the famous Rockefeller Center ice rink, when—
“AHHH!” This distracting exclamation is emitted by a small child of utterly indeterminable age and gender, holding a large stuffed Rudolph the Reindeer, and so bundled up that all that’s visible is their eyes.
Those eyes look very frightened. This, perhaps, is because a strange, gasping man running at full speed is seconds away from crashing into them; Ben would probably scream in the circumstances, too.
In fact: “AHHH!” Ben screams in reply, and leaps wildly to his left, towards what he realizes too late is a line of shrubs which serve as the barrier between the sidewalk and the sunken ice rink, which sits about a story below him.
The moment slows a little as Ben realizes he’s hitting it at a terrible, overbalanced angle, too high and with too much momentum—he’s teetering on the edge of the shrubs, scrabbling for purchase or, at very least, to direct his weight back towards the sidewalk instead of towards the ice below—crap, hell, it’s not enough, he’s tipping forward, he’s going to meet the ice skull-first and crack his damn head open and then Pete will never know that—
“Ben!” And suddenly he is being gripped by one large, strong hand, and then another, as he is hauled back to the safety of the earth. “Hey—I got you. You’re all right.”
Gasping for breath, his life flashing before his eyes, it takes Ben a second to realize his rescuer is Pete.
“It’s… you.” Ben wheezes this more than he says it, out of breath from the run and the adrenaline and, a little, the abrupt proximity of Pete, which is asinine.
Surely, he wanted to see Pete; surely, he nearly killed himself getting here, more literally than he’d have preferred, in order to see Pete, immediately and at once.
And yet somehow being in front of him, with one of Pete’s hands firmly gripping his shoulder and his other arm loosely looped around Ben’s waist to steady him, is a breath-stealing, brain-emptying shock.
“Are you okay?” Pete’s looking at him with such unmasked concern, like these last two weeks never even happened—like Ben never stopped talking to him, or told him to go away without even hearing him out. “Jesus Christ, for a second there, I thought—”
“I’m okay,” Ben says. Letting the words out of his mouth seems to loosen his tongue—or maybe it’s the way Pete hasn’t stepped back yet, hasn’t let go even a little—but whatever the reason, Ben suddenly finds whole sentences he hasn’t thought through pouring out of him.
“I was running, because I saw the show. Your show? That you did just now? And I wasn’t far away—I mean, it was far to run, that’s why I probably seem, like, mostly dead?
But it was pretty close, and I was supposed to be going to California, which, oh, Christ, I have to call Larry, but that’s a later problem.
Sorry! Anyway! I was trying to say that I was running, because I thought if I ran, I could get here, to talk to you, to tell you that you didn’t have to do that and I’m so sorry Miranda’s been screwing you, and I should have let you explain, and I didn’t mean to make you—”
“You didn’t make me do anything.” Pete’s smiling down at him now; his arm tightens around Ben’s waist, pulling him in close.
“Or, if you did, it wasn’t in the way you mean.
” The hand that was on Ben’s shoulder is sliding now, long fingers spreading out over Ben’s coat to lie flat along his back.
“I did it because of something you made me realize.”
“And what was that?” Ben feels giddy, dizzy with proximity and happiness and relief, but the curiosity underneath is real.
Pete’s eyes are warm and fond under his snow-flecked beanie. “Well, as it turns out, nothing scares me as much as the thought of you never talking to me again. In the face of that, what’s a little camera time? A little internet fame?”
“Oh,” Ben says, semi-hysterically. “Is that all? Just the single most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me in my whole life, no biggie? How am I supposed to respond to that, Pete? I’m not going to say thank you, that seems insanely awkward, but my reference points for things like are old movies and I can’t imagine that my most dignified move here is to swoon—”
“You can if you want to,” Pete says, sounding amused. “But, honestly, I’d settle for hearing that you forgive me for getting you fired? Because, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to get around to kissing you at some point.”
“Forgiven, forgotten, let’s skip ahead,” Ben says hastily. “Don’t let me delay you.” And then Pete’s leaning in and Ben’s tipping his face up and the world’s falling away, leaving nothing but a distant echo behind.