Chapter 17 #2
“Thanks a lot!” Ben says, and then loses himself to hysteria, listing forward into Pete’s body as he shakes with laughter. Pete, still cackling himself, throws an easy arm around Ben’s shoulders, and for a moment they stand there together, letting the mirth flow through them.
But as their chuckling dies down, they both seem to realize, in the same moment, that they have made it: They are safely inside Ben’s apartment, where no one can arrest them for committing lewd acts in public, or accuse them of disturbing Roast Beef with their wanton ways.
Grinning down at Ben, Pete tightens his grip as he says, “Well? What do you say? Should we give her the show she’s expecting, do you think? She did already thank us.”
“Practically rude not to,” Ben agrees, smiling wide and embarrassingly happy up into Pete’s face.
The communication between them becomes more physical than verbal at this point—it’s all pressure and suggestion, stumbling steps towards the bedroom, clothes being peeled off and tossed away without so much as a glance as to where they’ll land.
Ben hears something fall, at one point, as he chucks Pete’s T-shirt somewhere to the left; it doesn’t matter.
He’ll figure it out tomorrow, or a week from now, or whenever Pete decides to be done with him: Ben can’t be the one left to make that call.
It’d be years, probably—they’d starve to death—but Ben’s increasingly sure with every passing minute that it’d be worth it.
Sometime later, after thoroughly exhausting one another, briefly napping, and then waking up ravenous around 4:00 a.m., Pete and Ben order a pizza.
It’s New York, so this pizza shows up quickly in spite of the hour, although it does arrive in the hands of maybe the most stoned person Ben has ever encountered.
Pete hides a smile behind his hand when the guy asks if they mind if he takes a slice of pie for the road, and then doesn’t bother to hide his fondness when Ben says, “I mean—yeah, why not,” and offers him one.
It’s a good pizza, even minus a slice, and as they sit on Ben’s bed eating it, Pete explains about Miranda.
“She actually kind of… got me this job? In the sense that she straight-up did get me my original job at Formica.” Pete shakes his head, and then laughs and thumps Ben on the back when he chokes on a mouthful of pepperoni in surprise.
“Sorry, probably that was a between-bite disclosure, but. I was. Uh. Well—are you sure you want to hear this? It’s a pretty long story. ”
Ben raises a single eyebrow at him and then makes an expansive hand gesture, one meant to encompass all that’s happened between them as, apparently, a consequence of this woman’s involvement in Pete’s life. “I’m very, very sure, Pete.”
“Okay,” Pete says, and sighs. “So this is going to seem like a tangent, but it’s not one: The summer after high school, I started dating this guy, Neil.
And Neil was…” Pete’s face falls into complicated expression, one Ben can’t quite read, before he says, “Neil was… a lot. There were ways in which the two of us were compatible, I guess, but mostly he was, uh.” Running a hand through his hair, obviously uncomfortable with every option he considers, Pete finally says, “I think maybe. Inconsistent? Is the best word for it?”
“Is it the best word?” Ben can’t help but ask, his ears pricking at the shift in Pete’s tone, the uncharacteristic hesitation. “Or is it the most generous one?”
Pete makes a face like he’s bitten a lemon and doesn’t answer the question, which is answer enough.
Ben contains a wince as Pete continues, “He was hard to describe, let’s just put it like that.
But we were together, on and off, for… God, I don’t even totally remember, now.
It’s all a little blurred, those years—it was always so volatile, you know?
Hard to keep track of the particulars. It was more than half of my twenties, though, for sure.
” He sighs again, more heavily this time, and looks down at his hands.
“We met at the restaurant I worked at back then—he was waiting tables to cover expenses his last few years of school—and it was fine, sort of, for a while. We fought a lot, broke up a few times, but usually we got along well enough. And he liked my family, and my friends, and I liked his, and when it was good, it really did feel like it was all working. We got a place together, even. But then he got this Wall Street job, and he started wanting to, uh. To party a lot harder than I was interested in partying.”
“I… see,” Ben says, and winces. He’s had his own run-ins with the sort of hard-partying finance guys he thinks Pete’s describing, mostly as the direct result of checking Grindr in certain parts of the city, and it’s never gone particularly well. “Coke, then? Or…?”
“Oh, it started there,” Pete says, with an uncomfortable shrug.
“And if it had stopped there, I mean—well, I still wouldn’t have loved it, to be honest, but.
It’s not like the restaurant industry is so clean and sober, right?
So in the beginning, when it was just him doing a bump or two at a party, I figured: Whatever.
He’s an adult. It’s not my job to look after him, and I know plenty of people who indulge like that every once in a while, and…
” In a smaller voice, one that sounds ashamed, Pete admits, “I just really didn’t want to have to fight about it?
I know that sounds horrible, but I was already so tired of fighting with him. ”
Ben briefly resists the urge to put a soothing hand on Pete’s back, and then has the glorious, crowing realization that he doesn’t have to resist that impulse, and does it with perhaps slightly more gusto than is strictly necessary.
“I don’t think it sounds horrible, Pete.
I think it sounds… really understandable, honestly. ”
Pete smiles at him, but it’s a queasy smile. “I’m not sure you’ll still think that when you find out what happened.”
“Oh, I’ll take that bet happily,” Ben says, not even having to pause to think.
With even this much information, he’s fairly sure he can see the shape of this story in the marks it left behind on Pete and the people around him, and he doubts very much Pete did anything truly wrong.
“You’re on. What do you want to say—ten bucks?
Or maybe it’s easier if loser buys the coffee tomorrow morning. ”
“Assuming you still want to have coffee with me in the morning,” Pete mutters.
But then, louder, he says, “God, I have to just tell you right now or I never will, so: He started going out more and more, and partying more and more, and we kept breaking up, and making up, and breaking up. That was… hard, because we were on a lease together and neither one of us could afford a place alone, and Neil was out more and more, using more and more. It was just coke at first, but pretty soon it was meth and GHB and God knows what else. He got… erratic.” Pete gives Ben a desperate look, a look that breaks Ben’s heart; it’s like he thinks Ben is going to call him a bastard and kick him out if he’s not generous enough to this man who, reading between the lines, clearly treated Pete quite poorly for the bulk of their relationship.
“You have to believe me: I did try to get him to go to rehab, visit a clinic, talk to someone, anything. I drove him to a fancy rehab center upstate, even—I had to wait until the day after my twenty-fifth birthday so I’d be old enough to rent a car.
But when we got there, he wouldn’t go in, and he never wanted to go in, and for a year or two, I really tried, I promise I did—”
“Hey,” Ben says quietly, rubbing his back and then figuring he might as well go for broke and pulling him into a hug.
“I can hear you freaking out, you know. I was specially trained like a Navy SEAL by watching you do it over and over for—and this is an estimate—eight million hours of footage.” When Pete doesn’t laugh, Ben lowers his voice and, more seriously, says, “Pete—come on. Of course I believe you. Take a breath.”
Miserably, Pete says, “But I broke up with him! Not just in a fight, or for a month or whatever; for real. I told him to lose my number, I moved out, I couldn’t take it anymore.
It was all so—so messed up, all the time.
I mean, God, he came to my niece’s quinceanera and called my sister a bitch.
To her face! In front of my aunts and uncles and everyone!
She just asked him if he wanted a bottle of water!
And at the apartment…” Pete shudders at the memory, and Ben shifts them both, they’re lying back together on the pillows.
“It was just… awful. It was always, always awful. So I left, and I moved back in with my dad, which ended up being a good thing because it turned out he shouldn’t have been living alone anyway, except that after that Neil—I guess Neil kind of.
Bottomed out.” So quietly Ben can barely hear him even inches away, he whispers, “Nobody’s heard from him in years, Ben.
He… he disappeared into his habit. Fell off the face of the earth.
For all I know he’s—” He shakes his head, unable to finish the sentence, holding himself taut as a wire in Ben’s arms. “You can tell me to leave now, if you want. I’d understand. ”
Ben glares, briefly, up at the ceiling; his rage at the world has to go somewhere.
Then, as kindly as he can, he says, “That’s okay, Pete.
You can hit the ATM for my ten dollars in the morning, or we can just go with the ‘loser buys the coffee’ plan.
I’ve got plenty of flaws, but I’m not a sore winner. ”
There’s a beat, and then Pete pushes himself up on one elbow to stare down at Ben in shock. “Really?” he demands, sounding breathless. “You’re not—you don’t think I’m—like an extremely horrible person? I mean, I left him and he—”