Chapter 14 Ben
Ella was attracted to me. I was attracted to Ella. But I wasn’t sure if I was ready to act on it.
This must have been one of the higher circles of hell. One reserved for amateur sinners who didn’t do anything bad enough during their lives to warrant everlasting physical torture but were juuust shitty enough that they got to spend eternity sexually frustrated.
Ella left my house an hour ago, as the sun began to set.
Upstairs, paint dried in the spare bedroom.
We came downstairs after covering the walls with a heavy coat of primer and got to work putting together the furniture I bought for the library.
The mood had eased some when we pulled apart from our hug, a sort of cease-fire of sexual tension.
We let the puppies into the library with us, and the roly-poly chaos they brought with them worked wonders to distract us.
Now she was gone, and I sat alone on the living room couch, the puppies passed out on me, a fire crackling in the fireplace. There was nothing to keep my mind occupied.
I raised my hand and flexed my fingers, remembering the feel of her waist beneath my palm.
This was my fault; I initiated the flirtation.
I had no one to blame but myself. When she asked me for help with that light fixture, I turned around to see her holding the ugly thing up, her toned arms on display, and couldn’t keep my gaze from sliding down over the rest of her.
The t-shirt she wore had ridden up, exposing the slight curve of her hips and her tight, rounded ass.
God bless the person who brought leggings back into style.
Just above the band of them, a couple inches of Ella’s lower back was exposed, her skin as pale as cream, the slight dimples on either side of her spine visible. I wanted to drop to my knees behind her and trace them with my tongue.
My attraction to Ella shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
She was my type, after all. Not just physically, but emotionally and even mentally.
It was the strength of my attraction, now that I’d stopped suppressing it, that caught me off guard.
I spent the entire afternoon wanting to capture her laughter with my mouth, swallow down that beautiful sound and let her warmth fill me.
I wanted to tease her, unendingly, just to watch the color bloom on her cheeks.
I wanted to thread my fingers into her hair.
I wanted to hear the noises she’d make when I made her come.
She didn’t freak out when I told her I had depression and anxiety.
Nothing about her behavior toward me changed afterward.
It made me want her even more. It made me wish that I’d done what I wanted and kissed her tears away when she cried.
It made me want to schedule the tests. To find out once and for all what my fate was so I could finally move forward with my life. And maybe, move forward with her.
My phone rang from the side table. Doodle, who’d been splayed across my lap, jerked awake at the sound and nearly tumbled off of me.
Boots, sleeping on his back wedged in between my thigh and the arm of the couch, twitched his head up to glare at the phone.
I scooped it up and answered, feeling like I should apologize for disturbing them.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. Finally. I’d been worried after not hearing back from them.
“Hi, Ben. I have you on speaker with Mom.”
“Hi, Mom. You doing any better?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice quiet. “Sorry about yesterday.”
I wanted to ask her about yesterday, press her about what “bad days” meant to her, but now didn’t really feel like the time. Much better to have that conversation face-to-face.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I told her. “I know how stressed you’ve been about me being out here.”
“When did you want us to visit?” Dad asked.
“Ella and I put the first coat of paint on a spare bedroom for you earlier. I just need another day or two to get that finished and a few more for the furniture to arrive. Did you want to plan for ten days from now?”
“We can do that,” Dad said. “Oh, hey, we finally chose a new staff writer for the website.”
“Nice. Who’d you decide on?”
“Veronica O’Leary. She’s the woman with the ex-army husband who has TBI from his time in Afghanistan.”
“She sounds like the perfect fit. Someone who gets it.”
“She is,” Mom chimed in. “And she does.”
Combat soldiers were right up there with football players when it came to brain injury rates.
My parents and I planned to expand the non-profit’s website and publish our own articles about the emerging studies on TBI and CTE, and Mom and Dad had been spearheading the hiring of staff while I’d been out here.
They asked me to weigh in on some big decisions, but mostly they handled it themselves.
We spent the next thirty minutes talking about plans for the website, shooting another PSA, and the lawsuit against the USFL.
Our lawyers had filed an injunction against the league’s Commissioner for his Twitter rant, and, thankfully, the judge granted it.
Mom, an unforgiving edge to her tone, voiced the hope that in his hubris, the Commissioner would ignore the injunction and get fined, and/or imprisoned, and/or charged with contempt of court.
I sympathized with her. The man was a monumental jackass.
He sided with the conservative team owners and the corporate sponsors, always, more their crony than a functioning figurehead.
It was obvious what dictated his decisions: greed.
The league would lose a lot of money if the courts decided in the favor of the players, which meant that he would lose money.
Or get fired. Personally, I hoped he got the axe long before we went to trial. God knew he deserved it.
By the time I got off the phone, the puppies were up and bumbling around the living room, batting at toys, playing tug of rope with each other, and generally being tiny puffs of trouble. It had been a while since they’d gone out, so I pushed up from the couch and coaxed them toward the front door.
I bundled up and then cracked it open. Boots took two steps toward it, got hit in the face with an arctic blast of wind that blew his ears back, and then turned around and took off at full speed back into the house, his little body projecting an almost audible stream of, “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”
Doodle was a little braver. He got to the threshold, stepped his front two paws down onto the porch, and then immediately tried to reverse, crying pitifully when he couldn’t pull himself back up the step.
I scooped him up, set him inside, and closed the door against the wind.
He walked over to the nearby puppy pad, squatted down, and peed on it.
“Totally get it, little dude,” I told him. I wouldn’t want to piss out there either.
My phone dinged from inside my pocket. I pulled it out to see a text from Ella.
Puppy pictures. Need them. Already going through withdrawal over here.
I grinned. What’ll you give me in return?
We’re bartering now? Okay, how about more cribbage lessons so you stop being such an epic loser?
We played best out of three the other day. I’d been blessed with the skunkarooney dance again. One of these days, I needed to stealth record her doing it. The blackmail potential was off the charts.
Hmmm. What else you got? I texted back.
She sent me a picture of Fred and Sam, passed out on her living room floor.
From the looks of it, Jack had managed to wear them out.
Only a couple of days had passed since I’d seen them, but I missed those hyperactive weirdos.
The puppies were adorable, but their personalities hadn’t fully developed yet.
Fred and Sam had their own presences. I couldn’t wait to see how they interacted with Boots and Doodle.
Ella told me they were even more puppy obsessed than we were, but I found that hard to believe.
Fair trade, I texted back. Hang on a sec. I have to get them in the same room.
I scooped Doodle up from where he was chewing on the laces of my discarded boots, then went to find his brother. Boots was in the kitchen, his paws up on the trashcan like he was going to knock it over for the second time today.
“Come here, trouble,” I said, hefting him. He let out a whine and craned his head around to look at the trashcan in open longing.
I brought them into the living room, set them on the blanket by the fire, and took their picture. They looked like they were smiling at the camera. I sent it to Ella.
I JUST WANT TO SQUEEZE THEM, she texted back.
You’re that aunt who pinches cheeks, aren’t you?
Only Evan and Michael’s. If I tried to pinch Willow, she’d seek revenge.
I’m going to have to meet that kid one day.
Woah. Where had that come from? I mean, granted, I’d been curious about Willow since Ella told me about the infamous Christmas Eve Poopsicle Incident, but it was in a vague way. Like, it’d be fun to watch a kid that cute act like such a hellion.
As I stared down at my text, I realized that I meant the words in a more concrete way. I did want to meet Willow. And Michael and Evan. I wanted to meet Ella’s hippy mom and her grounded dad. I wanted to ask Jacob about his work in Africa. Talk to Jane about freelancing.
I wanted to know all of them. I wanted to watch them interact with Ella. I wanted to see her tease her siblings like she teased me. I wanted to experience the chaos of such a large family firsthand.
I knew the answer to Brian’s question now. I knew how I really felt about Ella. This was more than just simple attraction. I wanted to be part of her life. I wanted her to be part of mine.
The question was, what the fuck did I do about it?
My phone chimed with Ella’s response.