38. Ben
Ben
Callie Morgan was doing a headcount and it felt like torture to watch her.
She stood at the front of the bus with a clipboard she wasn't looking at, counting kids by tapping each one on the head like she was blessing them, and every few seconds she lost her place and started over.
A little girl asked her a question and she crouched right down to the sticky bus floor to answer it, knees in who-knew-what, giving the kid her whole face like the answer to whether goats had top teeth was the most important thing she'd hear all year.
Callie promised to find out, and the kid beamed like she'd been handed the moon.
I'd seen women perform that kind of warmth before, dial it up when the right person was watching and let it drop when they weren't. Callie did it when she thought nobody was looking at all. That was the thing that kept catching me in the ribs.
"Mr. Ben." Oliver had turned around in his seat one row up to face me, in a buttoned-up collared shirt that belonged on a man closing a mortgage.
"Did you know goats have rectangular pupils?
It gives them a near three-hundred-and-forty-degree field of vision.
They can see you sneaking up on them. You can't sneak up on a goat. "
"Good to know," I laughed. "I'll cancel any and all plans to sneak up on a goat."
He studied me to see if I was making fun of him. I wasn't, and he seemed to decide that, and faced front again, cracking open a book the size of a cinder block.
The geometry of the bus situation was actively hostile.
I'm not a small man, and neither are Cole or Luke, and the bus was designed for second-graders.
The three of us had been banished to the back bench, knees in our chests, while twenty-two kids screamed about goats up front and Callie tried to ride herd on all of it with a granola bar hanging out of her mouth.
The bus had no air to speak of, and the heat had her blouse clinging in a way that made it real clear she'd dressed for a classroom and not a sweatbox on wheels.
I could see the exact shape of her breasts through the thin cotton, the way the fabric gave up and went see-through over the curve of her nipples, and I shifted in my seat and threw my forearm across my lap before my dick could fully commit to ruining a field trip to some wacky holistic goat farm.
"This is a hate crime," Cole said. His knees were somewhere around his ears.
"You didn’t have to volunteer," Luke said.
"We all volunteered." I leaned my head against the window and watched Callie laugh at something a parent chaperone said, that real nose-crinkle one she did that lit my stomach up with fireflies. "For the children. Obviously."
That should have been the end of it, but Luke had gone quiet in the particular way he did when he was about to organize something he had no business organizing, and a couple miles down the road he leaned in, his eyes flicking to Oliver one row up.
"I have to tell you guys something." He dropped his voice. "About, you know…. the cupcake."
Cole's head turned slow. "What about my cupcake." He didn't even seem to notice he'd said my. I noticed, and I was suddenly feeling very possessive over my favorite baked good.
"The other night. After paintball." Luke kept his eyes on the seatback. "I had a big delicious bite of the cupcake."
"You… had the cupcake," I repeated. That pissed me off even more, considering I'd had to leave my own bite half-finished when Darren came stomping into the auditorium like the world’s biggest cock-blocker.
"I had the entire cupcake, Ben. Wrapper and all.
" He dragged a hand down his jaw. "And here's the thing.
She felt guilty about it. Apparently, since the retreat, you've both taken a bite out of the cupcake too.
She'd gotten it into her head that we'd all sat down and talked about it, that there was some standing arrangement and everybody knew where everybody stood.
" He blew out a breath. "I didn't know she'd had sex with the both of you since we got back.
For the record. I'm not exactly throwing a parade about it.
But we did hand her that test-drive status back at the lake.
So when she's sitting there about to come apart over it, what was I going to do?
I told her we share everything. I told her we were all good with it. "
I hadn't slept with her since we all did at the lake, courtesy of Darren stomping into that auditorium at the worst possible moment of my life, but I sure as shit wasn't going to let these two assholes know that.
The bus hit a pothole and I felt it go straight up my spine. Nobody spoke for a second.
"You had her," Cole said. He didn’t yell but I could tell he wanted to. A vein in his neck was throbbing out a Morse code I was pretty sure translated to I will bite the head off of any man who looks at her.
"You're going to act surprised." Luke finally looked at him. "Like you haven't. Like Ben hasn't. Neither of you have ownership on her."
My stomach was suddenly doing flip-flops.
"Look, the cupcakes frosting was about to melt off," Luke said. "You both know how she gets. She was apologizing, she thought she'd done something wrong, and she hasn't done one single thing wrong. So I told her what she needed to hear so she could stop hating herself for ten seconds."
"Since when do you speak for me," I was pissed, even though I would have said exactly the same thing to her.
Luke blinked. "I wasn't trying to. It wasn't like that."
"You told her we were all good with it. You decided that.
For all three of us." I wasn't even sure where the heat was coming from.
This was Luke, one of the two people on the planet I trusted most, and here I was ready to grab a fistful of his collar over a situation I'd signed up for with my eyes wide open and my pants already off.
"What if I'm not good with it? What if I don't want to split the cupcake three ways? "
"You think I want to share the cupcake?" Cole let out a short breath.
"I told myself this was simple. One night, nobody catches feelings, everybody drives home a little sore and very satisfied.
And then I spent the night on her terrible couch fishing a butterknife out of the cushions at two in the morning, and somewhere between that and her telling me about her deadbeat ex I realized I'd happily commit a felony for this woman.
So no. I'm not feeling real generous about sharing the cupcake either. "
"So what are we saying," Luke said quietly. "That it stops being three of us. That it becomes one of us. The best man wins?"
None of us answered, which was exactly the problem. We all wanted to give Callie the world. We all wanted to give each other the world, but sharing her felt worse than licking the floor of the school bus.
Up front, Callie was holding a juice box up to the light, squinting at the straw hole like it had personally betrayed her.
"We were idiots to think it'd stay simple," I said. I tried to make it a joke. It didn't come out like one. "It was never going to be a test drive forever. Somebody was always going to want to keep the car."
"Don't," Cole said. "Don't make this another joke."
"It's me, Cole. It's always going to be a joke. You knew that when you signed up for this bro-mance dickhead."
Luke almost smiled. "So we figure it out then. Like adults instead of man-children crying over a cupcake. We talk to her and we work out-"
"We don't," Cole said. "Not yet. Not until we know what we're even offering her." He looked out the window. "She's got enough coming at her without three grown men cornering her with an ultimatum next to a petting zoo."
Cole was right, so we shut up. We let the bus fill back up with the sound of twenty-two screaming kids and one woman we couldn’t keep our minds off of, and the three of us sat in the back row pretending we hadn't just turned a perfectly good friendship into a deranged love triangle.
Then Oliver, who I'd have sworn was three hundred pages deep in his cinder block, spoke up from one row ahead without turning around.
"If you're fighting over a cupcake," he said, "you should just share it. My mom says there's always enough to go around if people stop being greedy. She says that about snacks." He turned a page. "It's usually about snacks."
There was a beat of stunned silence.
"Out of the mouths of babes," I said shaking my head.
Cole put his face in his hands. Luke made a noise like he'd taken a paintball to the sternum. And I sat there thinking that an eight-year-old was smarter than any of us.
I went back to watching her. She'd gotten the juice box open and was looking very proud of herself about it.
She caught me staring and gave me a little wave.
I waved back and decided, that if it came down to one of us, it was going to be me.
I figured the other two were thinking the exact same thing.