40. Ben
Ben
I'd been quietly losing my mind over Callie Morgan ever since the goat yoga incident. So, when she texted that Oliver had a sleepover at his grandparents' and Wednesday was the one night she had to herself, I did something I hadn't done in the four years I'd owned Ben's Bait and Basket.
I closed early. Flipped the sign, killed the big neon BAIT light in the window so nobody'd come banging on the glass looking for night crawlers, and sent Fiona home two hours early, which earned me a look that said she knew exactly what I was up to and planned to bring it up for the rest of my natural life.
The dining room sat empty and dim, all the little net-and-buoy junk I'd nailed to the walls over the years throwing long shadows, the booths quiet, the whole place smelling like fryer oil and salt and the lemon stuff we mopped with.
Not fancy. My place was never going to be fancy.
I liked it that way, I was proud of an old-school place that I paid for with my own two hands, and tonight I was going to share it with her.
I had the grill going in the back and a couple beers sweating on the counter when she knocked on the locked front door.
I let her in. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt that had a small hole near the hem and she'd clearly tried to do something with her hair that her hair had voted against, and she was holding up a gas station bag like a peace offering.
"I brought dessert," she announced, "because I panicked and didn't know if showing up empty-handed was rude, so I stopped and got-" she peered into the bag, "-four packs of Reese's, a thing of donuts, and a scratch-off.
I got carried away. The scratch-off is for both of us.
We're partners now. If it hits we split it. "
"What's the split?"
"Sixty-forty. I drove."
"You drove five minutes."
"It was a hard five minutes, Ben. Emotionally. And you know I'm always playing Russian roulette with my gas tank."
God, I was gone for her. I took the bag and set it on the counter and didn't tell her I'd already made dessert, because watching her produce a fistful of gas station garbage as a gift was better than anything I could've plated.
"Sit," I told her, nodding at the one booth I'd actually wiped down. "I'm cooking."
"You're… wait, you closed the whole restaurant? For this? For me?" She looked around at the empty room like she was only now noticing, and frowned. "Ben, that's a whole night of business. You can't just-"
"I can do whatever I want. I own the place.
" I popped the cap off a beer and handed it to her, mostly to give her hands something to do besides wring each other.
"Sit down, Cupcake. You've spent every day this month taking care of twenty-two kids and one of your own and three idiots who don't deserve you.
One night. Let somebody feed you for once. "
She sat, but had trouble sitting still and started picking the label on the beer and spun the salt shaker and told me about a kid in her class who'd finally read a whole sentence out loud that afternoon, how she'd had to go stand in the supply closet for a second so she wouldn't cry in front of the room.
She talked with her hands the way she always did, and I cooked, and I watched her out of the corner of my eye, and I thought about how a woman could walk into your restaurant one night and rearrange the whole inside of your chest without trying.
I brought her a plate of blackened fish and the good slaw and the hush puppies people drove from two towns over for, and she took one bite and closed her eyes and moaned around her fork in a way that made me proud.
"Okay, that's not allowed," she said with her mouth full. "You can't look like you and cook like this. It's too much power for one man. The government should look into you."
"Eat your hush puppies."
"I'm going to eat all of them. I'm going to eat them and then I'm going to eat the donuts I brought and then probably the scratch-off." She pointed her fork at me. "Aren't you eating?"
"I'm good." I slid into the booth across from her with my beer and watched her demolish a plate of my food in my empty restaurant, and I was about as happy as I could remember being, right up until she set her fork down and got quiet.
She never got quiet. That was how I knew it was coming.
"Can I say a serious thing?" Her hands found each other on the table and started twisting. "And you have to let me get through it without being charming, because if you're charming at me I'll chicken out."
"No charm. Scout's honor." I set the beer down. "Go ahead."
She took a breath. "I'm scared I'm wrecking it.
You and Cole and Luke." She looked up, and the joking was gone out of her eyes, and it knocked the wind out of me a little.
"You three have this whole life long friendship together.
You'd put your body in front of a bus for each other.
And then I show up, this disaster of a woman, and now there's this thing going on, and I lie awake at night thinking, what if I'm the thing that breaks it?
What if you three stop being you because of me?
I keep doing the math on it and it makes me feel sick, Ben.
I could lose all three of you and live. I could not live with being the reason you lost each other. "
Shit, she was asking the question I'd been trying to suppress all week, laid right out on a sticky booth table between a basket of hush puppies and a bag of gas station candy.
The hell of it was she was right. She had it exactly right. There was a crack and it was spreading.
I could've told her the truth. Yeah, Cupcake. You're right to be scared. We're a mess and we haven't figured it out and I don't know how this ends.
Instead, I looked at this woman who'd hidden in a supply closet so a kid wouldn't see her cry, who carried the whole world on her back and apologized for the weight of it, sitting in my restaurant terrified she was going to break something she loved; and I decided to do exactly what Luke did.
"Hey. Look at me." I reached across the table and caught both her twisting hands in one of mine and held them still.
"We've got it handled, baby. The three of us already talked it through.
We're square. You're not breaking anything, you hear me?
That's not your job to carry." It came out easy and warm and I felt like garbage saying it.
"Put it down. Let it go. We're grown men, we've got our own stuff sorted, and the only thing I want you worrying about tonight is whether you've got room for dessert. "
The relief that washed over her face about killed me. Her shoulders came down and her eyes lit up like she was ready for the exact thing I wanted to give her.
"Now stop thinking so hard. You've been in your own head all night."
"That's where I live, Ben. It's a bad neighborhood but the rent's cheap."
I laughed, and I came around the side of the booth and held my hand out to her, and she looked at it and then up at me.
"I've got a better idea for what you can put your busy little brain on," I said.
She put her hand in mine and let me pull her up. "This is so inappropriate. We're in a place that serves food to the public. And what if someone sees… I can't be seen with any of you."
"Not tonight it doesn't. Tonight it's closed.
" I walked over and turned the lights off, then came back to her, walked her backward a step, and got a hand in that hair she was always fighting, tilting her face up to mine.
"Tonight there's no kids, no goats, no principal, no clock, and a locked door between us and every single person who's ever interrupted me before I could finish with you.
" I dropped my mouth to the corner of hers, close enough to feel her breath stutter.
"And I have been waiting to finish with you, Cupcake. "
"Ben-"
I kissed her, and she came up onto her toes and grabbed two fistfuls of my shirt and kissed me back like she'd been starving longer than I had.
I walked her backward until the backs of her thighs hit the booth table, kissing her the whole way, swallowing every little sound she made.
She tasted like beer and hush puppies and the sugar she probably snuck at the gas station, and I could've stayed in her mouth for an hour.
I got her t-shirt up and off, and tossed it somewhere behind me, and then I got her bra off too and just looked at her.
Her chest was already flushing that pretty pink she got, her nipples gone tight and dark, and I dropped my head and pulled one into my mouth just to watch the color deepen and hear the sound she made.
"That mouth should be illegal," she gasped, arching up into me. "You should need a permit."
"Permit's pending. In the meantime, I’d like to continue the project we were working on last time." I got my hands on her waist and lifted her up onto the table like she weighed nothing, and she squeaked and grabbed my shoulders. "Lie back for me."
"Ben, this is a table. People eat off this. Health codes were written in blood-"
"I'll bleach the whole place down myself in the morning.
Lie back, Cupcake." I put a hand flat between her breasts and eased her down until she was laid out across the wood, and the way her breath caught when she went made me want to skip every good intention I had.
I got her jeans open and dragged them down her legs along with everything underneath, and then I knelt down right there on the floor of my own restaurant like a man who'd finally been let into church.
"Oh my god," she whispered to the ceiling.
"No hand over your mouth tonight." I hooked her knees over my shoulders and pressed a kiss to the inside of one thigh, then the other, taking my time, feeling her shake.
"Nobody to hear you but me, and I locked the door myself.
So you're going to give me every single sound you've been swallowing for weeks. Every one. You hear me?"
"I swear to god if you keep talking instead of touching me…"