CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE BENNET
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BENNET
It's been four days since I've seen Blaire. But we've fallen into a text rhythm all week that I've started looking forward to in a way I'm choosing not to examine too closely.
After an hour of watching Rosalie and Jenn bond over their shared amusement at my expense Tuesday morning — exchanging numbers, planning brunch, finishing each other's sentences like they'd known each other for years — I'd seen and heard enough and kicked them both out.
Gerald stayed. Nobody asked him.
I'd just walked into a meeting when my phone went off.
Blaire: I had some wildly inappropriate dreams about that tiramisu last night.
I smiled but didn't respond. Spent the entire meeting thinking about what I should say when I did, which meant I absorbed approximately nothing of what was discussed.
The rest of the day blurred between back-to-back meetings and a charity appearance that is technically part of occupation bad boy rehabilitation. By the time I made it back to my apartment, I was exhausted and wound tight.
I opened my phone to find another text. This one with a photo attached.
It was a full tiramisu, fork mid-bite, Blaire’s mouth open and ready to take it.
I sat up on the couch and stared at it for longer than I should have.
It wasn't sexual, not technically, but that mouth and that spoon and the deliberateness of the angle had me setting the phone face down and picking it back up twice before I read the message underneath it.
Blaire: Couldn't help it. I ordered a whole one. Going to gain ten pounds before the weekend. Hope you had a reason to smile today.
I stared at that last line for the better part of an hour.
Hope you had a reason to smile today.
She used to find ways to tell me that in high school.
Text messages, or post-it notes, or just saying the words.
It was at the end of every study session, every movie on her bedroom floor, every late night when we'd talked too long about nothing and everything.
It was the exclamation mark on my day. The last good thing before sleep.
The fact that she sent it now, ten years later, without knowing what it meant to me — whether by memory or instinct or pure coincidence — was fucking with my head in ways I didn't have the bandwidth to process.
So again, I didn't respond.
Wednesday
Blaire: Well done at the Blue Moons Charity event yesterday. I liked your speech. The Instagram post with the cat was also well executed. Did you adopt it?
I was mid-workout when her text came through. The fact that she's in the same building has been its own misery, and the treadmill has become my primary outlet. How poignant — running on a treadmill to run away from my problems. Someone should write that down.
I slowed to a walk, wiped my sweat and the machine, stepped off and took a seat on the bench.
Bennet: Thanks. I have a good speechwriter. Gerald is my neighbor Jenn's cat. I just used him for optics. He was well compensated.
Blaire: How does one compensate a cat?
Bennet: Butt pats. Obviously.
Blaire: Obviously. Why are you responding so early? Don't you sleep?
I looked at the time. Just after five AM.
Bennet: I could ask you the same thing. I'm at the gym.
Blaire: I haven't actually gone to sleep. I had coffee and tiramisu at ten last night, and I've been wired ever since.
Bennet: I question your life choices, Blaire.
Blaire: Not all of us have your discipline. Who goes to the gym at five in the morning? Considering I'm halfway through the tiramisu, I may need to join you.
I typed it before I thought about it and hit send before I could stop myself.
Bennet: Fuck that, your body is goddamn amazing just as it is.
The dots appeared immediately. Then disappeared. Then appeared again. Then disappeared again. The specific pattern of someone typing and deleting and retyping, and I sat on that bench watching it with a level of anxiety that is genuinely embarrassing for a grown man.
Is this a childbearing age situation all over again?
Blaire: Ditto.
I stared at that word for a long time.
Fuck.
Thursday
Bennet: Did you see me doing the dougie?
Blaire: I wouldn't call what you did the dougie, exactly. But it's working in your favor. Have you not seen the headlines?
Bennet: What do you mean? I did an EXCELLENT dougie.
I spoke at a high school career day this morning, and the principal asked me to stick around for a few events afterward.
One of which included their annual dance off between teachers and students, which I was voluntold to participate in, and which I participated in with what I can only describe as considerable enthusiasm and genuine conviction.
I leave the text thread and Google myself.
Bennet Sullivan School Dance.
The comments on the first video load and I stand up from my couch.
OMG! Bennet Sullivan can’t dance.
Guess you can't have the looks AND the rhythm.
Aww. He looked like a newborn giraffe just learning to walk.
"What the fuck?"
Blaire: It's endearing.
Bennet: Endearing. I was robbed. Those kids rigged that competition.
Blaire: You lost to a sixteen year old doing the griddy and you know it.
Bennet: The griddy is not a real dance.
Blaire: The internet disagrees.
Bennet: The internet is wrong.
Blaire: The internet has forty seven thousand likes on the video of you trying to keep up with him and failing.
Bennet: I want a rematch.
Blaire: I will pay money to watch that.
Bennet: Consider it part of your compensation package.
The dots appeared almost immediately.
Blaire: ?? Goodnight, Bennet. I hope you had a reason to smile today. I know I did.
Bennet: Goodnight, Blaire.
I set the phone down and looked at the ceiling for a long moment.
Hope you had a reason to smile today.
I did, actually.
Friday
Good morning Houston. I'm Lyle and this is my co-host Marissa. We're here today once again with NFL Hall of Famer Colton Monroe.
Thanks for having me. It's great to be back on your show.
They are literally interrupting local news to air this bullshit again. I watch from the kitchen while I make my coffee, mug halfway to my mouth, staring at the television.
I wonder if Blaire is watching this. I hope she isn't. I hope she's still asleep with her phone face down and none of this reaching her before she's had her coffee.
I hope she doesn't give this man another second of her attention or her energy or her guilt, because I know she carries it, I've seen the way she goes quiet when his name comes up, and he doesn't deserve one more second of anything she has left.
I turn the volume up anyway because I need to know what he's saying about her.
Colton, we appreciate you sitting down with us again. I can’t imagine how you must be feeling watching your wife in the tabloids right now. One video in particular that’s been making rounds online.
They cut to a video of me and Blaire in the nightclub. The video is shot from below. Blaire is on my lap, gyrating. My hands are gripping near her ass. My cock twitches at the sight. Fuck, she looked amazing on top of me.
They cut back to Colt as he’s wiping fake ass tears from his eyes.
Do you think this is why she wanted the divorce? To move on with this bad boy billionaire, as they call him?
He exhales slowly. Drops his chin. The picture of a devastated man.
It's hard not to think that. It just makes me feel like I didn't try hard enough. Didn't love her enough. I'll regret that for my entire life. A pause, perfectly timed. I only hope he'll love her the way I have. I'll always love her.
I set my coffee mug down before I put it through the television.
The way he performed grief on that screen, the architecture of it — the pause, the exhale, the I'll always love her — is so precisely calibrated that someone who didn't know better would weep for him. Most of Houston apparently doesn't know better.
I know better.
I pick up my phone.
Bennet: Something tells me you’re watching. If you aren’t, I know you won’t be able to stop yourself. But listen to me, fuck him. Fuck him. He doesn’t deserve anything else from you.
I see the moment she reads it. The little check marks shift. I wait for the bubbles.
Nothing.
I picture her sitting in her apartment with her coffee going cold, watching him perform his grief for the city of Houston, and not being able to stop herself from absorbing it, anyway.
I picture her crying, and I want to walk down sixteen floors and knock on her door and pull her into my arms and tell her that everything that man just said was a performance written by a coward.
I also want to sit back and let her feel every second of it.
She married the motherfucker. She knew exactly who Colt was, and she married him.
They worked together to ruin my life. They stood in that poolhouse together, enjoying the laughter, the humiliation.
So maybe this is exactly what she deserves.
Maybe I should pour a little whiskey in my cup of coffee and enjoy the show.
I sit my phone down and drink my coffee.
I tap my fingers on the counter.
I look down at my phone and check for bubbles.
I tap my fingers on the counter while drinking my coffee.
“It’s karma. It’s whatever. It’s not my fucking problem.”
I walk to my bedroom to start getting ready, coffee in hand, fully committed to not being a person who cares about this.
“Fuck youuuuu. Fuck youuuuu” I yell at the top of my lungs, stomping back down the hallway to where I left my phone. I pick it up and type out another message.
Bennet: I’ll be your reason to smile today. I’m here if you need me.
I stare at it.
Send it.
The bubbles appear almost immediately.
Blaire: Thank you, Bennet.
I stand in my kitchen in my socks, holding my phone feeling like a teenager again, in the best and worst possible way.
Saturday