FF: Snapshots Left on the Negative -- Final Part (2nd Half)
First Half - Final Part
That evening after they hang up she rattles around Ben’s townhouse like a ghost, Harrison trailing after her. He’s strangely subdued, so much so that she almost worries that she should take him to the vet, but nothing looks physically wrong and he eats the food she sets out for him with far more vigor than she attacks the Chinese she called for, so in the end she just thinks he’s picking up on her mood.
Or he misses Ben.
Or maybe that’s the same thing.
Despite Ben’s care to reassure her about the Inaugural Party, their argument’s left her shaken, scared. She feels like she’s running out of time. Like she’s letting this slip through her fingers all over again, and she doesn’t quite know what to do about it. Worries that she’s already messed it up. Or more precisely she worries they’ve messed it up.
Because as insane as it sounds they’re fighting for the same thing this time, both reaching out with everything they have and yet they’re still missing each other. It’s like they’ve gone along all this time thinking they’re building something together, only to discover they’ve been working from slightly different blueprints.
And they’re only off by a quarter of an inch. But god that quarter of inch is everything.
Makes the whole structure unsound.
And maybe that’s why she suddenly feels a little like an intruder, like a guest who’s overstayed her welcome as she eats at his table and washes her dishes in his sink. But for some reason she can’t bring herself to leave, doesn’t want to leave.
She winds up going through his home like a wake, touching his things. Stands in the kitchen and pulls down his chef’s knife, sets it out on a cutting board like it’s waiting for him. Puts ‘Return of the Jedi’ in his Blu-Ray player and turns the volume up so she can hear it as she walks up the stairs. Notices a hamper on top of the washing machine and starts the load of laundry just to do it, just to wash his shirts once.
Pulls out a fresh towel and takes a shower in his bathroom. Starts to write ‘I love you’ on the fogged-over mirror with her finger, but remembers what he said and writes ‘You’re impossible’ instead (forgets it’ll show up the next time he showers).
Puts on the faded ‘Lil’ Sebastian’ t-shirt she found in the dryer, walks to his bedroom door-
And stops.
Stands there forever staring at the wood-grain, the door handle, the half exposed frame that tells her the door’s not entirely closed, that all she’d have to do would be to reach out and push.
And she can’t. She just can’t.
Not this. She can’t take this.
Harrison has no such compunction (after all it’s his home, too). Slipping around her legs, he nudges his head against the door moving it open, gets halfway inside and then stops, seemingly puzzled by Ben’s absence.
Leslie’s not paying much attention to that right now though. Instead she’s looking, memorizing, filing pieces away like a dream she’s determined to remember.
It’s not a particularly unique room. But it is decidedly Ben’s. Clean-lined sturdy furniture far enough out of date to have been bought second hand. Low bookcases in place of bedside tables with a magnetic charge strip for too much technology and good reading lamps. There’s a padded headboard and gray flannel sheets that look like they might have cost him some money and a battered recliner in the corner that definitely didn’t.
The thing that strikes her most however are the walls. In every other space he’s left them the warm neutral sand color that probably came from the builder, but not here. Here he’s painted, calm slate blue, crowded them with personal artifacts-photographs and shadowboxes and posters, even a hand-done sampler in the corner that looks completely out place, but she’d stake a year’s salary on being from family.
It is, in short, as far from a hotel room as he could possibly make it.
Leslie takes a deep breath and tries not to think about the fact she has a quilt that would go perfectly with his sheets, that she can’t believe she never thought of using bookshelves as bed tables to hold her reports. Reaches out to close the door.
From his spot just across the threshold, Harrison whines and looks up at her in a way that seems to say, ‘What are you waiting for?’
She honestly doesn’t know anymore.
---
Because being in Ben’s house without him just feels too lonely, Leslie promises Harrison she’ll come walk him in the morning and goes back to her apartment instead.
It’s not any better.
If anything it’s worse.
And it strikes her that Ben’s place has become her home while she’s in Indy. It’s obvious from the way she hasn’t made any effort to settle in. In the way she’s still living out of boxes and staring at bare walls.
This . . .
This is just space.
Sometime around one in the morning she gives up on the sleep that obviously isn’t coming and turns on the overhead light. Makes hot chocolate and curls up on the futon.
Stares at where Ben’s gift leans against the opposite wall for a long time. At her father, at Ben. At both of them.
What was it her mother had said? “All he’d ever wanted to do was teach math and be married to the woman down the hall who read Shakespeare out loud to her class.”
All he’d ever wanted . . .
She looks back at Ben. In that stupid gray t-shirt, pretending to marvel at a miniature horse he never understood and genuinely smiling all the same. Fingers the faded writing on that same t-shirt she’s wearing now.
“You don’t get to tell him what he’s willing to do or what will make him happy. You get to tell him what you’re willing to do and what will make you happy, and that’s it.”
Looks over at herself standing beside him, at the joy on her face and reaches out to pick up her watch from where she set it on the box she’s been using as a side table. Holds it in her hand.
“You know you’re part of that, right? That having you- in my life- That I wouldn’t be as happy if you weren’t. You know that, right?”
And it’s not that she wouldn’t be happy again, but she knows it would always be less. Less than it could have been. Less than it should have been.
So what are you willing to do, Leslie?
“People do that all the time. Make adjustments, compromises, sacrifices, for someone else, because of someone else . . . People do this, Leslie.”
She turns the watch over and stares at the “Go Big” on the back. Thinks about the first time she said that. How she wasn’t talking about a Harvest Festival or a town or her career. She was talking about Andy and April. About people and love.
Ready to take your own advice Leslie?
Restless, she gets up and moves. Comes to sit on the floor in front of the picture, and stares at the two of them together for what seems like an eternity. And then something happens.
She stops looking at the foreground and instead starts looking behind them. At all the other people, the couples sharing funnel cakes, and the grandparents with the ‘handprint’ t-shirts. At the little girl on her father’s shoulder so she can get a better view. At the banners, and the smiles, and the color and the life. At Pawnee, at her very first and truest love so happy.
Happy because of what they did.
“This is as much yours as it is mine. It’s ours.”
They did that. Together.
Them.
Her ideas. His faith. Her vision. His execution.
They made that happen.
Maybe not her greatest achievement, but certainly her best.
And she didn’t do it alone. It wouldn’t have meant as much if she’d done it alone.
“I get a say in your life, your decisions, just the same way I’ll give you a say in mine.”
Okay. She thinks.
Touches her fingers to the frame and breathes.
Okay.
Getting up off the floor, Leslie goes over to the table, pulls out a stack of notecards and begins to write. All the things she is, all the things she wants. Things that matter and things that don’t and things that matter but not too much. Pieces of her life sorted out on paper, until she has a stack almost half an inch thick. Goes through them slowly and lays them out. Stares at them for a minute, then picks up three, just three, walks over to her bare wall and sticks them up with a push pin one by one.
‘Ann’
‘Pawnee’
‘Ben’
Three things she’s not willing to give up. No one written bigger than the other, no one placed higher. Three equally non-negotiable points.
Turns back to look at the rest of her life. Still on the table. Inhales deeply and then breathes out.
All right then.
Time to get to work.
---
Say what you will about Leslie. Say she’s stubborn. Say she’s ambitious. Say she can demand too much of her friends and even more of herself. Say she has a tendency to charge headfirst, and dig in her heels and it would take something close to an act of God to get her to admit she might be wrong when she thinks she's right.
But never say she doesn’t know how to give it her all.
For the next thirty-six hours she eats, sleeps and breathes this.
She walks Harrison and runs potential futures by him. Just to have the excuse to hear them out loud. See how she likes the sound of them on her tongue.
Leverages her resources and calls Ann to ask about living with someone (“There’s going to be a night when they need you and you’re tired. Drink coffee and get to it.”).
Then swallows her reservations, and calls Diane to ask about living without them (”Other than phone sex? -All right, no, seriously. Remember it sucks for both of you and don’t hang up in anger. Phones are too easy to put down and too hard to pick up . . . Also, I’d like it noted how I’m being good and not asking what this is about.”)
Goes through each of the note-cards on her table, and writes potential adjustments, problems, questions they’ll need to answer. Things they’ll need to talk about. Tries to anticipate all his possible answers and see if any one of them shakes her resolve, makes her take it off the table and add it to the wall.
And just when she thinks she’s almost there. She’s almost got it . . .
Ben shows up on her doorstep on New Year’s Eve and throws a wrench in her plans.
You’d really think she’d be used to him doing that by now.
---
‘What are you doing here?’
This is actually the first thing that crosses her mind. Not, ‘I’m so glad to see you’ or ‘I’ve missed you’ or ‘I desperately love you and I’m working on an elaborate multimedia presentation to convince you of this.’ But ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
He is an entire day early. A whole, complete twenty four hours.
Which leads to her second thought: ‘Why aren’t you in Minnesota?’
Thankfully she doesn’t actually give voice to either of these, mainly because Ben doesn’t give her chance. Because no sooner has she opened the door than he is off and running, talking in a manic, rapid-fire clip that leaves her dizzy and spinning and barely able to catch her breath.
“You know this- This is the exact reason I wanted to just be friends with you,” he opens without preamble as he steps past her into the apartment, pulling at his scarf. “I was fine when we were friends. I knew how to handle it. I mean sure sometimes I would look at you and think- But as long as I didn’t cross that line, I was okay. Because I was on that side of the line, because I had limits.”
He tosses his scarf over the back of her kitchen chair and turns on her, “But then you go and you kiss me. And it’s like this switch goes off in my head, and that’s it I’m done.” Starts stripping off his gloves in aggravated jerk. “Every single limit, every reasonable expectation. Out the window.” Drops them on the table, and advances on her, “I told you. I told you, that I don’t have a halfway with you. I warned you about that, didn’t I?”
Leslie nods, throat dry, uncertain where this is going. “You did. And I was just-”
She doesn’t get the rest of the sentence out because he takes that one last step forward and then he’s kissing her.
After that entire tirade, he’s kissing her.
In her apartment.
While she’s in her pajamas.
On what is decidedly not a date.
She is so confused.
What is going on? Why is he not in Minnesota? Why is he talking like a crazy person, like he’s running on ten cups of coffee and no sleep? And why is he wearing a bowtie? And why? Why is he stopping?
“Ben, wha-?” she forces herself to catch her breath, and finally manages a complete sentence. “What are you doing?”
He looks down at her, expression strangely intent, eyes still a little wild, almost reckless. “I’m dating you.”
“Oh no, you don’t-”
Ben steps away, holding up a finger, “No see I’ve thought about this. A lot actually. I mean for the last I don’t know twenty-four hours I pretty much haven’t been able to think about anything else. And the thing is- I don’t want to be that guy. That guy who just gives up because ‘he can’t deal.’ Because really, what kind of person does that?” He shakes his head, still half stuck on his sister’s divorce, then blows out a breath and looks over at her, resolved and determined, “I don’t know. But it’s not going to be me.”
“It’s not you. It was never you.” Leslie rushes to reassure him, “Ben you’re not Scott in this.”
“Exactly,” he agrees taking an excited half-step forward like he thinks she’s getting it now. “Exactly. Which is why I’ve been doing this all wrong. I keep giving you the lead, keep asking you to just tell me to jump. And I got so frustrated because I didn’t understand why you just wouldn’t. When it was obvious I wanted you to so badly- But of course you’d never do that. Not if you didn’t think you could jump yourself. So I thought that meant-”
He runs a hand through his hair and turns away, and for a second she can see just a flash of remembered agony, but then he shakes it off, and spins back, starts up again from a completely different direction, criss-crossing the map of his thoughts in a crazy zig-zag she can just barely keep up with. “Look, you once told me I have too much faith in you, and I think you’re right. Actually, no, scratch that, I think you’re wrong I think I have exactly the right amount of faith in you. But for some reason it’s more than you think you deserve. For some reason, that I haven’t figured out yet, and it took me forever to see it because I’m so used to the Leslie who believes she can do anything- But this, us, relationships, this is where you doubt yourself, this is one place you honestly don’t know what you’re capable of. And that’s why I kept getting confused, I thought that because you thought you couldn’t, it meant you didn’t want to. But it doesn’t, does it?”
And for the first time Leslie can see just the tiniest thread of trepidation, just a momentary flicker of uncertainty, and she instinctively has to soothe it, takes a step forward. “No it doesn’t. I want to.”
Ben smiles. A beautiful, slow blossoming, grin that’s like watching the sun come out from behind the clouds, as the storm passes and the seas go calm. Whatever’s been driving him, whatever wound him up and set him off, has suddenly uncoiled, smoothed out, and now he’s Ben again steady and even keeled and deliberate. And yet, freer somehow, opened-up, like he’s cut all ties, unfurled his sails and caught the wind. He nods. “See that’s what I thought. So here’s the thing-”
Stepping close he reaches out and cups her face, tilting it up to meet his gaze, and her breath catches at the certainty there. “I’m done waiting for you to ask me to jump," he whispers, "I’m done waiting for you to have enough faith in yourself for this. You don’t need it. I’ve got you covered. So I’m going to go first, and all you have to do is follow, just have faith in me and trust that I am never going to lead you somewhere I don’t know you can go. You believe in me and I’ll believe in you and we’ll be fine. Okay?”
And even though she was almost there, even though Leslie was ninety-five percent sure she had it, this right here right now, this is her last five percent. Because believing in him is so simple, so easy. Believing in Ben is like breathing, unconscious and instinctive. She already knows she can do that. She’s been doing it for years.
Leslie nods, “Okay.” Nods again. “Okay.” Can’t stop nodding. “Okay.” And then she’s kissing him over and over and still repeating the words against his lips, “Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay.”
Her hands land on the lapels of his overcoat, and the realization that Ben never actually got past taking off his gloves seems to hit them at the same moment, so they’re laughing out of the kiss even as her hands are scrambling for his buttons. Because seriously she has waited so long for this, and then he’s shrugging out of it and letting it drop to the floor and pressing her back against the wall, and her hands fly to his shoulders only to encounter the unexpected feel of wool-gabardine and she opens her eyes and-
“You’re wearing a tuxedo.”
Really she could kill herself for opening her mouth, because that makes Ben stop kissing her neck and step back to glance down at himself as if this fact had entirely slipped his mind, and this is not at all what she wants to be happening right now.
He looks back up at her with a sheepish smile. “Right. About that- I actually had a plan for this. And I happen to think it’s pretty good plan. And despite the fact that I have never made one plan involving you that you haven’t managed turn upside down just by breathing or smiling at me, or-” he sighs, “writing on my mirror . . . For some reason I still seem to keep making them. So I’d like to try and see if we can do this the way I planned, just once, just to know how it feels.”
“And it involves a tuxedo?”
Ben grins. “And a dress. Not for me, for you. A tuxedo and a dress and two tickets to a New Year’s Eve party that my boss called and offered me this morning when his wife woke up with the flu. And I took as a sign. With me so far?”
She nods.
“Okay so the plan goes something like this: You’re going to get changed now, and I am going to take you out for New Year’s Eve, and I’m going to kiss you at midnight. And from that point on I really don’t intend to stop. And you can call that dating, or not dating, or, I don’t know, hopscotch for all I care. But as far as I’m concerned come next year you’re stuck with me and you’re pretty much just going to have to figure out how to live with that.” He exhales, calms a little, “Anyway, that’s my plan. As I said, I think it’s a good one and I’d like to try it, so if you could just humor me and go get changed before I kiss you again and this all goes to hell, I’d really appreciate it.”
Leslie half laughs, half groans as what he just said sinks in, the fact that he actually intends to keep her waiting even a half second longer. “You can’t be serious. You can’t show up here and look like that and kiss me the way you did, and then tell me I have to wait. What on earth could you possibly want to wait for?”
“I want to take you home with me.”
Her heart stops.
Ben moves back, reaching out to run his hands up into her hair and continues. “I want to do this right for once. I want to lay you out on my bed and finally know exactly what you look like against my sheets rather than imagining it. I want to fall asleep with you and wake up with you on New Year’s day and make you breakfast in the morning and know that I’m cooking you dinner that night. That’s what I want to wait for. That’s the memory I want.”
“Dammit.” She drops her head back against the wall defeat, and sighs, “Dammit. Now I have to go change.”
He laughs, and grabs her wrist, to lead her over to her closet. “If it’s any consolation, you’ve come extremely close to shaking my resolve here.”
Just for that Leslie takes great pains to make sure he can see the lingerie she pulls out of her drawer (there is nothing wrong with having at least one ridiculous scrap of nothing in your arsenal, even if it’s just for you), and strips in the hallway before she goes into the bathroom.
It gets her is an extremely satisfying groan, but nothing else.
Still, you really cannot blame a girl for trying.
---
When she comes back out forty five minutes later with her hair and makeup done, in a basic black cocktail dress that isn’t particularly flashy (until she turns around), but has the advantage of making her feel like her body looks amazing, Leslie is expecting at the least one very long appreciative look. There are certain things she simply feels she has a right to as a woman. And if she goes through the trouble of putting on perfume and makeup and a backless dress and killer heels and underwear whose sole purpose for existing is to be removed, being visibly objectified for three seconds by the guy she intends to sleep with at the end of the night is one of them.
She does not get it.
She does not get it because Ben does not look at her.
Because Ben is sitting on her futon, jacket shed, bowtie undone, shirtsleeves rolled up, staring at her wall. The stack of note cards from her kitchen table spread out on the floor around him.
Oh.
Leslie moves to stand in front of him, and finally he seems to register her presence. Looks up. Blinks.
“I’m on your wall.”
She nods, “You are.”
“I’m on your wall with Ann and Pawnee.” His voice is strange. Dazed almost. Like he’s waking up from some kind of dream.
“Ben, it’s not-” and she about to tell him it’s not what he thinks except she obviously has absolutely no clue what he thinks because now he’s smiling, happy and broad.
“Ann and Pawnee and me,” he ducks his head and laughs a little at the unintentional rhyme, then looks back up at her. “That’s, um, that’s a pretty exclusive club to be in.”
Leslie nods more vigorously now, a gurgle of relieved laughter bubbling up inside her. “It is. It’s-” she kneels down in front of him heedless of the notecard on 'clutter' she crumples with her shoe, and starts to explain. “I kept trying to tell you when you came in. That I’ve been thinking about this, too. I’ve been working on it. Trying to figure out- Ann said that what I got to tell you, the only things I got to tell you, was what I was willing to do and what would make me happy. So that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out, what I can give you, and I can give a lot. I really think I can. I can give you-” She picks up one of the notecards, reads off of it- “My newspapers.” Frowns. “No, that’s not a good one.” Looks around, for something better, lands on it, presses the card into his palm, “This. I could give you this if I had to. If there was no other way.”
Ben looks down at the card that says ‘Mayor’ and starts to shake his head, put it aside. “No. Leslie, no. I can’t ask- I would never-”
She puts her hands over his to stop him, brings it back and folds his fingers over it. “I know. I know you wouldn’t. And don’t you see? That’s why I can. Because I know it would be the absolute last thing you would ever ask me. And it’s not just that. Ben, I realized I don’t want to do it without you. I think we’re a good team. I think I’m better with you in my corner and I think if I ever run for Mayor I owe it to Pawnee to give them the best of me, so that means you.” She brushes a kiss to his knuckles, “But I know that doing this would require changes for you too. Probably a lot of changes, some of which might not be easy or even feasible. So I’m going to keep working towards it, and I want it, but not if you can’t do it with me. That’s why it’s down here. If it’s not on the wall, then it’s on the table. It’s an option. In this case, a ‘when all else fails break glass in case of emergency’ option, but an option all the same.”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, absorbing this, his eyes moving back and forth between their hands and the notecards and the wall, then back again. “So these are all-”
“Options. Things I’m willing to give you a say in.”
“And the wall is?”
“The things that make me happy. I guess you could call them my caveats or my non-negotiable points. I have three, which I know is more than you, but I just- I need all of them.”
Ben gets up from the futon and goes to stand in front of the wall for minute. Touches his fingers to his name. Then without saying a word, he goes over to the table, picks up three notecards and writes something down on of them. Comes back over. Leslie moves to stand beside him and read as he pins them up next to hers on the wall one by one.
‘Paul and Diane’
‘Harrison’
‘Leslie’
“There. Now we’re even. Actually you could even argue I have more, since Paul and Diane are technically two.”
She laughs. “We’ll count them as one.”
“There you go then. Three each.”
Leslie shakes her head, frowning, because as sweet as the gesture is, it’s also a little ridiculous. “Ben, saying you want to keep Harrison isn’t exactly the same thing as me saying I want to keep Pawnee.”
He waggles his head back and forth in a funny ‘yes’ and ‘no’. “I don’t know. He can get pretty crazy. Wait until you lose those shoes.”
“Ben-”
“I’m sorry you’re right,” he gets serious again, and takes her hand, walking her back with him to the futon so they can sit down. Runs his thumb along her knuckles, gathering his thoughts, then says, “Look, I’m not going to lie and say that the fact you don’t want to leave Pawnee isn’t going to make things hard, but I’m also not going to pretend this is some kind of earthshaking revelation. You and Pawnee are, I don’t know- kind of a package deal. It’s like- Well, it’s like Lauren and Jackson. Like if you meet a woman with a kid, you know that you don’t get to have her without the kid too. And you know that up front, long before you ever get too involved, so you don’t get to turn around and complain about the complications later. If you want to have the woman it means you want to have the kid, and if you’re not willing to deal with that then you need to get out.” Slipping his fingers between hers, he meets her eyes. “I think I’ve already made my stance on getting out pretty clear.”
She smiles, “You have.”
“Okay then. So-” he looks down at the mess of notecards on the floor, “What else you got?”
---
They get lost in it. Let time slip through their fingers going through her notes, trading ideas and solutions intermixed with jokes and stories. Eventually Ben grabs a clean stack and starts adding his own to the pile. There is apparently a pretty serious fantasy baseball addiction that they may need to work on. He’ll cook in her kitchen if he has to, but if he ever moves to Pawnee they’re going to need to talk about a remodel. He’s knows now he’s never wants to run for office himself (“I’d be miserable trying to deal with the reporters”), but he honestly doesn’t have the slightest clue whether he wants to keep advancing past the job he currently has or do something completely different.
Notecards become ideas, become possibilities, become dreams. Imagined futures they’re constructing together. Variations on themes. Each one beautiful.
Ben moves to Pawnee and helps her run for Mayor and starts doing consults for any town submitting bond or tax revision applications to his old department. (It would be a lot of travel again, but in shorter bursts).
Leslie stays in the State Assembly and they keep living out of each other pockets in traded spaces. (Not ideal, but they've got good role-models in Paul and Diane. It could certainly work.)
They wind up in a deep discussion of the finer points of the later option because they both agree it will be their reality for the foreseeable future (she’s splitting her time between towns for the next two years no matter what). And eventually Leslie reveals her notecard listing Diane’s advice, complete with the ‘phone sex,’ with no little embarrassment. Ben fingers it for a second, and then gets a funny look on his face like something just clicked, followed quickly by a truly disturbed grimace and a groan, “Oh dear lord.”
“What?”
Shaking his head he reaches over to where his jacket is tossed over the back of the futon and pulls out his phone, taps the screen a few times and then hands it to her, with an apologetic, “I wish I could tell you this was atypical for them.”
It’s an email from Paul. With a link for a video chat service and a simple message-‘Trust me. This is better. --Also, Diane informs me that we approve.’
Leslie closes her eyes and moans, “Oh my god. They're incorrigible.”
“Still think you’ve got more up on that wall than me?”
“Don’t worry. Ann can definitely hold her own.”
“See and now I’m worried,” he retorts, plucking the phone back out of her hand. Goes to put it back in his pocket, and then stops, drops his head. “I don’t believe it. I absolutely don’t believe it.”
“What?”
He holds up his phone, so she can see the time displayed on the screen. “We missed our dinner reservation. Do you know how many people I had to call-” Shakes his head back and forth with a sigh and an indulgent laugh, “I should have known. Every time. Every time I make a plan involving you, somehow, someway you flip everything completely upside down.”
Leslie grins unrepentant, “Maybe you should start making plans about me messing up your plans. Then one of them is bound to work.” Ben chuckles. Then an idea strikes her and she kneels up on the futon, she climbs into his lap, hiking up the slim skirt on her cocktail dress (its already pretty rumpled anyway), to deliberately expose the tops of her stockings as she straddles him. “But since I’ve already ruined this one, maybe we could just skip ahead to the part where you take me home and find out what I look like on your sheets?”
And because she is not above playing dirty when needed, she leans down and kisses him before he can say no, in a way that’s a very obvious ‘preview of coming attractions.’ Adds, “Wouldn’t kissing me at midnight be better if I’m naked? I bet there’s bonus points for that. Maybe even a prize.”
Ben drops his forehead to hers with a strained laugh that dissolves in a moan. Puts his hands on her hips and strokes his thumbs along her waist. “All right fine. You win. God you are still so completely impos-”
He only gets half the word out before he stops, realizing what he about to say. And it’s the pause that kills her, if he had just said it, if it had just been an offhand thing she could have ignored it, but the fact he stopped, the fact he couldn’t- She takes a deep shuddering breath.
“Leslie, look at me.”
Obediently she lifts her head and the look in his eyes makes her breath catch and her heart well up.
Reaching out he swipes his thumb along her cheek bone. “You know I told you I wanted to just be friends.”
“I know.”
“You kissed me anyway.”
She turns her head to press her mouth to his palm, completely unapologetic. “I did.”
Ben lowers his hand to the curve of her neck. “Then I told you I needed time to think. And you turn around and tell me you love me”
Leslie smiles. “Because I do.”
He shakes his head, and runs his fingers along the line of her collarbone “And when I ask you not to keep saying that, you go and write it on my mirror instead.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Yeah, I did.”
He stills for a moment, deciding, then moves his hand to press it over her heart, and looks up at her. Takes a breath and says with a deliberate intensity she absolutely cannot mistake for anything other than what it is, “You are, without a doubt, completely impossible.”
For a second she doesn’t immediately respond, does breath or move or speak or do anything other than simply be happy, so incredibly, brilliantly happy. And at the pause, Ben starts to remove his hand, but then she’s bringing hers up to cover it, press his palm to her heart like she could imprint him there, and finds her voice, picking up her cue to a routine they once did five long years ago and she still remembers like it was yesterday.
“But you love it.”
Ben smiles. “I do. I really always have.”
---
-fin-
That evening after they hang up she rattles around Ben’s townhouse like a ghost, Harrison trailing after her. He’s strangely subdued, so much so that she almost worries that she should take him to the vet, but nothing looks physically wrong and he eats the food she sets out for him with far more vigor than she attacks the Chinese she called for, so in the end she just thinks he’s picking up on her mood.
Or he misses Ben.
Or maybe that’s the same thing.
Despite Ben’s care to reassure her about the Inaugural Party, their argument’s left her shaken, scared. She feels like she’s running out of time. Like she’s letting this slip through her fingers all over again, and she doesn’t quite know what to do about it. Worries that she’s already messed it up. Or more precisely she worries they’ve messed it up.
Because as insane as it sounds they’re fighting for the same thing this time, both reaching out with everything they have and yet they’re still missing each other. It’s like they’ve gone along all this time thinking they’re building something together, only to discover they’ve been working from slightly different blueprints.
And they’re only off by a quarter of an inch. But god that quarter of inch is everything.
Makes the whole structure unsound.
And maybe that’s why she suddenly feels a little like an intruder, like a guest who’s overstayed her welcome as she eats at his table and washes her dishes in his sink. But for some reason she can’t bring herself to leave, doesn’t want to leave.
She winds up going through his home like a wake, touching his things. Stands in the kitchen and pulls down his chef’s knife, sets it out on a cutting board like it’s waiting for him. Puts ‘Return of the Jedi’ in his Blu-Ray player and turns the volume up so she can hear it as she walks up the stairs. Notices a hamper on top of the washing machine and starts the load of laundry just to do it, just to wash his shirts once.
Pulls out a fresh towel and takes a shower in his bathroom. Starts to write ‘I love you’ on the fogged-over mirror with her finger, but remembers what he said and writes ‘You’re impossible’ instead (forgets it’ll show up the next time he showers).
Puts on the faded ‘Lil’ Sebastian’ t-shirt she found in the dryer, walks to his bedroom door-
And stops.
Stands there forever staring at the wood-grain, the door handle, the half exposed frame that tells her the door’s not entirely closed, that all she’d have to do would be to reach out and push.
And she can’t. She just can’t.
Not this. She can’t take this.
Harrison has no such compunction (after all it’s his home, too). Slipping around her legs, he nudges his head against the door moving it open, gets halfway inside and then stops, seemingly puzzled by Ben’s absence.
Leslie’s not paying much attention to that right now though. Instead she’s looking, memorizing, filing pieces away like a dream she’s determined to remember.
It’s not a particularly unique room. But it is decidedly Ben’s. Clean-lined sturdy furniture far enough out of date to have been bought second hand. Low bookcases in place of bedside tables with a magnetic charge strip for too much technology and good reading lamps. There’s a padded headboard and gray flannel sheets that look like they might have cost him some money and a battered recliner in the corner that definitely didn’t.
The thing that strikes her most however are the walls. In every other space he’s left them the warm neutral sand color that probably came from the builder, but not here. Here he’s painted, calm slate blue, crowded them with personal artifacts-photographs and shadowboxes and posters, even a hand-done sampler in the corner that looks completely out place, but she’d stake a year’s salary on being from family.
It is, in short, as far from a hotel room as he could possibly make it.
Leslie takes a deep breath and tries not to think about the fact she has a quilt that would go perfectly with his sheets, that she can’t believe she never thought of using bookshelves as bed tables to hold her reports. Reaches out to close the door.
From his spot just across the threshold, Harrison whines and looks up at her in a way that seems to say, ‘What are you waiting for?’
She honestly doesn’t know anymore.
---
Because being in Ben’s house without him just feels too lonely, Leslie promises Harrison she’ll come walk him in the morning and goes back to her apartment instead.
It’s not any better.
If anything it’s worse.
And it strikes her that Ben’s place has become her home while she’s in Indy. It’s obvious from the way she hasn’t made any effort to settle in. In the way she’s still living out of boxes and staring at bare walls.
This . . .
This is just space.
Sometime around one in the morning she gives up on the sleep that obviously isn’t coming and turns on the overhead light. Makes hot chocolate and curls up on the futon.
Stares at where Ben’s gift leans against the opposite wall for a long time. At her father, at Ben. At both of them.
What was it her mother had said? “All he’d ever wanted to do was teach math and be married to the woman down the hall who read Shakespeare out loud to her class.”
All he’d ever wanted . . .
She looks back at Ben. In that stupid gray t-shirt, pretending to marvel at a miniature horse he never understood and genuinely smiling all the same. Fingers the faded writing on that same t-shirt she’s wearing now.
“You don’t get to tell him what he’s willing to do or what will make him happy. You get to tell him what you’re willing to do and what will make you happy, and that’s it.”
Looks over at herself standing beside him, at the joy on her face and reaches out to pick up her watch from where she set it on the box she’s been using as a side table. Holds it in her hand.
“You know you’re part of that, right? That having you- in my life- That I wouldn’t be as happy if you weren’t. You know that, right?”
And it’s not that she wouldn’t be happy again, but she knows it would always be less. Less than it could have been. Less than it should have been.
So what are you willing to do, Leslie?
“People do that all the time. Make adjustments, compromises, sacrifices, for someone else, because of someone else . . . People do this, Leslie.”
She turns the watch over and stares at the “Go Big” on the back. Thinks about the first time she said that. How she wasn’t talking about a Harvest Festival or a town or her career. She was talking about Andy and April. About people and love.
Ready to take your own advice Leslie?
Restless, she gets up and moves. Comes to sit on the floor in front of the picture, and stares at the two of them together for what seems like an eternity. And then something happens.
She stops looking at the foreground and instead starts looking behind them. At all the other people, the couples sharing funnel cakes, and the grandparents with the ‘handprint’ t-shirts. At the little girl on her father’s shoulder so she can get a better view. At the banners, and the smiles, and the color and the life. At Pawnee, at her very first and truest love so happy.
Happy because of what they did.
“This is as much yours as it is mine. It’s ours.”
They did that. Together.
Them.
Her ideas. His faith. Her vision. His execution.
They made that happen.
Maybe not her greatest achievement, but certainly her best.
And she didn’t do it alone. It wouldn’t have meant as much if she’d done it alone.
“I get a say in your life, your decisions, just the same way I’ll give you a say in mine.”
Okay. She thinks.
Touches her fingers to the frame and breathes.
Okay.
Getting up off the floor, Leslie goes over to the table, pulls out a stack of notecards and begins to write. All the things she is, all the things she wants. Things that matter and things that don’t and things that matter but not too much. Pieces of her life sorted out on paper, until she has a stack almost half an inch thick. Goes through them slowly and lays them out. Stares at them for a minute, then picks up three, just three, walks over to her bare wall and sticks them up with a push pin one by one.
‘Ann’
‘Pawnee’
‘Ben’
Three things she’s not willing to give up. No one written bigger than the other, no one placed higher. Three equally non-negotiable points.
Turns back to look at the rest of her life. Still on the table. Inhales deeply and then breathes out.
All right then.
Time to get to work.
---
Say what you will about Leslie. Say she’s stubborn. Say she’s ambitious. Say she can demand too much of her friends and even more of herself. Say she has a tendency to charge headfirst, and dig in her heels and it would take something close to an act of God to get her to admit she might be wrong when she thinks she's right.
But never say she doesn’t know how to give it her all.
For the next thirty-six hours she eats, sleeps and breathes this.
She walks Harrison and runs potential futures by him. Just to have the excuse to hear them out loud. See how she likes the sound of them on her tongue.
Leverages her resources and calls Ann to ask about living with someone (“There’s going to be a night when they need you and you’re tired. Drink coffee and get to it.”).
Then swallows her reservations, and calls Diane to ask about living without them (”Other than phone sex? -All right, no, seriously. Remember it sucks for both of you and don’t hang up in anger. Phones are too easy to put down and too hard to pick up . . . Also, I’d like it noted how I’m being good and not asking what this is about.”)
Goes through each of the note-cards on her table, and writes potential adjustments, problems, questions they’ll need to answer. Things they’ll need to talk about. Tries to anticipate all his possible answers and see if any one of them shakes her resolve, makes her take it off the table and add it to the wall.
And just when she thinks she’s almost there. She’s almost got it . . .
Ben shows up on her doorstep on New Year’s Eve and throws a wrench in her plans.
You’d really think she’d be used to him doing that by now.
---
‘What are you doing here?’
This is actually the first thing that crosses her mind. Not, ‘I’m so glad to see you’ or ‘I’ve missed you’ or ‘I desperately love you and I’m working on an elaborate multimedia presentation to convince you of this.’ But ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
He is an entire day early. A whole, complete twenty four hours.
Which leads to her second thought: ‘Why aren’t you in Minnesota?’
Thankfully she doesn’t actually give voice to either of these, mainly because Ben doesn’t give her chance. Because no sooner has she opened the door than he is off and running, talking in a manic, rapid-fire clip that leaves her dizzy and spinning and barely able to catch her breath.
“You know this- This is the exact reason I wanted to just be friends with you,” he opens without preamble as he steps past her into the apartment, pulling at his scarf. “I was fine when we were friends. I knew how to handle it. I mean sure sometimes I would look at you and think- But as long as I didn’t cross that line, I was okay. Because I was on that side of the line, because I had limits.”
He tosses his scarf over the back of her kitchen chair and turns on her, “But then you go and you kiss me. And it’s like this switch goes off in my head, and that’s it I’m done.” Starts stripping off his gloves in aggravated jerk. “Every single limit, every reasonable expectation. Out the window.” Drops them on the table, and advances on her, “I told you. I told you, that I don’t have a halfway with you. I warned you about that, didn’t I?”
Leslie nods, throat dry, uncertain where this is going. “You did. And I was just-”
She doesn’t get the rest of the sentence out because he takes that one last step forward and then he’s kissing her.
After that entire tirade, he’s kissing her.
In her apartment.
While she’s in her pajamas.
On what is decidedly not a date.
She is so confused.
What is going on? Why is he not in Minnesota? Why is he talking like a crazy person, like he’s running on ten cups of coffee and no sleep? And why is he wearing a bowtie? And why? Why is he stopping?
“Ben, wha-?” she forces herself to catch her breath, and finally manages a complete sentence. “What are you doing?”
He looks down at her, expression strangely intent, eyes still a little wild, almost reckless. “I’m dating you.”
“Oh no, you don’t-”
Ben steps away, holding up a finger, “No see I’ve thought about this. A lot actually. I mean for the last I don’t know twenty-four hours I pretty much haven’t been able to think about anything else. And the thing is- I don’t want to be that guy. That guy who just gives up because ‘he can’t deal.’ Because really, what kind of person does that?” He shakes his head, still half stuck on his sister’s divorce, then blows out a breath and looks over at her, resolved and determined, “I don’t know. But it’s not going to be me.”
“It’s not you. It was never you.” Leslie rushes to reassure him, “Ben you’re not Scott in this.”
“Exactly,” he agrees taking an excited half-step forward like he thinks she’s getting it now. “Exactly. Which is why I’ve been doing this all wrong. I keep giving you the lead, keep asking you to just tell me to jump. And I got so frustrated because I didn’t understand why you just wouldn’t. When it was obvious I wanted you to so badly- But of course you’d never do that. Not if you didn’t think you could jump yourself. So I thought that meant-”
He runs a hand through his hair and turns away, and for a second she can see just a flash of remembered agony, but then he shakes it off, and spins back, starts up again from a completely different direction, criss-crossing the map of his thoughts in a crazy zig-zag she can just barely keep up with. “Look, you once told me I have too much faith in you, and I think you’re right. Actually, no, scratch that, I think you’re wrong I think I have exactly the right amount of faith in you. But for some reason it’s more than you think you deserve. For some reason, that I haven’t figured out yet, and it took me forever to see it because I’m so used to the Leslie who believes she can do anything- But this, us, relationships, this is where you doubt yourself, this is one place you honestly don’t know what you’re capable of. And that’s why I kept getting confused, I thought that because you thought you couldn’t, it meant you didn’t want to. But it doesn’t, does it?”
And for the first time Leslie can see just the tiniest thread of trepidation, just a momentary flicker of uncertainty, and she instinctively has to soothe it, takes a step forward. “No it doesn’t. I want to.”
Ben smiles. A beautiful, slow blossoming, grin that’s like watching the sun come out from behind the clouds, as the storm passes and the seas go calm. Whatever’s been driving him, whatever wound him up and set him off, has suddenly uncoiled, smoothed out, and now he’s Ben again steady and even keeled and deliberate. And yet, freer somehow, opened-up, like he’s cut all ties, unfurled his sails and caught the wind. He nods. “See that’s what I thought. So here’s the thing-”
Stepping close he reaches out and cups her face, tilting it up to meet his gaze, and her breath catches at the certainty there. “I’m done waiting for you to ask me to jump," he whispers, "I’m done waiting for you to have enough faith in yourself for this. You don’t need it. I’ve got you covered. So I’m going to go first, and all you have to do is follow, just have faith in me and trust that I am never going to lead you somewhere I don’t know you can go. You believe in me and I’ll believe in you and we’ll be fine. Okay?”
And even though she was almost there, even though Leslie was ninety-five percent sure she had it, this right here right now, this is her last five percent. Because believing in him is so simple, so easy. Believing in Ben is like breathing, unconscious and instinctive. She already knows she can do that. She’s been doing it for years.
Leslie nods, “Okay.” Nods again. “Okay.” Can’t stop nodding. “Okay.” And then she’s kissing him over and over and still repeating the words against his lips, “Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay.”
Her hands land on the lapels of his overcoat, and the realization that Ben never actually got past taking off his gloves seems to hit them at the same moment, so they’re laughing out of the kiss even as her hands are scrambling for his buttons. Because seriously she has waited so long for this, and then he’s shrugging out of it and letting it drop to the floor and pressing her back against the wall, and her hands fly to his shoulders only to encounter the unexpected feel of wool-gabardine and she opens her eyes and-
“You’re wearing a tuxedo.”
Really she could kill herself for opening her mouth, because that makes Ben stop kissing her neck and step back to glance down at himself as if this fact had entirely slipped his mind, and this is not at all what she wants to be happening right now.
He looks back up at her with a sheepish smile. “Right. About that- I actually had a plan for this. And I happen to think it’s pretty good plan. And despite the fact that I have never made one plan involving you that you haven’t managed turn upside down just by breathing or smiling at me, or-” he sighs, “writing on my mirror . . . For some reason I still seem to keep making them. So I’d like to try and see if we can do this the way I planned, just once, just to know how it feels.”
“And it involves a tuxedo?”
Ben grins. “And a dress. Not for me, for you. A tuxedo and a dress and two tickets to a New Year’s Eve party that my boss called and offered me this morning when his wife woke up with the flu. And I took as a sign. With me so far?”
She nods.
“Okay so the plan goes something like this: You’re going to get changed now, and I am going to take you out for New Year’s Eve, and I’m going to kiss you at midnight. And from that point on I really don’t intend to stop. And you can call that dating, or not dating, or, I don’t know, hopscotch for all I care. But as far as I’m concerned come next year you’re stuck with me and you’re pretty much just going to have to figure out how to live with that.” He exhales, calms a little, “Anyway, that’s my plan. As I said, I think it’s a good one and I’d like to try it, so if you could just humor me and go get changed before I kiss you again and this all goes to hell, I’d really appreciate it.”
Leslie half laughs, half groans as what he just said sinks in, the fact that he actually intends to keep her waiting even a half second longer. “You can’t be serious. You can’t show up here and look like that and kiss me the way you did, and then tell me I have to wait. What on earth could you possibly want to wait for?”
“I want to take you home with me.”
Her heart stops.
Ben moves back, reaching out to run his hands up into her hair and continues. “I want to do this right for once. I want to lay you out on my bed and finally know exactly what you look like against my sheets rather than imagining it. I want to fall asleep with you and wake up with you on New Year’s day and make you breakfast in the morning and know that I’m cooking you dinner that night. That’s what I want to wait for. That’s the memory I want.”
“Dammit.” She drops her head back against the wall defeat, and sighs, “Dammit. Now I have to go change.”
He laughs, and grabs her wrist, to lead her over to her closet. “If it’s any consolation, you’ve come extremely close to shaking my resolve here.”
Just for that Leslie takes great pains to make sure he can see the lingerie she pulls out of her drawer (there is nothing wrong with having at least one ridiculous scrap of nothing in your arsenal, even if it’s just for you), and strips in the hallway before she goes into the bathroom.
It gets her is an extremely satisfying groan, but nothing else.
Still, you really cannot blame a girl for trying.
---
When she comes back out forty five minutes later with her hair and makeup done, in a basic black cocktail dress that isn’t particularly flashy (until she turns around), but has the advantage of making her feel like her body looks amazing, Leslie is expecting at the least one very long appreciative look. There are certain things she simply feels she has a right to as a woman. And if she goes through the trouble of putting on perfume and makeup and a backless dress and killer heels and underwear whose sole purpose for existing is to be removed, being visibly objectified for three seconds by the guy she intends to sleep with at the end of the night is one of them.
She does not get it.
She does not get it because Ben does not look at her.
Because Ben is sitting on her futon, jacket shed, bowtie undone, shirtsleeves rolled up, staring at her wall. The stack of note cards from her kitchen table spread out on the floor around him.
Oh.
Leslie moves to stand in front of him, and finally he seems to register her presence. Looks up. Blinks.
“I’m on your wall.”
She nods, “You are.”
“I’m on your wall with Ann and Pawnee.” His voice is strange. Dazed almost. Like he’s waking up from some kind of dream.
“Ben, it’s not-” and she about to tell him it’s not what he thinks except she obviously has absolutely no clue what he thinks because now he’s smiling, happy and broad.
“Ann and Pawnee and me,” he ducks his head and laughs a little at the unintentional rhyme, then looks back up at her. “That’s, um, that’s a pretty exclusive club to be in.”
Leslie nods more vigorously now, a gurgle of relieved laughter bubbling up inside her. “It is. It’s-” she kneels down in front of him heedless of the notecard on 'clutter' she crumples with her shoe, and starts to explain. “I kept trying to tell you when you came in. That I’ve been thinking about this, too. I’ve been working on it. Trying to figure out- Ann said that what I got to tell you, the only things I got to tell you, was what I was willing to do and what would make me happy. So that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out, what I can give you, and I can give a lot. I really think I can. I can give you-” She picks up one of the notecards, reads off of it- “My newspapers.” Frowns. “No, that’s not a good one.” Looks around, for something better, lands on it, presses the card into his palm, “This. I could give you this if I had to. If there was no other way.”
Ben looks down at the card that says ‘Mayor’ and starts to shake his head, put it aside. “No. Leslie, no. I can’t ask- I would never-”
She puts her hands over his to stop him, brings it back and folds his fingers over it. “I know. I know you wouldn’t. And don’t you see? That’s why I can. Because I know it would be the absolute last thing you would ever ask me. And it’s not just that. Ben, I realized I don’t want to do it without you. I think we’re a good team. I think I’m better with you in my corner and I think if I ever run for Mayor I owe it to Pawnee to give them the best of me, so that means you.” She brushes a kiss to his knuckles, “But I know that doing this would require changes for you too. Probably a lot of changes, some of which might not be easy or even feasible. So I’m going to keep working towards it, and I want it, but not if you can’t do it with me. That’s why it’s down here. If it’s not on the wall, then it’s on the table. It’s an option. In this case, a ‘when all else fails break glass in case of emergency’ option, but an option all the same.”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, absorbing this, his eyes moving back and forth between their hands and the notecards and the wall, then back again. “So these are all-”
“Options. Things I’m willing to give you a say in.”
“And the wall is?”
“The things that make me happy. I guess you could call them my caveats or my non-negotiable points. I have three, which I know is more than you, but I just- I need all of them.”
Ben gets up from the futon and goes to stand in front of the wall for minute. Touches his fingers to his name. Then without saying a word, he goes over to the table, picks up three notecards and writes something down on of them. Comes back over. Leslie moves to stand beside him and read as he pins them up next to hers on the wall one by one.
‘Paul and Diane’
‘Harrison’
‘Leslie’
“There. Now we’re even. Actually you could even argue I have more, since Paul and Diane are technically two.”
She laughs. “We’ll count them as one.”
“There you go then. Three each.”
Leslie shakes her head, frowning, because as sweet as the gesture is, it’s also a little ridiculous. “Ben, saying you want to keep Harrison isn’t exactly the same thing as me saying I want to keep Pawnee.”
He waggles his head back and forth in a funny ‘yes’ and ‘no’. “I don’t know. He can get pretty crazy. Wait until you lose those shoes.”
“Ben-”
“I’m sorry you’re right,” he gets serious again, and takes her hand, walking her back with him to the futon so they can sit down. Runs his thumb along her knuckles, gathering his thoughts, then says, “Look, I’m not going to lie and say that the fact you don’t want to leave Pawnee isn’t going to make things hard, but I’m also not going to pretend this is some kind of earthshaking revelation. You and Pawnee are, I don’t know- kind of a package deal. It’s like- Well, it’s like Lauren and Jackson. Like if you meet a woman with a kid, you know that you don’t get to have her without the kid too. And you know that up front, long before you ever get too involved, so you don’t get to turn around and complain about the complications later. If you want to have the woman it means you want to have the kid, and if you’re not willing to deal with that then you need to get out.” Slipping his fingers between hers, he meets her eyes. “I think I’ve already made my stance on getting out pretty clear.”
She smiles, “You have.”
“Okay then. So-” he looks down at the mess of notecards on the floor, “What else you got?”
---
They get lost in it. Let time slip through their fingers going through her notes, trading ideas and solutions intermixed with jokes and stories. Eventually Ben grabs a clean stack and starts adding his own to the pile. There is apparently a pretty serious fantasy baseball addiction that they may need to work on. He’ll cook in her kitchen if he has to, but if he ever moves to Pawnee they’re going to need to talk about a remodel. He’s knows now he’s never wants to run for office himself (“I’d be miserable trying to deal with the reporters”), but he honestly doesn’t have the slightest clue whether he wants to keep advancing past the job he currently has or do something completely different.
Notecards become ideas, become possibilities, become dreams. Imagined futures they’re constructing together. Variations on themes. Each one beautiful.
Ben moves to Pawnee and helps her run for Mayor and starts doing consults for any town submitting bond or tax revision applications to his old department. (It would be a lot of travel again, but in shorter bursts).
Leslie stays in the State Assembly and they keep living out of each other pockets in traded spaces. (Not ideal, but they've got good role-models in Paul and Diane. It could certainly work.)
They wind up in a deep discussion of the finer points of the later option because they both agree it will be their reality for the foreseeable future (she’s splitting her time between towns for the next two years no matter what). And eventually Leslie reveals her notecard listing Diane’s advice, complete with the ‘phone sex,’ with no little embarrassment. Ben fingers it for a second, and then gets a funny look on his face like something just clicked, followed quickly by a truly disturbed grimace and a groan, “Oh dear lord.”
“What?”
Shaking his head he reaches over to where his jacket is tossed over the back of the futon and pulls out his phone, taps the screen a few times and then hands it to her, with an apologetic, “I wish I could tell you this was atypical for them.”
It’s an email from Paul. With a link for a video chat service and a simple message-‘Trust me. This is better. --Also, Diane informs me that we approve.’
Leslie closes her eyes and moans, “Oh my god. They're incorrigible.”
“Still think you’ve got more up on that wall than me?”
“Don’t worry. Ann can definitely hold her own.”
“See and now I’m worried,” he retorts, plucking the phone back out of her hand. Goes to put it back in his pocket, and then stops, drops his head. “I don’t believe it. I absolutely don’t believe it.”
“What?”
He holds up his phone, so she can see the time displayed on the screen. “We missed our dinner reservation. Do you know how many people I had to call-” Shakes his head back and forth with a sigh and an indulgent laugh, “I should have known. Every time. Every time I make a plan involving you, somehow, someway you flip everything completely upside down.”
Leslie grins unrepentant, “Maybe you should start making plans about me messing up your plans. Then one of them is bound to work.” Ben chuckles. Then an idea strikes her and she kneels up on the futon, she climbs into his lap, hiking up the slim skirt on her cocktail dress (its already pretty rumpled anyway), to deliberately expose the tops of her stockings as she straddles him. “But since I’ve already ruined this one, maybe we could just skip ahead to the part where you take me home and find out what I look like on your sheets?”
And because she is not above playing dirty when needed, she leans down and kisses him before he can say no, in a way that’s a very obvious ‘preview of coming attractions.’ Adds, “Wouldn’t kissing me at midnight be better if I’m naked? I bet there’s bonus points for that. Maybe even a prize.”
Ben drops his forehead to hers with a strained laugh that dissolves in a moan. Puts his hands on her hips and strokes his thumbs along her waist. “All right fine. You win. God you are still so completely impos-”
He only gets half the word out before he stops, realizing what he about to say. And it’s the pause that kills her, if he had just said it, if it had just been an offhand thing she could have ignored it, but the fact he stopped, the fact he couldn’t- She takes a deep shuddering breath.
“Leslie, look at me.”
Obediently she lifts her head and the look in his eyes makes her breath catch and her heart well up.
Reaching out he swipes his thumb along her cheek bone. “You know I told you I wanted to just be friends.”
“I know.”
“You kissed me anyway.”
She turns her head to press her mouth to his palm, completely unapologetic. “I did.”
Ben lowers his hand to the curve of her neck. “Then I told you I needed time to think. And you turn around and tell me you love me”
Leslie smiles. “Because I do.”
He shakes his head, and runs his fingers along the line of her collarbone “And when I ask you not to keep saying that, you go and write it on my mirror instead.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Yeah, I did.”
He stills for a moment, deciding, then moves his hand to press it over her heart, and looks up at her. Takes a breath and says with a deliberate intensity she absolutely cannot mistake for anything other than what it is, “You are, without a doubt, completely impossible.”
For a second she doesn’t immediately respond, does breath or move or speak or do anything other than simply be happy, so incredibly, brilliantly happy. And at the pause, Ben starts to remove his hand, but then she’s bringing hers up to cover it, press his palm to her heart like she could imprint him there, and finds her voice, picking up her cue to a routine they once did five long years ago and she still remembers like it was yesterday.
“But you love it.”
Ben smiles. “I do. I really always have.”
---
-fin-