FF: Escape Hatch (April/Ben)
Title: Escape Hatch
Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Pairing: April/Ben (seriously) with some background April/Andy and Leslie/Ben (but no cheating, see author's note)
Word Count: ~11,000
Rating: R (for sex, language, and screwed-up people)
Timeline: Up through 3x05 "Media Blitz"
Summary: "I don’t remember you being such an asshole in Pawnee." ~ "Yeah, well. That was Pawnee, wasn’t it?" :: This is not a love story. At least it is not their love story.
Author's Note: So the nbckink comm continues to be like crack. This prompt which was brilliant in its simplicity, asking for "Ben/April, mind games" (whoever prompted this I love you) was actually the first prompt to catch my eye at the meme, and has been haunting me for weeks. But it took me awhile to figure out how to do it because I didn't even want to try to imagine a world where Andy and April were not together and ridiculously happy after "Fancy Party" . . . So, I didn't. Instead this veers off the canon timeline about mid-way through "Media-Blitz" imagining a reality where April never forgave Andy and took the job with Chris, and Ben never really recovered from the Perd Hapley debacle so he went back to Indy before the Harvest Festival went up. So while there is background Andy/April and Leslie/Ben neither one of them are in a relationship. Okay, everyone oriented? Let's go.
----
There are days Ben is pretty sure Chris does things just to fuck with him.
Like the time in Wabash when he inexplicably managed to put his hands on wheatgrass and celebrated Ben’s birthday with ‘smoothies for everyone!’
Or the time in Hookersville, when he invited everybody to a town-hall meeting “because we want to hear all of your wonderful ideas” (the fact the town is still named Hookersville should be enough to tell you no one there has even a decent idea, let alone a ‘wonderful’ one).
But this. Hiring April Ludgate as his assistant? This is Chris’s piece de resistance. His Sistine Chapel and Mona Lisa and Hallelujah Chorus all rolled into one.
Chris doesn’t have to come up with ways to fuck with Ben any more. April does it for him.
All the time.
---
It starts with the post-its. Chris’s stupid color-coded post-its with cheerful little messages like “Good job” and “Superstar” and occasionally “Rework budget projections factoring in 3-year tax abatement” (That’s the problem with Chris’s post-its. Every sixth one or so there’s a truly brilliant idea tucked away amidst the unnecessary positive reinforcement, so you can’t just throw them all away. You actually have to read them first).
Except suddenly the post-its have gotten exponentially less positive and a lot more creative. The first one is on his desk one afternoon when he comes back from lunch, simple and eloquent and to the point.
“LOSER”
Ben looks up to find April just staring at him, face completely blank. He looks back down at the note, fiddles with it for about three seconds too long, then tears it up and throws it in the trashcan.
Yeah, that’s his first mistake.
Looking back he realizes he shouldn’t have acknowledged it at all, should have just ignored it completely. Put his files down on top of it and kept on working like it wasn’t even there. But he did and she knows it and she knows it bothered him and now she’s got a new toy. An amusement. A plaything.
It’s a very similar feeling to being the ‘catnip mouse’ dangled from a bit of string when said cat still has her claws.
The post-its keep coming in rapid succession after that. All pretty scathing, most profane, and some more than a little sexually inappropriate when you consider she’s barely an adult and he’s kind of her boss. He keeps throwing them away (or shredding them depending on content), but for some reason he doesn’t say anything. Some days when he thinks of Leslie and her Harvest Festival and the way he just left her to it after the catastrophe of Perd Hapley, he knows he doesn’t say anything because he feels like they’re kind of true. Because he feels like he kind of deserves it.
Then one morning he gets in to find one waiting for him on his computer screen an hour before he has to go in to do the debriefing meeting on the Pawnee Audit, and he’s already pretty wired having been up all night trying to figure out a way to explain how he got talked into something as insane as the Harvest Festival that doesn’t include ‘I got stupid’ or ‘I lost all perspective’ or ‘Have you met Leslie Knope?’
“Fuck-up”
It’s underlined this time and strangely she's added a gold star from Chris’s stash which is actually ten times more disturbing than the words would have been alone.
And the thing is as he stands there staring at it, he realizes he doesn’t know how it got there. Because she’s not here yet, and she definitely wasn’t here last night when he left, and he thought she didn’t have a key to his office.
The idea that she’s somehow gotten hold of one makes him break out into a cold sweat. But weirdly it also makes him pissed off enough that he’s able to shed some of his steadily building anxiety, so that when the meeting comes at nine he speaks articulately and logically about all the factors that went into his decision to approve the Harvest Festival and how given its projected revenue Pawnee will be completely on track to stay within the restrictions set by the state despite not making all the initially recommended cuts.
It’s a pretty good meeting and all in all he’s feeling kind of generous, so when the coffee-shop makes his latte wrong and asks if he wants to give the second one to someone he only thinks for a second before saying ‘yes.’ Gets half-way out the door before an idea hits him and he turns back to ask to borrow the barista’s sharpie.
Five minutes later he sets the latte down on April’s desk, making sure it’s turned so she can see the ‘Fuck-up’ surrounded by the five stars he’s drawn around it on the side of her cup in thick black marker. Smiles.
“Thanks for the pep-talk this morning.” Does Chris’s little double finger point just to seal the deal. “April Ludgate. Literally the best assistant, ever.”
The knife points of her glare in his back should not feel as good as they do.
---
After that it’s war.
April misorders his lunch for a week straight. Ben eats every single meal he gets and thanks her for the variety.
She purposely drops five phone-calls in one day. He has Kathleen the grandmotherly executive-assistant for the Budget Director ‘let’ April shadow her for three afternoons until she ‘gets the hang of it’. (There is something about sweet, elderly women that is apparently April’s kryptonite. He files that away for later and doesn’t notice that he’s starting to devote maybe more attention to this thing than is healthy).
She ‘forgets’ to tell him Chris rescheduled a seven am meeting. He ‘forgets’ to tell her when Chris leaves early for the weekend and says she can take off too if she wants.
Then one afternoon he has to legitimately give her a rush set of edits he doesn’t have time to do himself before he heads into the prep meeting for Snerling (no games, no ulterior motive).
April follows him back into his office and throws the stack of papers down on his desk, crosses her arms over her chest.
“I don’t know why you gave me this. We both know I’m not going to do it.”
Ben just stares at her for a second in disbelief. “It’s your job.”
She shrugs. “So? Maybe you should fire me.”
And there’s something about it, about the insolence of it, and the pretense, and supposed lack of caring. He has never met anyone so fucking determined to ruin their life before it’s even begun, to completely and utterly screw up their future just out of sheer obstinacy. Because there’s a mind at work somewhere under that apathy, an insane, brilliant, completely terrifying mind that’s copied his keys and locked him out of his computer and basically made his life a living hell, but done it all with a kind of panache you’ve just got to salute.
She could be something, could probably be anything she wanted, and he cannot tell you what he would have given to have still had those kind of options at the age of twenty-one. And here she is, standing in his office, slumped against his wall and trying to throw all of hers away. And he can take everything else, can take the caustic and sometimes sexually-inappropriate post-its inside his copies of reports, can take the liverworst sandwiches and split-pea soup. He can even take having to call IT and discovering his login has been changed to ‘micropenis’ (he is still trying to figure out how she pulled that one off). But he’ll be damned if he lets her get away with treating opportunities he would have killed for like garbage.
He loses it. Absolutely, fucking loses it.
“What the hell is your problem? Do you really think that you’re going to be able to get through the rest of your life like this? Because you won’t. You’ve gotten lucky because you don’t actually take responsibility for anything, but sooner or later you’re not going to have a choice and all it takes is one real screw up and everyone will turn their backs on you. Trust me you have never been that alone in your life.”
April just rolls her eyes at him like he’s an idiot. “Whatever. I hate people, anyways.”
That is the most completely bullshit response he’s ever heard. “Doesn’t mean you don’t need them.”
“Um, yes it does.”
“Fine. Then you can stay up here when we go to Snerling. Just you in this office, alone. All day. Every day. For three straight months. Take messages, file papers and not have to talk to anyone. It should be like heaven for you.”
That gets her. He knew it would. Because if she’s alone, it means he’s not here to screw with. And as best he can tell he’s at least a good five to six hours of her day, every single day. She’ll be climbing up the walls in less than forty-eight hours without him and they both know it.
Still he’s got to give her credit for trying to play it off. She just picks despondently at her nails and mutters, “You know if you leave me here I’ll just skip work and go out with my friends.”
“Got a lot of those up here in Indy, do you?” That makes her glare at him, but they both kind of already knew the answer to that. She’s about as good at making connections with people as he is. They’ve simply got too many edges and too much plating. Nobody other than a fool or an optimist would throw themselves against their fortresses (except maybe someone equally well protected, but he doesn’t even acknowledge that thought before he’s pushed it aside). He let his drop for awhile only to be reminded why it was up in the first place. And he doesn’t know what put hers there but he’s sure as shit not about to be the one to tell her to lower it.
Bizarrely he realizes that having her for a nemesis might be the closest thing either one of them has to a friend anymore.
And then it trips across his mind that his life is going to be incredibly boring if she doesn’t come to Snerling and he’s almost sad about it.
God this has gotten so fucked up.
Sighing he picks up the stack of papers, walks over to the doorway where she’s slumped and holds them out in front of her. “Either do it or pack your desk. But when you go back to Pawnee and everyone asks what happened don’t tell them you were fired. Tell them you chose to leave. Because that’s what I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them you missed all of them like crazy, that you couldn’t return fast enough, that you went running right back to whatever it is you’re running away from.”
And he’s knows it’s harsh, knows it’s almost borderline cruel, but he kind of wants to see what she’ll do if pushed. Wants to see just how thick that plating has gotten, just how stubborn she can be. And if he’s honest with himself he’s half-hoping she’ll crumble, that she’ll give. Go back. He thinks. Get out. He begs. Turn around and run back to Pawnee where people smile and put up with you and love you. There’s only room for one Tin Man in the story. I missed my chance but it could still be you. So go. Run back to the Wizard and get your heart.
For a second she just looks at him, and there’s something in her eyes, something soft and a little bit scared and impossibly young, and he thinks she’s going to do it. And he thinks he’s really going to miss her.
Then she snatches the sheaf of papers from his hand with a truly impressive eye-roll and a groan. “God, I hate you. Why can’t you just be like normal people and avoid me?”
“Believe me, I’m trying.”
But he’s not trying nearly hard enough, and they both know it, and there’s something really wrong about that.
April goes back to her desk and sure enough ten minutes later he’s treated to the sound of incredibly angry typing and a lot of expletives.
He’d whistle if he knew how.
---
Snerling is where everything gets weird.
Not that it wasn’t already weird.
But, you know, weirder.
Which of course for them, means it actually starts to get kind of comfortable.
She deliberately books him a smoking room (he didn’t even know places still had those). He takes her key and makes them trade.
Ben is not even surprised to come back two nights later to find her sitting on his bed in an oversized t-shirt and what look like his boxer-shorts, eating a pint of ‘Chunky Monkey’ straight out of the carton.
He is surprised to find out she wears glasses and for some reason that’s the thing that makes him stop and stare at her far longer than is appropriate (though given his twenty-one year-old subordinate is sitting on his bed in his boxer shorts after leaving him a very explicit post-it this morning about everything she imagines to be wrong with his cock, appropriate is becoming an extremely elastic term).
Finally April tears her eyes away from the TV and gives him one of her patented ‘what is your dysfunction?’ looks. “That room smells like ass. I’m sleeping here tonight. It was supposed to be mine anyway.”
He should kick her out. He knows this, knows that is the logical and adult response here. She shifts to tuck one of her legs under her, and it makes his boxers ride up so high on her thighs that it looks like she’s wearing nothing but that t-shirt, and he can feel something inside him (something those sexually explicit post-its have tugging at for weeks now) shift left of center, and he knows kicking her out is also the safe response here.
The problem is there’s something about April that makes his logic shut down, makes his first instinct be to hold his hand over the flame just a little longer.
Also protesting would just escalate the issue and possibly result in her doing something drastic designed to get him in trouble like running outside and yelling at the top-of-her-lungs, so really he’s got very few choices here. (Or at least that’s what he tells himself because it absolutely cannot be that he is simply this fucking lonely).
Ben walks over, picks up the remote, and changes the channel over to the Cubs game he’d been looking forward to watching in peace.
“Hey!” she protests, “I was watching that.”
“Watching what?”
“The other thing.”
And it strikes him that she’s gotten very comfortable in his room given she only left the office thirty minutes before he did. He crosses his arms and levels her with a knowing look. “Tell me the name of the show and the channel it’s on and I’ll change it back.”
They wind up watching the Cubs game.
Well, he watches it. April puts in the ear-buds of her iPod and turns her music on with a pointedness that tells him this probably used to bother someone in her past. (He’s betting her parents, and it rolls through his head that he should be a lot more bothered by the fact she’s given him equivalent status, and that’s followed close on its heels by the counter thought that no he should not be bothered about having parental status at all). After about twenty-minutes when it apparently sinks in with her that he does not care one iota about whether or not she pays him any attention tonight, she stops being so fucking emphatic about not giving him the time of day and just lays down cross wise on the bottom end of the bed and lets herself focus on listening to the music rather than ignoring him.
It’s the most peaceful he’s ever seen her. Her whole body relaxes with it and something that on anyone else’s face would be the start of a smile plays at her lips and every once in awhile her mouth moves a little with the words.
For awhile they just stay like that, him sitting up at the top of the bed drinking a beer and watching a Cubs game. Her laying at the foot, listening to music, the slowly melting pint of ice-cream forgotten on the floor.
When he mutes one of the commercials to call for a pizza, he can hear her saying something and it takes him a moment to realize she’s singing. Softly, quietly singing.
She doesn’t have the world’s most beautiful voice, but like so much of the rest of her it’s unique and striking. Like stumbling upon a cracked desert cliff after spending all your days in a rain-forest. You know it's harsh and unforgiving, know can’t support life and you’d die if you stayed, but you can’t help but marvel at it a little.
Without thinking he leans forward and pulls out one of her ear-buds.
April’s eyes pop open to stare up at him and her hand flies up to the spot on her ear where his finger-tips brushed her skin. “What?”
It should be sharp. Out of her mouth it should be demanding and bored, and practically scream ‘you are lame and creepy’ (it would have been really helpful if she had at least managed the ‘creepy’ part), instead it comes out soft, and a little startled. And it’s the fact he startled her, actually managed to legitimately surprise her with one impulsive act after nearly five weeks of barely being able to rattle her with anything planned that makes him do what he does next.
Reaching out he brushes his fingertips along her forehead, feathering her bangs. And for a second, just a second April tilts her head back into his touch like a cat, baring the long pale line of her throat and he has the overwhelming impulse to run his tongue along it, bite down hard on that cord of muscle connecting to her shoulder. He wonders exactly what he’d have to do to make her beg.
God, he bets it would take him weeks to discover that, and he’s always loved a challenge.
That’s what it is he thinks. The riddle of her, the puzzle. When he was fifteen his dad gave him a Rubix cube in his stocking at Christmas, an after-thought of a gift, just something to fiddle with while waiting for the grandparents to get there for the main event. Except Ben couldn’t put it down, couldn’t let it go, carried it around with him for weeks until he finally solved it. And for those weeks it occupied nearly his every waking thought. He stared at it, manipulated it, calloused his fingers twisting it this way and that, all in an effort to make it bend to his will.
He is in serious danger of letting April become his new Rubix cube.
And before he can stop himself, the question he’s been wanting to ask for weeks slips out. “What are you running from?”
It’s the wrong move.
Her expression slams shut with such force he swears he can hear the rattle of the drawbridge chain.
“I dropped your toothbrush in the toilet.”
Aaaaand just like that, they’re back.
“Yeah, okay.” Ben sits up and rubs a hand over his face with a sigh. Reaches behind him for the telephone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling for pizza.”
“If you get it with onions, I’ll breathe onion breath on your face all night.”
“Who says I’m ordering any for you?”
---
So if anyone ever told him that sleeping with his twenty-one year-old kind-of assistant (he can still only get her to do about ten-percent of what he asks, but it’s progress) would become a common everyday thing along the lines of doing his laundry or reading the morning paper he would probably have them submit to a drug-test. Because really, have you met him? He is not that type of guy. Even if he wanted to be that type of guy, he is not that type of guy.
Which is okay because he is apparently still not that type of guy.
Because when he says he sleeps with his twenty-one year old assistant, that’s exactly what he means. He sleeps with her. Nothing else.
It should be really weird. Correction. It is really weird. And what makes it even weirder? That they both treat it like it’s not weird at all. Like it’s totally fucking normal.
That’s mostly April’s doing. She’s simply so matter-of-fact about the whole thing from the very first night. After eating three pieces of the pizza (and complaining about the mushrooms the whole time, but not picking them off), she just gets up and walks over to the bathroom, and proceeds to brush her teeth with his toothbrush (which she apparently did not drop in the toilet because if she did, well . . . He makes a mental note to pick up a new one tomorrow anyways). Then comes back out, climbs into bed on the right side (where he usually sleeps) and rolls over without so much as a good night.
When he wakes up in the morning it’s to find her staring at him through a curtain of hair.
“I thought you would drool.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
This is the full extent to which they talk about it.
Still there’s this moment every night, this ten minute stretch when he first lays down and he can smell her hair, feel the weight of her body shifting on the mattress just a few feet away. And during that ten minutes he is incredibly aware that there’s a part of him that desperately wants to just roll over on top of her and press that deceptively lithe body of hers into the mattress and call her bluff (wants it not to be a bluff at all). And he’s aware there’s a part of him that half thinks of her as some kind of annoying kid-sister, that he’s developed this oddly protective streak for her, where for all he’ll push her buttons from sun-up to sun-down and laugh while doing it, when he overheard some twenty-three year-old asshole from the Transportation Department call her a ‘freaky bitch’ in the hallway the other day it took everything in him not to turn around and deck the guy.
And he is incredibly aware that this is not normal.
And for those ten minutes when he first gets into bed, he can’t think about anything else. Can’t stop the insane, giddy hysteria of ‘what the fuck am I doing?’ that makes his muscles almost vibrate with the urge to laugh and cry simultaneously. But it only ever lasts for ten-minutes, and after that ten-minute panic attack (and he thinks that’s the entire reason she does this, just to put him through that ten minutes of hell) something else takes over, something he’s beginning to think of as the ‘April effect’: this heretofore undiscovered part of him that rolls with the punches, that mentally shrugs his shoulders and goes ‘fuck it’. And he just lets himself enjoy being in bed with another human being, the implied connection of it, because honestly he misses that in a way that’s completely separate from any sexual desire.
There are some days when he thinks not wanting to lose that is probably the only thing keeping him from kissing her.
Well that and the fact he’s not entirely sure she won’t simply turn around and castrate him with a butter knife.
---
It goes on that way for about a week.
Nothing else changes. She still leaves him post-its inside his binders. (There was one with a stick figure labeled ‘Loser’ and what might have been a dog that probably would have gotten him fired on the spot.) He still occasionally brings her coffee with profanities written under the sleeve, just to let her know he’s not done playing.
Sometimes he can’t believe Chris hasn’t figured it out yet. Not that he’s entirely certain what ‘it’ is, but he’s pretty sure that from any angle you view it, whatever he and April are doing violates Chris’s rules (god knows it’s a scandal waiting to happen at the very least and Chris hates a scandal). But then again maybe it’s not such a stretch. At work he and April are still always one step away from mutually assured destruction, and Chris is not a guy who can see anything beneath the surface of a conflict like that. He just sees the conflict and wants it to stop.
Which is how Ben winds up with April shadowing him while he does the departmental evaluation meetings because “I just know if she gets a chance to see how dedicated you are to your work, she’ll appreciate you more. Also, you know, smile at her a little, maybe take her out to lunch and ask about her ambitions. I bet you’ll be a great team.”
If you can think of a more uncomfortable meeting than letting him take apart your department’s budget expenditures piece by over-inflated piece while April stares at you like she’s just waiting to see how long it will take you to cry, Ben would honestly love to hear it.
In case you’re wondering, the longest someone goes without crying that day is fifty-five minutes. The shortest is four. (That is, by the way, a new record for him. Really he’s very proud.)
When that meeting disintegrates and the assistant director of Snerling’s library department runs out of the room sobbing, Ben leans back in his chair and presses the heels of his palms to eyes with a sigh. “That went well.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Oh for the love of- He drops his hands and looks over at her. April’s eyes have narrowed to tiny slits, and he can feel her glare cutting into him like razor wire, and really? She’s really judging his people skills, here? Then he thinks about the woman who just left in tears-two years past her pension and smelling like baked goods and Benjay. Yes, he thinks, she’s really doing this.
“Yeah, because you’re such a ray of sunshine. I’m sure having you over there doing your Wednesday Adams impersonation really put everyone at ease.”
“Whatever, you’re still an asshole.”
He snorts a mirthless laugh, and starts to gather up his things. “Okay then. Glad we got that cleared up.”
And he’s just at the door only a few seconds away from freedom when April speaks up again.
“Did you make Leslie cry?”
At the mention of Leslie’s name, it’s like something’s reached in, grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. And for a second he can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t do anything other than stand there and hate himself.
He closes his eyes and forcefully tears away from the attack. Beats it back with a viciousness that would probably surprise even April.
Yanking open the door, he grinds out, “Get the meeting notes on my desk before you leave tonight, or I’ll have Chris to send you back to Indy.”
Leaves the room without looking back.
What are you running from?
---
April drops two pages of typed notes on his desk at six that evening without a word.
They’re flawless. Not a single profanity. Not a misspelled word or a comma out of place.
It feels like she’s yelling at him.
---
That night when he gets back to his motel room, Ben hesitates outside the door, tries to decide if he thinks she’s going to be there or not. Tries to decide if he wants her to be there or not. Can’t quite make up his mind.
She’s there.
And she’s not.
There’s a routine to how this goes. April gets here before him. April wears his boxers and drinks the last of his beer and turns the TV to anything other than the baseball game and then proceeds to hide the remote. April sprawls across the bottom of his bed and messes up his papers and generally ignores him until she’s hungry, at which point she won’t leave him alone.
Tonight however she’s still in her work-clothes, sitting at the top of the bed, knees pulled up against her chest in a tight ball of anger. She doesn’t look up when he comes in, doesn’t scowl or roll her eyes or anything, just continues staring straight ahead at nothing. The TV is already turned to a baseball game and the remote sits on his pillow.
April has never been more considerate.
It’s awful.
He hates it. It’s like he’s beneath her contempt. Like she’s so disgusted she can’t be bothered to even punish him because that would involve acknowledging his existence. And it’s strange but in the loss of her, the hundred constant tiny irritations of her, he realizes that she’s been the thing keeping him to together, the release valve that lets him siphon off just a little the pressure, of the self-loathing, lets it manifest itself into something bizarre and fucked-up and more than a little self-destructive. But as long as it’s out there, as long as it’s directed at her, it keeps everything inside him from building up, from pressing against his walls until he fractures.
Which is probably why he starts pushing back, turning her consideration on its head, just trying to get a rise out of her. Any kind of rise.
He turns the channel to one those horrible ‘reality’ shows she likes to mock everyone in.
April puts on her iPod.
A little while later when he gets up to go to the bathroom and change into sweats, Ben lays out a clean pair of boxers and a t-shirt for her at the foot of the bed.
She sleeps in her clothes.
The next morning he leaves her meeting notes on her desk with the word “Outstanding!!!” written at the top in bright red marker.
She hangs them up like a certificate of commendation.
He invites her to lunch in front of Chris. “We can talk about where you want to be in five years.”
April gives him in a bright, fake sunshine smile and says "Great." She brings a notebook to lunch and three different colors of pens and takes copious notes.
It feels like she’s mocking Leslie.
Ben wants to reach across the table and strangle her.
Halfway back to the office, while April is still chattering on about her “ambitions” and her “love of public service” he jerks the car over to the side of the road so hard her shoulder slams into the passenger-side window.
Reaching across the console, he rips the pages of brightly colored notes off her pad, and crumples them into a ball. Tosses it out the window.
“But I need those!” April protests, “They were color coded.”
Before he even knows what he’s doing he’s got her by the shoulders fingers digging-in hard, shakes her a little. “Stop it. Just fucking stop it!”
Her false demeanor dissolves and finally, finally, the April he knows stares back up at him, face flat, eyes hard.
“Did you make Leslie cry?”
“Son-of-a-”
“Did you?”
He sighs, relents, because she’s obviously not going to let this go, and he’s tired now, just so desperately tired. “No. I definitely did not make Leslie cry.”
She chews on that for a moment, then adds, “I don’t remember you being such an asshole in Pawnee.”
“Yeah, well. That was Pawnee, wasn’t it?”
Something flickers across April’s face at that, and he can’t quite decipher it, but he files it away. Feels like if he could just get that one piece the whole puzzle of her would unlock.
“You don’t think Leslie cried when you left?”
Ben can feel his mouth twist in a pained sardonic smile. “I doubt it. I really, really doubt it.”
“Do you think you would have stayed if she’d cried? If she’d begged you and said she was sorry for anything she did, do you think you wouldn’t have left? That you’d, you know, not be such a loser.”
“I-“ He squeezes his eyes shut, realizes somehow this conversation has veered into new and unfamiliar territory. “Wait- what are we talking about now?”
April tries to shrug his hands off her shoulders, but he holds on. “April?”
She whips her head around and glares at him, “Nothing. Geez, we’re talking nothing okay. Just that you’re such a lame-ass and your face is so stupid it’s like painful to look at it. And-“
“And?”
“And you- I-” And for once April’s endless supply of insults seems to run dry, he can see the frustration and anger mounting on her face, and he really should be prepared for what happens next, but he’s not at all.
With a muffled cry in the back of her throat, April reaches up, fists her hands in his hair and drags his mouth down onto to hers.
It’s an all out assault, a brutal attack, punishing and angry and needy. And probably if he was still the man he’d been in Pawnee or even the man he’d been before Pawnee, he’d push her away, he’d obey his better angels and not take advantage of the emotionally distraught woman (girl) having an obvious breakdown in the passenger seat of his car, over something he doesn’t entirely understand.
But he’s not that man anymore. And that’s at least fifty-percent because of her. She’s molded him, warped him, turned him into her creature.
He reaches over and unhooks her seatbelt.
April doesn’t miss a beat, climbs across the console in an elegant movement that feels almost predatory in its expediency and straddles him, rocking against his erection in a blatant invitation that’s really a command.
Even as he’s bringing one hand up to massage her breast, enjoying the way she presses into it, the fact he can make her just a little less impassive, he can't help but know this is crazy. That the fact he’s even thinking of doing this-of fucking his assistant in his car, in the middle of the afternoon, on an open stretch of highway, just outside the town he’s in the midst of hacking to pieces-is proof he has a self-destructive streak a mile wide.
Then it doesn’t matter because April’s got his pants undone and her hand is closing around his cock, even as she’s leaning forward to whisper in his ear, “Stop being such a fuck-up and just do it, just fuck me already.”
It’s the insult that does it. Not because of any of kind of need to be humiliated or chastised or anything, but because it means he’s got her back, that she’s done with whatever she’s been doing for the last twenty-four hours and they can go back to screwing with each other on a regular basis.
And maybe even add new tricks to their repertoire.
She’s wearing a skirt for once, something dark and almost knee length, with a little white button-down and a long yellow cardigan. Her attempt at a ‘professional’ look that she did just to get under his skin. He shoves the skirt up to her waist hoping (insanely) that it holds the wrinkles, and runs the pad of his thumb over the damp cotton of her underwear. It’s the pair with the Smurfs that he keeps finding in random places around the room. Briefly it skitters across his mind to wonder exactly how long she’s been thinking about this, and then April is guiding his hand to shove her underwear to the side and lowering herself onto him and he’s not thinking about anything at all.
There’s nothing romantic about it. There’s barely anything nice about it. They don’t gaze into each other’s eyes or whisper encouraging words. It’s fast and frantic and sloppy. April keeps her hands fisted in his hair using the sharp points of her elbows on his shoulders for leverage, and his fingers bite into the angles of her hipbones so hard she will probably bruise. (It’s disturbing how much he looks forward to the possibility of checking on that tonight.) And when she whispers things to him, it’s little impatient demands like “Come on, already” and “Harder, God,” and he says things back like “Shut-up” and “You’re not helping.”
When it’s done, April climbs off him with all the ceremony and self-consciousness of someone who just borrowed a cup of sugar, tugs down her skirt and looks at the clock, then back over at him with a little smirk.
“You’re going to be late for the meeting with the Parks Department. Chris will be pissed he has to do it.”
Ben drops his forehead to the steering wheel and bites down on a strained, hysterical laugh. “I’ll live.”
When they get back to the Snerling municipal building, April drops the notebook and multi-colored pens in the trash can outside.
It’s the last time they ever talk about Leslie.
---
- part 2 -
Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Pairing: April/Ben (seriously) with some background April/Andy and Leslie/Ben (but no cheating, see author's note)
Word Count: ~11,000
Rating: R (for sex, language, and screwed-up people)
Timeline: Up through 3x05 "Media Blitz"
Summary: "I don’t remember you being such an asshole in Pawnee." ~ "Yeah, well. That was Pawnee, wasn’t it?" :: This is not a love story. At least it is not their love story.
Author's Note: So the nbckink comm continues to be like crack. This prompt which was brilliant in its simplicity, asking for "Ben/April, mind games" (whoever prompted this I love you) was actually the first prompt to catch my eye at the meme, and has been haunting me for weeks. But it took me awhile to figure out how to do it because I didn't even want to try to imagine a world where Andy and April were not together and ridiculously happy after "Fancy Party" . . . So, I didn't. Instead this veers off the canon timeline about mid-way through "Media-Blitz" imagining a reality where April never forgave Andy and took the job with Chris, and Ben never really recovered from the Perd Hapley debacle so he went back to Indy before the Harvest Festival went up. So while there is background Andy/April and Leslie/Ben neither one of them are in a relationship. Okay, everyone oriented? Let's go.
----
There are days Ben is pretty sure Chris does things just to fuck with him.
Like the time in Wabash when he inexplicably managed to put his hands on wheatgrass and celebrated Ben’s birthday with ‘smoothies for everyone!’
Or the time in Hookersville, when he invited everybody to a town-hall meeting “because we want to hear all of your wonderful ideas” (the fact the town is still named Hookersville should be enough to tell you no one there has even a decent idea, let alone a ‘wonderful’ one).
But this. Hiring April Ludgate as his assistant? This is Chris’s piece de resistance. His Sistine Chapel and Mona Lisa and Hallelujah Chorus all rolled into one.
Chris doesn’t have to come up with ways to fuck with Ben any more. April does it for him.
All the time.
---
It starts with the post-its. Chris’s stupid color-coded post-its with cheerful little messages like “Good job” and “Superstar” and occasionally “Rework budget projections factoring in 3-year tax abatement” (That’s the problem with Chris’s post-its. Every sixth one or so there’s a truly brilliant idea tucked away amidst the unnecessary positive reinforcement, so you can’t just throw them all away. You actually have to read them first).
Except suddenly the post-its have gotten exponentially less positive and a lot more creative. The first one is on his desk one afternoon when he comes back from lunch, simple and eloquent and to the point.
“LOSER”
Ben looks up to find April just staring at him, face completely blank. He looks back down at the note, fiddles with it for about three seconds too long, then tears it up and throws it in the trashcan.
Yeah, that’s his first mistake.
Looking back he realizes he shouldn’t have acknowledged it at all, should have just ignored it completely. Put his files down on top of it and kept on working like it wasn’t even there. But he did and she knows it and she knows it bothered him and now she’s got a new toy. An amusement. A plaything.
It’s a very similar feeling to being the ‘catnip mouse’ dangled from a bit of string when said cat still has her claws.
The post-its keep coming in rapid succession after that. All pretty scathing, most profane, and some more than a little sexually inappropriate when you consider she’s barely an adult and he’s kind of her boss. He keeps throwing them away (or shredding them depending on content), but for some reason he doesn’t say anything. Some days when he thinks of Leslie and her Harvest Festival and the way he just left her to it after the catastrophe of Perd Hapley, he knows he doesn’t say anything because he feels like they’re kind of true. Because he feels like he kind of deserves it.
Then one morning he gets in to find one waiting for him on his computer screen an hour before he has to go in to do the debriefing meeting on the Pawnee Audit, and he’s already pretty wired having been up all night trying to figure out a way to explain how he got talked into something as insane as the Harvest Festival that doesn’t include ‘I got stupid’ or ‘I lost all perspective’ or ‘Have you met Leslie Knope?’
“Fuck-up”
It’s underlined this time and strangely she's added a gold star from Chris’s stash which is actually ten times more disturbing than the words would have been alone.
And the thing is as he stands there staring at it, he realizes he doesn’t know how it got there. Because she’s not here yet, and she definitely wasn’t here last night when he left, and he thought she didn’t have a key to his office.
The idea that she’s somehow gotten hold of one makes him break out into a cold sweat. But weirdly it also makes him pissed off enough that he’s able to shed some of his steadily building anxiety, so that when the meeting comes at nine he speaks articulately and logically about all the factors that went into his decision to approve the Harvest Festival and how given its projected revenue Pawnee will be completely on track to stay within the restrictions set by the state despite not making all the initially recommended cuts.
It’s a pretty good meeting and all in all he’s feeling kind of generous, so when the coffee-shop makes his latte wrong and asks if he wants to give the second one to someone he only thinks for a second before saying ‘yes.’ Gets half-way out the door before an idea hits him and he turns back to ask to borrow the barista’s sharpie.
Five minutes later he sets the latte down on April’s desk, making sure it’s turned so she can see the ‘Fuck-up’ surrounded by the five stars he’s drawn around it on the side of her cup in thick black marker. Smiles.
“Thanks for the pep-talk this morning.” Does Chris’s little double finger point just to seal the deal. “April Ludgate. Literally the best assistant, ever.”
The knife points of her glare in his back should not feel as good as they do.
---
After that it’s war.
April misorders his lunch for a week straight. Ben eats every single meal he gets and thanks her for the variety.
She purposely drops five phone-calls in one day. He has Kathleen the grandmotherly executive-assistant for the Budget Director ‘let’ April shadow her for three afternoons until she ‘gets the hang of it’. (There is something about sweet, elderly women that is apparently April’s kryptonite. He files that away for later and doesn’t notice that he’s starting to devote maybe more attention to this thing than is healthy).
She ‘forgets’ to tell him Chris rescheduled a seven am meeting. He ‘forgets’ to tell her when Chris leaves early for the weekend and says she can take off too if she wants.
Then one afternoon he has to legitimately give her a rush set of edits he doesn’t have time to do himself before he heads into the prep meeting for Snerling (no games, no ulterior motive).
April follows him back into his office and throws the stack of papers down on his desk, crosses her arms over her chest.
“I don’t know why you gave me this. We both know I’m not going to do it.”
Ben just stares at her for a second in disbelief. “It’s your job.”
She shrugs. “So? Maybe you should fire me.”
And there’s something about it, about the insolence of it, and the pretense, and supposed lack of caring. He has never met anyone so fucking determined to ruin their life before it’s even begun, to completely and utterly screw up their future just out of sheer obstinacy. Because there’s a mind at work somewhere under that apathy, an insane, brilliant, completely terrifying mind that’s copied his keys and locked him out of his computer and basically made his life a living hell, but done it all with a kind of panache you’ve just got to salute.
She could be something, could probably be anything she wanted, and he cannot tell you what he would have given to have still had those kind of options at the age of twenty-one. And here she is, standing in his office, slumped against his wall and trying to throw all of hers away. And he can take everything else, can take the caustic and sometimes sexually-inappropriate post-its inside his copies of reports, can take the liverworst sandwiches and split-pea soup. He can even take having to call IT and discovering his login has been changed to ‘micropenis’ (he is still trying to figure out how she pulled that one off). But he’ll be damned if he lets her get away with treating opportunities he would have killed for like garbage.
He loses it. Absolutely, fucking loses it.
“What the hell is your problem? Do you really think that you’re going to be able to get through the rest of your life like this? Because you won’t. You’ve gotten lucky because you don’t actually take responsibility for anything, but sooner or later you’re not going to have a choice and all it takes is one real screw up and everyone will turn their backs on you. Trust me you have never been that alone in your life.”
April just rolls her eyes at him like he’s an idiot. “Whatever. I hate people, anyways.”
That is the most completely bullshit response he’s ever heard. “Doesn’t mean you don’t need them.”
“Um, yes it does.”
“Fine. Then you can stay up here when we go to Snerling. Just you in this office, alone. All day. Every day. For three straight months. Take messages, file papers and not have to talk to anyone. It should be like heaven for you.”
That gets her. He knew it would. Because if she’s alone, it means he’s not here to screw with. And as best he can tell he’s at least a good five to six hours of her day, every single day. She’ll be climbing up the walls in less than forty-eight hours without him and they both know it.
Still he’s got to give her credit for trying to play it off. She just picks despondently at her nails and mutters, “You know if you leave me here I’ll just skip work and go out with my friends.”
“Got a lot of those up here in Indy, do you?” That makes her glare at him, but they both kind of already knew the answer to that. She’s about as good at making connections with people as he is. They’ve simply got too many edges and too much plating. Nobody other than a fool or an optimist would throw themselves against their fortresses (except maybe someone equally well protected, but he doesn’t even acknowledge that thought before he’s pushed it aside). He let his drop for awhile only to be reminded why it was up in the first place. And he doesn’t know what put hers there but he’s sure as shit not about to be the one to tell her to lower it.
Bizarrely he realizes that having her for a nemesis might be the closest thing either one of them has to a friend anymore.
And then it trips across his mind that his life is going to be incredibly boring if she doesn’t come to Snerling and he’s almost sad about it.
God this has gotten so fucked up.
Sighing he picks up the stack of papers, walks over to the doorway where she’s slumped and holds them out in front of her. “Either do it or pack your desk. But when you go back to Pawnee and everyone asks what happened don’t tell them you were fired. Tell them you chose to leave. Because that’s what I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them you missed all of them like crazy, that you couldn’t return fast enough, that you went running right back to whatever it is you’re running away from.”
And he’s knows it’s harsh, knows it’s almost borderline cruel, but he kind of wants to see what she’ll do if pushed. Wants to see just how thick that plating has gotten, just how stubborn she can be. And if he’s honest with himself he’s half-hoping she’ll crumble, that she’ll give. Go back. He thinks. Get out. He begs. Turn around and run back to Pawnee where people smile and put up with you and love you. There’s only room for one Tin Man in the story. I missed my chance but it could still be you. So go. Run back to the Wizard and get your heart.
For a second she just looks at him, and there’s something in her eyes, something soft and a little bit scared and impossibly young, and he thinks she’s going to do it. And he thinks he’s really going to miss her.
Then she snatches the sheaf of papers from his hand with a truly impressive eye-roll and a groan. “God, I hate you. Why can’t you just be like normal people and avoid me?”
“Believe me, I’m trying.”
But he’s not trying nearly hard enough, and they both know it, and there’s something really wrong about that.
April goes back to her desk and sure enough ten minutes later he’s treated to the sound of incredibly angry typing and a lot of expletives.
He’d whistle if he knew how.
---
Snerling is where everything gets weird.
Not that it wasn’t already weird.
But, you know, weirder.
Which of course for them, means it actually starts to get kind of comfortable.
She deliberately books him a smoking room (he didn’t even know places still had those). He takes her key and makes them trade.
Ben is not even surprised to come back two nights later to find her sitting on his bed in an oversized t-shirt and what look like his boxer-shorts, eating a pint of ‘Chunky Monkey’ straight out of the carton.
He is surprised to find out she wears glasses and for some reason that’s the thing that makes him stop and stare at her far longer than is appropriate (though given his twenty-one year-old subordinate is sitting on his bed in his boxer shorts after leaving him a very explicit post-it this morning about everything she imagines to be wrong with his cock, appropriate is becoming an extremely elastic term).
Finally April tears her eyes away from the TV and gives him one of her patented ‘what is your dysfunction?’ looks. “That room smells like ass. I’m sleeping here tonight. It was supposed to be mine anyway.”
He should kick her out. He knows this, knows that is the logical and adult response here. She shifts to tuck one of her legs under her, and it makes his boxers ride up so high on her thighs that it looks like she’s wearing nothing but that t-shirt, and he can feel something inside him (something those sexually explicit post-its have tugging at for weeks now) shift left of center, and he knows kicking her out is also the safe response here.
The problem is there’s something about April that makes his logic shut down, makes his first instinct be to hold his hand over the flame just a little longer.
Also protesting would just escalate the issue and possibly result in her doing something drastic designed to get him in trouble like running outside and yelling at the top-of-her-lungs, so really he’s got very few choices here. (Or at least that’s what he tells himself because it absolutely cannot be that he is simply this fucking lonely).
Ben walks over, picks up the remote, and changes the channel over to the Cubs game he’d been looking forward to watching in peace.
“Hey!” she protests, “I was watching that.”
“Watching what?”
“The other thing.”
And it strikes him that she’s gotten very comfortable in his room given she only left the office thirty minutes before he did. He crosses his arms and levels her with a knowing look. “Tell me the name of the show and the channel it’s on and I’ll change it back.”
They wind up watching the Cubs game.
Well, he watches it. April puts in the ear-buds of her iPod and turns her music on with a pointedness that tells him this probably used to bother someone in her past. (He’s betting her parents, and it rolls through his head that he should be a lot more bothered by the fact she’s given him equivalent status, and that’s followed close on its heels by the counter thought that no he should not be bothered about having parental status at all). After about twenty-minutes when it apparently sinks in with her that he does not care one iota about whether or not she pays him any attention tonight, she stops being so fucking emphatic about not giving him the time of day and just lays down cross wise on the bottom end of the bed and lets herself focus on listening to the music rather than ignoring him.
It’s the most peaceful he’s ever seen her. Her whole body relaxes with it and something that on anyone else’s face would be the start of a smile plays at her lips and every once in awhile her mouth moves a little with the words.
For awhile they just stay like that, him sitting up at the top of the bed drinking a beer and watching a Cubs game. Her laying at the foot, listening to music, the slowly melting pint of ice-cream forgotten on the floor.
When he mutes one of the commercials to call for a pizza, he can hear her saying something and it takes him a moment to realize she’s singing. Softly, quietly singing.
She doesn’t have the world’s most beautiful voice, but like so much of the rest of her it’s unique and striking. Like stumbling upon a cracked desert cliff after spending all your days in a rain-forest. You know it's harsh and unforgiving, know can’t support life and you’d die if you stayed, but you can’t help but marvel at it a little.
Without thinking he leans forward and pulls out one of her ear-buds.
April’s eyes pop open to stare up at him and her hand flies up to the spot on her ear where his finger-tips brushed her skin. “What?”
It should be sharp. Out of her mouth it should be demanding and bored, and practically scream ‘you are lame and creepy’ (it would have been really helpful if she had at least managed the ‘creepy’ part), instead it comes out soft, and a little startled. And it’s the fact he startled her, actually managed to legitimately surprise her with one impulsive act after nearly five weeks of barely being able to rattle her with anything planned that makes him do what he does next.
Reaching out he brushes his fingertips along her forehead, feathering her bangs. And for a second, just a second April tilts her head back into his touch like a cat, baring the long pale line of her throat and he has the overwhelming impulse to run his tongue along it, bite down hard on that cord of muscle connecting to her shoulder. He wonders exactly what he’d have to do to make her beg.
God, he bets it would take him weeks to discover that, and he’s always loved a challenge.
That’s what it is he thinks. The riddle of her, the puzzle. When he was fifteen his dad gave him a Rubix cube in his stocking at Christmas, an after-thought of a gift, just something to fiddle with while waiting for the grandparents to get there for the main event. Except Ben couldn’t put it down, couldn’t let it go, carried it around with him for weeks until he finally solved it. And for those weeks it occupied nearly his every waking thought. He stared at it, manipulated it, calloused his fingers twisting it this way and that, all in an effort to make it bend to his will.
He is in serious danger of letting April become his new Rubix cube.
And before he can stop himself, the question he’s been wanting to ask for weeks slips out. “What are you running from?”
It’s the wrong move.
Her expression slams shut with such force he swears he can hear the rattle of the drawbridge chain.
“I dropped your toothbrush in the toilet.”
Aaaaand just like that, they’re back.
“Yeah, okay.” Ben sits up and rubs a hand over his face with a sigh. Reaches behind him for the telephone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling for pizza.”
“If you get it with onions, I’ll breathe onion breath on your face all night.”
“Who says I’m ordering any for you?”
---
So if anyone ever told him that sleeping with his twenty-one year-old kind-of assistant (he can still only get her to do about ten-percent of what he asks, but it’s progress) would become a common everyday thing along the lines of doing his laundry or reading the morning paper he would probably have them submit to a drug-test. Because really, have you met him? He is not that type of guy. Even if he wanted to be that type of guy, he is not that type of guy.
Which is okay because he is apparently still not that type of guy.
Because when he says he sleeps with his twenty-one year old assistant, that’s exactly what he means. He sleeps with her. Nothing else.
It should be really weird. Correction. It is really weird. And what makes it even weirder? That they both treat it like it’s not weird at all. Like it’s totally fucking normal.
That’s mostly April’s doing. She’s simply so matter-of-fact about the whole thing from the very first night. After eating three pieces of the pizza (and complaining about the mushrooms the whole time, but not picking them off), she just gets up and walks over to the bathroom, and proceeds to brush her teeth with his toothbrush (which she apparently did not drop in the toilet because if she did, well . . . He makes a mental note to pick up a new one tomorrow anyways). Then comes back out, climbs into bed on the right side (where he usually sleeps) and rolls over without so much as a good night.
When he wakes up in the morning it’s to find her staring at him through a curtain of hair.
“I thought you would drool.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
This is the full extent to which they talk about it.
Still there’s this moment every night, this ten minute stretch when he first lays down and he can smell her hair, feel the weight of her body shifting on the mattress just a few feet away. And during that ten minutes he is incredibly aware that there’s a part of him that desperately wants to just roll over on top of her and press that deceptively lithe body of hers into the mattress and call her bluff (wants it not to be a bluff at all). And he’s aware there’s a part of him that half thinks of her as some kind of annoying kid-sister, that he’s developed this oddly protective streak for her, where for all he’ll push her buttons from sun-up to sun-down and laugh while doing it, when he overheard some twenty-three year-old asshole from the Transportation Department call her a ‘freaky bitch’ in the hallway the other day it took everything in him not to turn around and deck the guy.
And he is incredibly aware that this is not normal.
And for those ten minutes when he first gets into bed, he can’t think about anything else. Can’t stop the insane, giddy hysteria of ‘what the fuck am I doing?’ that makes his muscles almost vibrate with the urge to laugh and cry simultaneously. But it only ever lasts for ten-minutes, and after that ten-minute panic attack (and he thinks that’s the entire reason she does this, just to put him through that ten minutes of hell) something else takes over, something he’s beginning to think of as the ‘April effect’: this heretofore undiscovered part of him that rolls with the punches, that mentally shrugs his shoulders and goes ‘fuck it’. And he just lets himself enjoy being in bed with another human being, the implied connection of it, because honestly he misses that in a way that’s completely separate from any sexual desire.
There are some days when he thinks not wanting to lose that is probably the only thing keeping him from kissing her.
Well that and the fact he’s not entirely sure she won’t simply turn around and castrate him with a butter knife.
---
It goes on that way for about a week.
Nothing else changes. She still leaves him post-its inside his binders. (There was one with a stick figure labeled ‘Loser’ and what might have been a dog that probably would have gotten him fired on the spot.) He still occasionally brings her coffee with profanities written under the sleeve, just to let her know he’s not done playing.
Sometimes he can’t believe Chris hasn’t figured it out yet. Not that he’s entirely certain what ‘it’ is, but he’s pretty sure that from any angle you view it, whatever he and April are doing violates Chris’s rules (god knows it’s a scandal waiting to happen at the very least and Chris hates a scandal). But then again maybe it’s not such a stretch. At work he and April are still always one step away from mutually assured destruction, and Chris is not a guy who can see anything beneath the surface of a conflict like that. He just sees the conflict and wants it to stop.
Which is how Ben winds up with April shadowing him while he does the departmental evaluation meetings because “I just know if she gets a chance to see how dedicated you are to your work, she’ll appreciate you more. Also, you know, smile at her a little, maybe take her out to lunch and ask about her ambitions. I bet you’ll be a great team.”
If you can think of a more uncomfortable meeting than letting him take apart your department’s budget expenditures piece by over-inflated piece while April stares at you like she’s just waiting to see how long it will take you to cry, Ben would honestly love to hear it.
In case you’re wondering, the longest someone goes without crying that day is fifty-five minutes. The shortest is four. (That is, by the way, a new record for him. Really he’s very proud.)
When that meeting disintegrates and the assistant director of Snerling’s library department runs out of the room sobbing, Ben leans back in his chair and presses the heels of his palms to eyes with a sigh. “That went well.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Oh for the love of- He drops his hands and looks over at her. April’s eyes have narrowed to tiny slits, and he can feel her glare cutting into him like razor wire, and really? She’s really judging his people skills, here? Then he thinks about the woman who just left in tears-two years past her pension and smelling like baked goods and Benjay. Yes, he thinks, she’s really doing this.
“Yeah, because you’re such a ray of sunshine. I’m sure having you over there doing your Wednesday Adams impersonation really put everyone at ease.”
“Whatever, you’re still an asshole.”
He snorts a mirthless laugh, and starts to gather up his things. “Okay then. Glad we got that cleared up.”
And he’s just at the door only a few seconds away from freedom when April speaks up again.
“Did you make Leslie cry?”
At the mention of Leslie’s name, it’s like something’s reached in, grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. And for a second he can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t do anything other than stand there and hate himself.
He closes his eyes and forcefully tears away from the attack. Beats it back with a viciousness that would probably surprise even April.
Yanking open the door, he grinds out, “Get the meeting notes on my desk before you leave tonight, or I’ll have Chris to send you back to Indy.”
Leaves the room without looking back.
What are you running from?
---
April drops two pages of typed notes on his desk at six that evening without a word.
They’re flawless. Not a single profanity. Not a misspelled word or a comma out of place.
It feels like she’s yelling at him.
---
That night when he gets back to his motel room, Ben hesitates outside the door, tries to decide if he thinks she’s going to be there or not. Tries to decide if he wants her to be there or not. Can’t quite make up his mind.
She’s there.
And she’s not.
There’s a routine to how this goes. April gets here before him. April wears his boxers and drinks the last of his beer and turns the TV to anything other than the baseball game and then proceeds to hide the remote. April sprawls across the bottom of his bed and messes up his papers and generally ignores him until she’s hungry, at which point she won’t leave him alone.
Tonight however she’s still in her work-clothes, sitting at the top of the bed, knees pulled up against her chest in a tight ball of anger. She doesn’t look up when he comes in, doesn’t scowl or roll her eyes or anything, just continues staring straight ahead at nothing. The TV is already turned to a baseball game and the remote sits on his pillow.
April has never been more considerate.
It’s awful.
He hates it. It’s like he’s beneath her contempt. Like she’s so disgusted she can’t be bothered to even punish him because that would involve acknowledging his existence. And it’s strange but in the loss of her, the hundred constant tiny irritations of her, he realizes that she’s been the thing keeping him to together, the release valve that lets him siphon off just a little the pressure, of the self-loathing, lets it manifest itself into something bizarre and fucked-up and more than a little self-destructive. But as long as it’s out there, as long as it’s directed at her, it keeps everything inside him from building up, from pressing against his walls until he fractures.
Which is probably why he starts pushing back, turning her consideration on its head, just trying to get a rise out of her. Any kind of rise.
He turns the channel to one those horrible ‘reality’ shows she likes to mock everyone in.
April puts on her iPod.
A little while later when he gets up to go to the bathroom and change into sweats, Ben lays out a clean pair of boxers and a t-shirt for her at the foot of the bed.
She sleeps in her clothes.
The next morning he leaves her meeting notes on her desk with the word “Outstanding!!!” written at the top in bright red marker.
She hangs them up like a certificate of commendation.
He invites her to lunch in front of Chris. “We can talk about where you want to be in five years.”
April gives him in a bright, fake sunshine smile and says "Great." She brings a notebook to lunch and three different colors of pens and takes copious notes.
It feels like she’s mocking Leslie.
Ben wants to reach across the table and strangle her.
Halfway back to the office, while April is still chattering on about her “ambitions” and her “love of public service” he jerks the car over to the side of the road so hard her shoulder slams into the passenger-side window.
Reaching across the console, he rips the pages of brightly colored notes off her pad, and crumples them into a ball. Tosses it out the window.
“But I need those!” April protests, “They were color coded.”
Before he even knows what he’s doing he’s got her by the shoulders fingers digging-in hard, shakes her a little. “Stop it. Just fucking stop it!”
Her false demeanor dissolves and finally, finally, the April he knows stares back up at him, face flat, eyes hard.
“Did you make Leslie cry?”
“Son-of-a-”
“Did you?”
He sighs, relents, because she’s obviously not going to let this go, and he’s tired now, just so desperately tired. “No. I definitely did not make Leslie cry.”
She chews on that for a moment, then adds, “I don’t remember you being such an asshole in Pawnee.”
“Yeah, well. That was Pawnee, wasn’t it?”
Something flickers across April’s face at that, and he can’t quite decipher it, but he files it away. Feels like if he could just get that one piece the whole puzzle of her would unlock.
“You don’t think Leslie cried when you left?”
Ben can feel his mouth twist in a pained sardonic smile. “I doubt it. I really, really doubt it.”
“Do you think you would have stayed if she’d cried? If she’d begged you and said she was sorry for anything she did, do you think you wouldn’t have left? That you’d, you know, not be such a loser.”
“I-“ He squeezes his eyes shut, realizes somehow this conversation has veered into new and unfamiliar territory. “Wait- what are we talking about now?”
April tries to shrug his hands off her shoulders, but he holds on. “April?”
She whips her head around and glares at him, “Nothing. Geez, we’re talking nothing okay. Just that you’re such a lame-ass and your face is so stupid it’s like painful to look at it. And-“
“And?”
“And you- I-” And for once April’s endless supply of insults seems to run dry, he can see the frustration and anger mounting on her face, and he really should be prepared for what happens next, but he’s not at all.
With a muffled cry in the back of her throat, April reaches up, fists her hands in his hair and drags his mouth down onto to hers.
It’s an all out assault, a brutal attack, punishing and angry and needy. And probably if he was still the man he’d been in Pawnee or even the man he’d been before Pawnee, he’d push her away, he’d obey his better angels and not take advantage of the emotionally distraught woman (girl) having an obvious breakdown in the passenger seat of his car, over something he doesn’t entirely understand.
But he’s not that man anymore. And that’s at least fifty-percent because of her. She’s molded him, warped him, turned him into her creature.
He reaches over and unhooks her seatbelt.
April doesn’t miss a beat, climbs across the console in an elegant movement that feels almost predatory in its expediency and straddles him, rocking against his erection in a blatant invitation that’s really a command.
Even as he’s bringing one hand up to massage her breast, enjoying the way she presses into it, the fact he can make her just a little less impassive, he can't help but know this is crazy. That the fact he’s even thinking of doing this-of fucking his assistant in his car, in the middle of the afternoon, on an open stretch of highway, just outside the town he’s in the midst of hacking to pieces-is proof he has a self-destructive streak a mile wide.
Then it doesn’t matter because April’s got his pants undone and her hand is closing around his cock, even as she’s leaning forward to whisper in his ear, “Stop being such a fuck-up and just do it, just fuck me already.”
It’s the insult that does it. Not because of any of kind of need to be humiliated or chastised or anything, but because it means he’s got her back, that she’s done with whatever she’s been doing for the last twenty-four hours and they can go back to screwing with each other on a regular basis.
And maybe even add new tricks to their repertoire.
She’s wearing a skirt for once, something dark and almost knee length, with a little white button-down and a long yellow cardigan. Her attempt at a ‘professional’ look that she did just to get under his skin. He shoves the skirt up to her waist hoping (insanely) that it holds the wrinkles, and runs the pad of his thumb over the damp cotton of her underwear. It’s the pair with the Smurfs that he keeps finding in random places around the room. Briefly it skitters across his mind to wonder exactly how long she’s been thinking about this, and then April is guiding his hand to shove her underwear to the side and lowering herself onto him and he’s not thinking about anything at all.
There’s nothing romantic about it. There’s barely anything nice about it. They don’t gaze into each other’s eyes or whisper encouraging words. It’s fast and frantic and sloppy. April keeps her hands fisted in his hair using the sharp points of her elbows on his shoulders for leverage, and his fingers bite into the angles of her hipbones so hard she will probably bruise. (It’s disturbing how much he looks forward to the possibility of checking on that tonight.) And when she whispers things to him, it’s little impatient demands like “Come on, already” and “Harder, God,” and he says things back like “Shut-up” and “You’re not helping.”
When it’s done, April climbs off him with all the ceremony and self-consciousness of someone who just borrowed a cup of sugar, tugs down her skirt and looks at the clock, then back over at him with a little smirk.
“You’re going to be late for the meeting with the Parks Department. Chris will be pissed he has to do it.”
Ben drops his forehead to the steering wheel and bites down on a strained, hysterical laugh. “I’ll live.”
When they get back to the Snerling municipal building, April drops the notebook and multi-colored pens in the trash can outside.
It’s the last time they ever talk about Leslie.
---
- part 2 -