“In front of my coworkers?—”
“Oh my God, Pete, come on, justlookat him. It’s soobviousthat he’s?—”
“Will youshut up!” Pete nearly snarls this, so emphatic and freaked out that Ben all but physically jumps.
Chris, too, seems taken aback, his eyes widening before he narrows them, crossing his arms over his chest. Whoever he is to Pete—though Ben thinks, grimly, that the answer there is looking increasingly likely to be “boyfriend”—he obviously didn’t care for that at all, and his voice is very cold when he says, “Fine, then. I will. I’m going to go enjoy the party on my own, if that’s the way you’re going to be, but wewillbe discussing this later. I’ll try not to ruin your reputation in the meantime.” He rolls his eyes on this bitterly sarcastic last, and then, managing to imbue the word with a vast reserve of icy bitchiness that Ben both fears and respects, he adds, “Blumenthal,” before he turns and walks off.
Ben doesn’t quite know what to make of it, but he knows he doesn’t like it.
But before he can ask, he and Pete are being approached by a little knot of people with a certain—energy. Ben has encountered this a few times in the last month or so, only ever when he’s out with Pete; now and then, they’re starting to get recognized. Or,well, Pete is starting to get recognized, anyway. But sometimes, if Ben is with him, a particularly eagle-eyed fan will realize who Ben is, either from his voice or from the wacky credit sequence featuring embarrassing photos of everyone who worked on the episode. Ben had started slapping that in at the end of every edit after the first video, and he hasn’t had any cause to regret it until now.
Well, okay, last week someonedidapproach them and ask for both of their autographs while they were having lunch in the Formica cafeteria. That had been a completely wild experience, although Ben thinks he handled it better than Pete did. Ben, at least, had responded with some recognizable words in the English language; Pete had said something that sounded to Ben like, “Squirgle,” and then, “Whoop!” and then hared off out of the room, leaving his lunch behind. When Ben had texted him,????Pete had not replied for hours, and then only said,sorry, think i ate a weird breakfast burrito or something, which was so obviously a lie that Ben could not think of a polite way to call him out on it.
It does suggest that whatever is about to happen is not going to go well, and Ben finds himself half reaching for Pete’s arm before he corrects the impulse sharply. After all, his boyfriend, or whatever Chris is, probably wouldn’t like it.
“It’s them!” someone in the group hisses excitably; someone else gasps, “You have toshowthem!” and then, before Ben can begin to brace himself properly, the gaggle seems to spit out two young men, dressed in familiar clothes.
It takes Ben a second to place the outfits. The shorter guy, in the dark, curly wig, is wearing a black-and-gray flannel shirt that looks a lot like the one Ben himself wears three times a week and holding a fake prop computer; the taller man is dressed head to toe in the kitchen blacks Ben has been insisting Pete film in sincethe Heaps for Dinner video, with a comically large splatter of fake sauce laid across the top.
“They’re…us,” Ben says, blankly. Then, because even having one of the most surreal moments of his entire life, he doesn’t want to risk looking like a total idiot, he adds, “I mean—aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” the taller guy says sheepishly; the shorter one, the one dressed as Ben, is blushing crimson and staring at the floor. Ben thinks vaguely that maybe he’s method acting, and if so, that he deserves the Halloween Oscar—that is more or less exactly what he, himself, would like to be doing right now. He can’t bear to look at Pete as his be-sauced doppelganger continues, “We love the videos, guys, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?”
“I’ve heard that.” Pete sounds like he’s containing hysteria, but whether positive or negative Ben is not at all sure. “So I guess. Thank you?”
“Anytime,” says Not Pete. “Can we get a photo?”
“I,” Ben says, meaning to continue with, perhaps, “don’t think so,” or, “would rather you didn’t,” or something else along those lines. But he doesn’t have time; both men are crowding up against them and snapping the selfie a second later, then shouting, “Thanks!” as they retreat, their tittering crowd traipsing after them.
“Good Lord,” Ben says, blinking, as the group vanishes into the crowd as if it was only a horrible mirage. “Was that—am I awake? Am I hallucinating? Is there…peyote in those short rib pierogies? Because, admittedly, okay, I ate like six of them, but if I’d known they were full of hallucinogens, I would have stopped at four, tops.”
This, Ben knows, is not helpful. He is babbling; babbling, in his experience, is almost never helpful, and almost always even total silence would be better. But he’s forced himself to look,wincing, at Pete’s face, and it is frozen in an expression Ben’s never seen: a stone wall, rigid with tension, the veins unusually visible along the side of his neck. It seems to pull the words out of Ben against his will, like salt leaching bitterness from an eggplant, or sugar relaxing strawberries into a loose, lazy sauce.
“I need a drink,” Pete says, eventually. His voice is flat, empty; Ben swallows.
“You have a drink,” he points out.
Pete looks from Ben to the drink in his hand, cocks his head, considers. After a moment: “So I do.”
Pete lifts the drink, which is, in terms of information Ben can tell by looking at it, in a medium-sized glass and brown; Pete drinks the drink. When Ben, not an hour ago, had been miserably drowning his own despair, he’d been doing it in small, determined sips of a clearer beverage that had contained quite a lot of soda. Pete does not drink like that. Pete downs the whole glass in one long, unbroken swallow, his throat working rather distractingly, without pausing for so much as a breath. Ben has never once been able to take a sip of anything that wasn’t significantly watered down without coughing—he has shamed his father for years, being drunk under the table at restaurant parties even by Renata. But Pete throws his drink back with the slightly unsettling ease of the long-time chef who came up in an era where you had to learn to hold your liquor if you wanted to keep pace. It’s impressive. Worrying, but impressive.
Pete winces when he’s finished, wipes the back of his mouth as he says, “The man has awful taste in booze.” Then, his face sliding back into that same stony expression, he adds, “Need, uh—another drink. Sorry.”
“Me too,” Ben says, his brow furrowing. “If you want, we could?—”
“The bathroom,” Pete says, slightly wildly, and then he’s off, slipping between party guests and disappearing into the crowd.
“Crap,” Ben mutters, craning his neck trying to see where Pete’s gone, and then giving it up almost immediately as futile. Figuring he might as well, he does go ahead and get another drink, although this time, already one round deep, he allows himself the luxury of something tart and sweet off the night’s specialty drink list. It has some ridiculous name, which Ben forgets as soon as he orders it. It is served up to him in quite a large glass, and after a single sip Ben knows it is a beautiful, delicious, perfectly balanced mistake; it doesn’t taste a bit like alcohol, just like lime and elderberry and very faintly of juniper. It will punish him tomorrow—the hangover will be brutal, a thrashing—but he figures he’s already in it, so he takes several more sips, and finds a certain resolve hardening within him as he swallows.
Drifting, as ever, to an open spot against the wall, Ben decides slightly drunkenly to formulate a plan. He has to think like Pete. He knows Pete, right? Sort of, anyway? He didn’t know that Pete had aboyfriend, okay, that’s not great. But, counterpoint, Pete’s boyfriend probably doesn’t know that Pete’s left eye starts twitching when he’s about to beef something up in the middle of a four-hour cooking shoot, so who’s really in the dark here?
Ben takes another steadying sip of his drink—he has to focus. He’s Pete; he’s thinking like Pete. Where would Pete go, if he was kind of, not to put too fine a point on it, losing it a little? Probably he doesn’t want to be around people, because he does seem to run off, whenever he can, at least in Ben’s experience. Also, Ben himself wouldn’t want to be around people if his brain was throwing up options like “Squirgle” as words, either, so he thinks the logic follows.
This is a party full of people; there is nowhere at this party without people; so Pete has left the party, at least temporarily. He could be on another floor, but Ben has to assume and hopethat they’re locked off, or otherwise closed to guests. He could have gone home, but Chris is still here—naturally, Ben can seehimacross the room, merrily chatting with someone dressed as a box of Cheerios—so by the rules of basic logic, Pete’s still in the vicinitysomewhere. Maybe he went out front? But there isn’t anywhere to hide out there, since the facade opens right out onto West Twenty-Third Street, and costumed people are still spilling into and out of the party through the main doors.
A single word occurs to Ben, bright and clear and obvious, the refuge of unhappy city-dwellers the world over:roof. He makes his way, a little tipsily, out of the main party and over to the elevator bank he passed on entry, hits a button, does an embarrassing little fist pump when the doors open, which he’s very glad no one is around to witness, and steps inside. He is pleased to see a button labeledRooftop Terrace, and even more pleased when, upon pressing it, it lights up and stays lit, and the doors ding shut.
Ben is whisked up to a glass-fronted elevator bay with doors that, as advertised, open onto a large rooftop terrace. It’s obvious this warehouse has been here many decades, maybe even centuries, and has lived many lives; there are brick archways leftover from a time that Ben could bother to place, if he cared more, was less drunk. As it is, he sips at his beverage and follows his hunch, wandering vaguely across the open rooftop until?—
