Luckily, Pete does not seem in a state to notice. He spends the subway ride hunched forward, head down to keep his face hidden, all but curled in on himself. It makes Ben want to hiss and spit at everyone who so much as glances at him, but also, in a horrible, contradictory way, to go soft and soothing, cocoon Pete in a brief but beautiful world a little less punishing than this one. At very least, it would be nice to give in to the urge to puta hand on Pete’s back, to rub in long, comforting strokes until some of the tension bled away from his shoulders.
Ben doesn’t do that, of course. It would be weird; it would be inappropriate. But he thinks about it, so hard he half expects Pete to see it written on his face, the whole way to the Upper West Side.
When they escape the bowels of the MTA and surface, Pete’s still grayed-out and mostly silent, so Ben simply leads him to the building, welcomes him inside, gestures for him to take a seat on the couch. Pete does, murmuring thanks and then dropping his head into his hands, groaning softly. As he has several times in the last half hour, he murmurs, clearly to himself, “Why did Idothat? What was Ithinking?”
After a moment, Roux, who is usually wary of strangers and sometimes wary of even Ben, comes creeping out from Ben’s bedroom. She looks assessingly at Pete for a long moment, and then at Ben, as if to say, “You know about the sad guy on the couch, man?” Ben, feeling silly about it, nods subtly to her; then, to his amazement, she leaps onto the couch, steps gracefully under Pete’s arm, and settles comfortably in his lap. After a second, she starts purring.
“Oh!” Pete moves, but carefully, clearly not wanting to startle or unseat her. “Hi, uh?—?”
“Roux,” Ben says, staring at her in shock. Then, seeing Pete lift a hand to pet her, he hastily adds, “Listen, I wouldn’t, she doesn’t usually like… Oh.” Transfixed in spite of himself, Ben watches as Pete scratches Roux on the back of the head, and then under the chin, and then along the ruff of her neck, all actions that would get Ben mauled six days out of ten. “Wow. I guess—never mind.”
“She’s a nice cat,” Pete says, stroking her absently. She gives Ben a smug look.
“She’s not,” Ben says, still staring at her. “But she does seem to like you, so. What do I know? Look, you wanted a drink, right? I have—uh,” Ben, abruptly remembering that he does not drink very much and these last few weeks have been an unfortunate, booze-soaked exception, winces. “Well, um. Actually. As I think about it. We might be looking at, like, a really old bottle of vermouth, or a couple of beers from the back of the fridge?”
Pete laughs. It’s not what Ben would call a hearty laugh—it’s thin, and wan, and sounds like he’s forcing it slightly—but it’s better than nothing. “I’ll take a fridge beer, man. Even after that, I don’t think I’m desperate enough to drink your vermouth. Why do you just have vermouth?”
“I’m not usually a big drinker,” Ben admits, unearthing two beers that have surely been in there at least a year. “But Idomake a chicken dish with vermouth that I really like, so I try to keep it on hand. Usually, I’d have red wine, too, because my mother would kill me if I tried to make half her dishes without it, but I’m out right now. My folks’ll probably send me back with some when I go home for Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks.” He sits down next to Pete on the couch, passing him one of the cans, and adds, “If that tastes disgusting, don’t say I didn’t warn you; I think I purchased it during a previous presidential administration.”
“I didn’t know you were going home for Thanksgiving,” Pete says, cracking his beer and taking what looks like an evaluative sip. He shrugs, offers, “Tastes fine to me,” and then adds, “Michigan, right? That’s home for you? Do you go back for Christmas, too?”
“Nah,” Ben says, trying to sound cool and casual, and not at all like his heart is beating faster because Pete remembered where he’s from. Love, Ben has realized, is above all elsesoembarrassing, but knowing that doesn’t seem to help. “Christmas is traditionally a disaster back home? So I prefer to swing by in November, say hello, eat some turkey, and dip back out of town before things start getting tense.” Feeling like he might as well offer a little more context, since Pete is clearly still teetering on the edge of the canyon of despair, he adds, “My dad’s Jewish, and my mom’s Catholic, and they always tried to do all of it, you know? But in the end, what they really cared about was the restaurant, and each always blamed the other’s holiday for getting in the way, and it—never brought out the best in anyone. It’s easier, like this.”
“Ahh,” Pete says, and sips his beer. “My family is pretty chill about Christmas, but Easter—that’s a bloodbath,” and Ben laughs, encouraged to hear him telling a joke, until he realizes that it isn’t one.
The conversation of holiday family grudges carries them for a few minutes, but Pete’s burst of distracted semi-decent cheer seems to fade away as they go. Eventually, Ben realizes why, but it’s not until Pete barks out a humorless laugh and says, “God, they’re all going to have seen it. My dad, my sisters, my sisters’ husbands; when I turn my phone back on, it’s going to be calls and messages and ‘How could you throw water on a grease fire,’ and ‘Don’t you know how this makes us look,’ and—” He cuts himself off, clearly frustrated, and then admits, “You know what? Just once, just one time, I’d like to not be theembarrassingone. The one who makes everyoneelsesay things like, ‘Wouldn’t want to be you, Petey.’ JustonceI’d love to be able to say that to someone else!”
Ben drums his fingers on his knee for a moment, considering this. Then, without saying a word, he stands up, walks to his office, picks up his laptop from his desk, types and scrolls for a moment, and then takes a deep breath.
When he returns to the living room and sets the laptop down in front of Pete, Ben says, “I want you to know, okay, that I would not show you this if the circumstances were not so extreme, and that, upon having shown it to you, we willnever speak of it again. Do you understand me?”
Pete’s brow furrows in confusion. “What?”
“Do you understand me or not?”
“I mean,” Pete starts, “I do, but what are we?—”
Despairingly, Ben says, “I don’t think it’ll take that long for you to figure it out,” and hits play. The screen fills with his teenaged self in a blue Starfleet uniform, a lot of blue eyeshadow, and thick, Vulcan-style eyebrows he’d drawn on with his mother’s eyeliner pencil.
“Oh myGod,” Pete breathes, sitting up in sudden, rapt attention, “is this?—”
“Yes,” Ben snaps, mortified but willing to do anything that pulls the miasma of anguish from Pete’s expression. “It is my teenage directorial debut, and if you tellanyonewe work with that you’ve seen it, or that a copy still exists?—”
“I won’t, I won’t,” Pete says, flapping a hand at him. “Shhh, I’m watching.” And Ben, with effort, goes silent. Then, with somewhat more effort, he, too, turns his head and forces himself to watch his life’s most embarrassing work.
He’s surprised and somewhat pleased to find, as the minutes tick on, that it’s not as mortifying as he thought. Thecontentis awful, of course, but it’s fun, watching it with Pete. Ben can see the humor in it, from this vantage point, in a way he couldn’t when he was fifteen, or even twenty-five. But here, as he approaches thirty, the spotty, wildly overeager teenager yelling out sound effects is somewhat hilarious, and Ben finds himself more amused than he would have expected by his antics.
Pete, for his part, tries manfully not to laugh for the first five or six minutes of viewing. He loses the battle during aparticularly overacted moment, letting out a single shout of laughter that becomes a peal when the next take is a brief, extreme, and obviously unintentional closeup of one of Ben’s ears.
By minute fifteen, they are both absolutely howling with mirth, clutching at each other for support, having scared Roux off in a huff some time ago.
“What,” Pete gasps, barely able to get the words out, “what are you doing to that pillow?”
“I’m… Oh, God. Well, I’m supposed to be, uh? Wrestling it? I see now that that’s not what it looks like.” This sets Pete off laughing so hard Ben’s a little afraid he’s going to choke on it, and, chuckling through it himself, he offers the best defense he can, which is: “I mean, listen, okay,youtry to wrestle a pillow?—”
“Oh, I don’t have to,” Pete says, gesturing at the screen. “Because you’ve helpfully showed me exactly what it would look like—oh myGod, are you using a banana as agun?”
“It’s a phaser,” Ben says as loftily as possible, “and it’s set to stun,” and then dissolves into hysteria again the second Pete catches his eye.
