When they do make it to the lobby, Ben notices, out of the corner of his eye, that his suitcase is sitting up against one wall, out of the way of foot traffic. He considers stopping to grab it, but then Pete is crowding him back into the otherwise empty elevator; Ben decides he can live with it, honestly, if one of his neighbors steals a third of his wardrobe. Who needs clothes? Ben certainly doesn’t, not for what he and Pete are about to do, and in this frame of mind, he’s got one hand halfway down Pete’s pants, still kissing him like it’s his last hour on earth and he intends to make it count, when the elevator doors open with a ding on his floor.
The ding doesn’t do much to distract Ben, honestly. But the sharp voice snapping, “Oh, God, I didn’t need to see that!” manages it, and he whips his head around to make horrified eye contact with his across-the-hall neighbor, Deena. Deena is in her late fifties, the proud owner of more cats than Ben thinks her lease strictly allows, and possessed of a surplus of personality, but a deficit of tact. True to form, she clutches slightly at her bathrobe, the bag of garbage she was obviously en route to depositing dangling judgmentally from her hands, as she says, “Now every sound I hear tonight, I’m going to think it’s you two…well, doing it! Boinking! Thanks a lot!” And she wheels around and storms off, trash still in hand, throwing over her shoulder as a parting shot: “This is totally going to throw off Roast Beef’s vibe with our animal communicator tomorrow, if you evencare. He’s very sensitive to…ugh,lustful vibrations.”
Ben and Pete both manage to keep straight faces as they proceed down the hall, somehow. Maybe it’s by dint of not looking at each other at all; certainly Ben, at least, is not looking at Pete, and furiously biting his own lip to keep a shout of laughter inside. He unlocks the door as fast as he can, and the second they’re inside, both Ben and Pete crack up, gasping and wheezing for breath.
Ben tries, for a moment, to gather himself, but all he manages to get out is, “Did she say the cat is sensitive to—lustful vibrations?—”
“Doingit,” Pete howls in reply, shaking his head. “Boinking?—”
“Thanks a lot!” Ben says, and then loses himself to hysteria, listing forward into Pete’s body as he shakes with laughter. Pete, still cackling himself, throws an easy arm around Ben’s shoulders, and for a moment they stand there together, letting the mirth flow through them.
But as their chuckling dies down, they both seem to realize, in the same moment, that they have made it: They are safely inside Ben’s apartment, where no one can arrest them for committing lewd acts in public, or accuse them of disturbing Roast Beef with their wanton ways.
Grinning down at Ben, Pete tightens his grip as he says, “Well? What do you say? Should we give her the show she’s expecting, do you think? Shedidalready thank us.”
“Practically rude not to,” Ben agrees, smiling wide and embarrassingly happy up into Pete’s face.
The communication between them becomes more physical than verbal at this point—it’s all pressure and suggestion, stumbling steps towards the bedroom, clothes being peeled off and tossed away without so much as a glance as to where they’ll land. Ben hears something fall, at one point, as he chucks Pete’s T-shirt somewhere to the left; it doesn’t matter. He’ll figure itout tomorrow, or a week from now, or whenever Pete decides to be done with him: Ben can’t be the one left to make that call. It’d be years, probably—they’d starve to death—but Ben’s increasingly sure with every passing minute that it’d be worth it.
Sometime later, after thoroughly exhausting one another, briefly napping, and then waking up ravenous around 4:00 a.m., Pete and Ben order a pizza. It’s New York, so this pizza shows up quickly in spite of the hour, although it does arrive in the hands of maybe the most stoned person Ben has ever encountered. Pete hides a smile behind his hand when the guy asks if they mind if he takes a slice of pie for the road, and then doesn’t bother to hide his fondness when Ben says, “I mean—yeah, why not,” and offers him one.
It’s a good pizza, even minus a slice, and as they sit on Ben’s bed eating it, Pete explains about Miranda.
“She actually kind of…got me this job? In the sense that she straight-updidget me my original job at Formica.” Pete shakes his head, and then laughs and thumps Ben on the back when he chokes on a mouthful of pepperoni in surprise. “Sorry, probably that was a between-bite disclosure, but. I was. Uh. Well—are you sure you want to hear this? It’s a pretty long story.”
Ben raises a single eyebrow at him and then makes an expansive hand gesture, one meant to encompass all that’s happened between them as, apparently, a consequence of this woman’s involvement in Pete’s life. “I’m very, very sure, Pete.”
“Okay,” Pete says, and sighs. “So this is going to seem like a tangent, but it’s not one: The summer after high school, I started dating this guy, Neil. And Neil was…” Pete’s face falls into complicated expression, one Ben can’t quite read, before he says, “Neil was…a lot. There were ways in which the two of us were compatible, I guess, but mostly he was, uh.” Running a handthrough his hair, obviously uncomfortable with every option he considers, Pete finally says, “I think maybe. Inconsistent? Is the best word for it?”
“Is it the best word?” Ben can’t help but ask, his ears pricking at the shift in Pete’s tone, the uncharacteristic hesitation. “Or is it the most generous one?”
Pete makes a face like he’s bitten a lemon and doesn’t answer the question, which is answer enough. Ben contains a wince as Pete continues, “He was hard to describe, let’s just put it like that. But we were together, on and off, for… God, I don’t even totally remember, now. It’s all a little blurred, those years—it was always so volatile, you know? Hard to keep track of the particulars. It was more than half of my twenties, though, for sure.” He sighs again, more heavily this time, and looks down at his hands. “We met at the restaurant I worked at back then—he was waiting tables to cover expenses his last few years of school—and it was fine, sort of, for a while. We fought a lot, broke up a few times, but usually we got along well enough. And he liked my family, and my friends, and I liked his, and when it was good, it reallydidfeel like it was all working. We got a place together, even. But then he got this Wall Street job, and he started wanting to, uh. To party a lot harder than I was interested in partying.”
“I…see,” Ben says, and winces. He’s had his own run-ins with the sort of hard-partying finance guys he thinks Pete’s describing, mostly as the direct result of checking Grindr in certain parts of the city, and it’s never gone particularly well. “Coke, then? Or…?”
“Oh, it started there,” Pete says, with an uncomfortable shrug. “And if it had stopped there, I mean—well, I still wouldn’t have loved it, to be honest, but. It’s not like the restaurant industry is so clean and sober, right? So in the beginning, when it was just him doing a bump or two at a party, I figured: Whatever. He’s an adult. It’s not my job to look after him, andI know plenty of people who indulge like that every once in a while, and…” In a smaller voice, one that sounds ashamed, Pete admits, “I just really didn’t want to have to fight about it? I know that sounds horrible, but I was already so tired of fighting with him.”
Ben briefly resists the urge to put a soothing hand on Pete’s back, and then has the glorious, crowing realization that he doesn’thaveto resist that impulse, and does it with perhaps slightly more gusto than is strictly necessary. “I don’t think it sounds horrible, Pete. I think it sounds…really understandable, honestly.”
Pete smiles at him, but it’s a queasy smile. “I’m not sure you’ll still think that when you find out what happened.”
“Oh, I’ll take that bet happily,” Ben says, not even having to pause to think. With even this much information, he’s fairly sure he can see the shape of this story in the marks it left behind on Pete and the people around him, and he doubts very much Pete did anything truly wrong. “You’re on. What do you want to say—ten bucks? Or maybe it’s easier if loser buys the coffee tomorrow morning.”
“Assuming you still want to have coffee with me in the morning,” Pete mutters. But then, louder, he says, “God, I have to just tell you right now or I never will, so: He started going out more and more, and partying more and more, and we kept breaking up, and making up, and breaking up. That was…hard, because we were on a lease together and neither one of us could afford a place alone, and Neil was out more and more, using more and more. It was just coke at first, but pretty soon it was meth and GHB and God knows what else. He got…erratic.” Pete gives Ben a desperate look, a look that breaks Ben’s heart; it’s like he thinks Ben is going to call him a bastard and kick him out if he’s not generous enough to this man who, reading between the lines, clearly treated Pete quite poorly for the bulk of theirrelationship. “You have to believe me: I did try to get him to go to rehab, visit a clinic, talk to someone, anything. I drove him to a fancy rehab center upstate, even—I had to wait until the day after my twenty-fifth birthday so I’d be old enough to rent a car. But when we got there, he wouldn’t go in, and he never wanted to go in, and for a year or two, I really tried, I promise I did?—”
“Hey,” Ben says quietly, rubbing his back and then figuring he might as well go for broke and pulling him into a hug. “I can hear you freaking out, you know. I was specially trained like a Navy SEAL by watching you do it over and over for—and this is an estimate—eight million hours of footage.” When Pete doesn’t laugh, Ben lowers his voice and, more seriously, says, “Pete—come on. Of course I believe you. Take a breath.”
Miserably, Pete says, “But Ibroke upwith him! Not just in a fight, or for a month or whatever; for real. I told him to lose my number, I moved out, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was all so—somessedup, all the time. I mean, God, he came to my niece’s quinceañera and called my sister abitch. To herface! In front of my aunts and uncles and everyone! She just asked him if he wanted a bottle of water! And at the apartment…” Pete shudders at the memory, and Ben shifts them both, they’re lying back together on the pillows. “It was just…awful. It was always, always awful. So I left, and I moved back in with my dad, which ended up being a good thing because it turned out he shouldn’t have been living alone anyway, except that after that Neil—I guess Neil kind of. Bottomed out.” So quietly Ben can barely hear him even inches away, he whispers, “Nobody’s heard from him in years, Ben. He…he disappeared into his habit. Fell off the face of the earth. For all I know he’s—” He shakes his head, unable to finish the sentence, holding himself taut as a wire in Ben’s arms. “You can tell me to leave now, if you want. I’d understand.”
Ben glares, briefly, up at the ceiling; his rage at the world has to go somewhere. Then, as kindly as he can, he says, “That’s okay, Pete. You can hit the ATM for my ten dollars in the morning, or we can just go with the ‘loser buys the coffee’ plan. I’ve got plenty of flaws, but I’m not a sore winner.”
There’s a beat, and then Pete pushes himself up on one elbow to stare down at Ben in shock. “Really?” he demands, sounding breathless. “You’re not—you don’t think I’m—like an extremely horrible person? I mean, Ilefthim and he?—”
“It sounds like he wasn’t very nice to you, Pete,” Ben says, reaching up to push Pete’s hair, flopped forward and messy, out of his eyes. “Even before he started going down that heavy road. And obviously it’s awful, and I’m so sorry it happened to you, and to him, and I hope he’s all right, wherever he is. But. It sounds to me like he was going to do what he was going to do? I don’t think you staying with him, miserable, would have changed much, in the end.”
“But maybe I could have… Oh, I don’t know.” Pete shrugs, helplessly, down at Ben. “Helped him. Fixed him. Something.”
Ben frowns up at him for a moment, considering. Finally, carefully, he says, “I don’t…really think it works like that? You can’t fix other people—they have to do that for themselves. All you can do is support them, if they’ll let you, and try to patch up your own gaps in the meantime.” He shrugs, both heartened and saddened by the hope in Pete’s eyes, because it reveals how badly he’s felt about this, and for how long. “And you’re not responsible for his choices, Pete. They werehischoices.”
