Chapter Text
Sunday.
The rain began on the highway; a last, late storm to wash away the season. The weather had turned; the road gleamed, reflecting the trees, and the air sang with the scent of water on soil.
Rey gripped the steering wheel, watched the lines of the road rush up towards them and then disappear beneath the car. Her skin prickled with the breeze, breaking in where Rose had rolled down the passenger-side window; and there were echoes, too, of touches that were twelve hours old. Rey felt light; like there were a hundred colourful balloons attached to her shoulders, and she’d float through the roof of the rented Peugeot at any moment.
Rose, in contrast, slouched in the other seat. Her sunglasses reflected the road, two opaque echoes of the Taconic in all its pot-holed, badly maintained glory. “Do you think they’ll sell stomach pumps at the gas station?”
“For your hangover? No. Probably just Alka-Seltzer.”
Rose groaned, and slouched down further.
The gas station, when they pulled off the highway and into the forecourt, was small, but it had what they needed; antacids and restrooms. They bought one, and made use of the other.
“How are you feeling?” Rey asked, leaning against the sinks. A mirror ran along behind them, several feet by several feet, so that it reflected the scene back like a painting. She could see her own profile in the corner of her eye.
Rose splashed her face with cold water, spattered droplets on the mirror. “I feel like there was tequila.”
Rey had been absent for the liquor-based part of the night. The reason why tumbled through her head—I dreamed of this, every day you were gone—and she cleared her throat, adjusted the touch of her hip against chipped Formica. Excitement flared in her lungs, fuelled by memory. Rey’s only hangover was a patchwork of emotions which refused to calm down.
Rose ran the tap again. Rey’s phone buzzed in her back pocket, wedged between denim and her wallet. Its noise was hidden by the rushing water, but she stilled all the same. It was her heart that felt loud, beating to the question of Ben?, and she wondered, irrationally, if Rose could hear it.
It was Ben (of course, of course it was), and she tried to look nonchalant, like it could have been anybody, even as her phone shook inside the cocoon of her hands. He was ahead of them on the highway, extra time to account for his drive to Leia’s place in Oyster Bay Cove and then back from Long Island to Manhattan. Rey had said goodbye to him in stolen kisses, hiding behind the side of the house like teenagers in the first blush of love. The rain had hung in the morning air, ready to birth the world anew.
Her smile was pulled from her without permission, so wide that it made her face ache.
She watched him type, but she knew what it would be before he said it.
Rey leaned further into the bite of the Formica against her hip. Vaguely, she was aware of the tap being turned off.
The bubbles appeared again, then stopped, then re-started.
“Who’re you texting?”
Rose’s voice cut through the curve of Rey’s fingers, poised to type, and she clamped them over the screen, a reflex which made her look instantly guilty.
It was the upper hand, and for a split-second Rose had it; but then her own phone buzzed, jumping across the Formica and down into the sink. She flushed, scrabbling for it against wet porcelain, and now it was Rey narrowing her eyes and asking, “Who are you texting?”
Rose blushed further. The rush of Rey’s victory drained away; something serious settled in its place. She stepped forward into Rose’s space, and her reflection did the same.
“Are you texting somebody?”
The verb was weighted; not texting, but texting, and everything that implied.
Rose pulled her sleeve down, pinched it in place with her fingers to wipe water from the screen. It lit up and then went dark again, confused by the static charge of the polyester.
“Kaydel.”
For the second time in as many days, Rey felt the Earth shift and resettle beneath her. The weekend shuttered across her vision like film frames, and she was back in the garden, watching Ben watching Kaydel watching—Rose.
“Oh,” was all she could say. Rose’s face crumpled with worry, and Rey shook her head, gave it all the vehemence she could muster. “No, no, it’s not—I’m just surprised.”
Rose relaxed. “Good. Okay. I thought maybe you might—because of Finn…?”
“Finn wants you to be happy as much as I do.”
“I know.” Rose covered her face with her hands. It muffled her voice. “It’s just—obviously it’s complicated.”
You don’t say, Rey thought.
Do you want me to stop the car? Rose had said on Thursday, driving past the sign for Skygazer Hill Lodge and towards Rey’s fate. We don’t have to go in straight away. If you want to talk about it.
She looped her arm over Rose’s shoulders. “Do you want to talk about it?”
No more secrets, Rey had said, shortening the weekend into a Ben-based précis. Rose, for her part, nodded stoically and refrained from comment. Rey suspected that would come once they were back on the road.
Rose paid for the Alka-Seltzer while Rey waited in the car. She could see her at the cash register from where they were parked.
She felt guilty for leaving the conversation so abruptly—I am too—and started again.
Ben stopped typing, began again.
Dr. J. The use of the title was an unexpected aphrodisiac. Rey shifted in the driver’s seat, cleared her throat in the empty car. She’d file that away for later.
Her stomach did a weird flip—more of the emotional hangover, this part less pleasant—god, she’d need to train herself out of this—but it made sense. Perhaps they’d had exactly the same conversation.
Her phone buzzed again.
Sometimes, Ben was as transparent as glass.
Rey’s heart twisted again, shedding the echoes of pain, softening into something safe and tender and light. She’d had this before, all the mundane details of being with someone—of talking about your day and your work and your friends—but there had been an edge to it; like standing near a tornado, waiting for the wind to pick you up. Now the skies were clear.
As if in sympathy, the real clouds parted and the patter of rain on the roof began to slow.
I love you, she thought, out of nowhere, with a fervour that felt almost violent.
Rose cauterised the thought by emerging from the gas station store, the door banging behind her as she crossed the forecourt.
“I got you some Goldfish,” she said, throwing the box through the open door and onto Rey’s lap. “And soda.”
It was a tiny gesture, but it glowed inside Rey’s heart all the same.
Rose sat in the passenger seat, threw her head back and took two large, long gulps of her Alka-Seltzer. When she was done her head dropped forward, and she ran the can along her forehead.
“Better?” Rey asked gently.
“Better.”
Quiet. The highway buzzed in the background, hidden by a line of trees. Rose opened her eyes and set the can down on the dashboard.
She turned to Rey. “So, who talks first?”
It felt—good, even pushing against years of instinctual blindness. Pretend it’s not happening, her brain whispered, and Rey breathed and kept forming the facts on her tongue.
“So…I guess Ben’s not nothing,” Rose said. She put the last word in quote marks.
Rey sipped her soda. “No. Not nothing.”
A pause.
“I didn’t realise.” Rose’s voice was quiet. “About Kaydel.”
“It’s okay. You’d never met her either. Why would you?”
“Still. I knew enough that I could have told you not to worry.”
It wouldn’t have mattered, Rey wanted to say. It had been Ben she was taking cues from; his silence she was reading into.
Rey shrugged. “We got there in the end.”
“Well, don’t blame yourself. Ben should have been honest with you.”
“I know.” I put you through a lot of shit. “He knows too.”
“Good.” Rose was fierce. “I get that you—” and she gestured, a wave of her hand to stand in for Rey’s emotions, “—but I can’t forgive him as easily as you can.”
Rey wanted to explain the inexplicable—that she’d hurt Ben too, holding him back from the last fragments of her damaged heart, still scattered in the departure lounge of Almería Airport—but Rose was predisposed to be on Rey’s side, and that would never balance out.
“No, I get it.” You’re being a good friend.
Rose sighed. “I guess all I can do is make sure you’re happy?”
It reminded Rey of her school reports; years of ‘she is a happy child but she struggles to make friends’ set down over and over in different handwriting.
She thought of Ben, touching her cheek, free of all those sharp lines that had once characterised his face; of her own words, echoing back. I’m going to speak to somebody, when we get home.
“I think,” she said, looking down at the soda in her hands, “that I will be. Soon.”
A pause; and then Rose said, “Okay. Okay.”
Rey rubbed the edge of the can, watched beads of condensation flatten and stretch out under her thumb.
“And I don’t mind about you and—and Kaydel.” She’d have to get used to that name in her mouth. “Honestly, I like her. Even when I thought—” Even when I thought she was breaking my heart. “She’s nice, and she’s funny, and clever. You deserve someone like that.”
Rose hunched in the passenger seat, frowned at the windscreen. “If you’re sure. I don’t want to—to mess things up, or make things worse.”
Guilt lanced through Rey; Rose should have been giddy with possibility, not confined by someone else’s past and its sharp edges.
“Totally sure.” She slid further down in the driver’s seat, so they were the same height, and curled up like it was a pyjama party and not a gas station forecourt. “Which means you have to tell me if you kissed?”
A moment, Rose still staring through the windscreen, biting her lip—and then she shrieked; threw her hands over her face, split by a grin, and squirmed in the passenger seat so that her heels kicked against the footwell. It was a universal sign.
Rey laughed, a giggle which rolled up from her belly and through her chest, blooming with joy. Yes; she could feel it on the horizon, drawing closer. Happiness.
Their apartment was cold, a typical overreaction to Brooklyn’s drop in temperature, and it was a few days too early for heat season to kick in and require the landlord to turn up the radiators.
“I’m going to sit on this couch and not move for a week,” Rose said, sinking into the cushions, and Rey set water on the stove to heat, checked her phone.
Electric kettles, she thought, taking the trà đắng tea from the cupboard and warming the teapot with the heated water. That was what Rey missed about the UK.
Five episodes into Parks and Rec, Rose fell asleep. Rey tucked her further inside her blanket and then crept from the sofa, tip-toeing across the floor.
Her own room was lit by sunshine. Rey sat on the bed and folded her hands in her lap, looked at the walls. Still the same—photographs, prints, a NASA poster she’d stolen from a conference, all tacked up against bare, badly insulated brick—but it felt like it belonged to someone else. It was Ben who’d never set foot in this apartment; Ben who’d never had to apply all his strength to the window when it stuck in the frame; Ben who’d never piled blankets and quilts onto the bed in the dead of winter. And yet. It was Rey who’d returned to a stranger’s bedroom.
Ben’s apartment had been permanently warm; and she’d known he was always too hot, could tell from the way he tugged at his t-shirts, or took them off completely (about which she didn’t complain), but he never opened a window, even when it bothered him. Ben had known that Rey grew up in the desert; had known that the cold still bothered her.
Everything about his apartment flooded back; the feeling of real floorboards under foot, the way light fell through the windows, the scent of his aftershave and laundry detergent haunting the air. Everything she’d made herself forget.
She dug her phone from her pocket.
There was an interminable pause in which Rey’s pulse sped up, as if the text was a step too far—perhaps it is, her brain said, treacherous—but then:
She smiled at the lack of capital letters and punctuation. Ben only did that when he was typing in a rush.
A few seconds as she thought about what to say; and then her phone buzzed, the screen blurring out, replaced with Ben’s number, and she slid her thumb across with that familiar answering click.
“You sure you’re okay?”
The lowest notes of his voice were made tinny by the speaker, but it still hit her the way it always did.
“Hi. Yes, really, I’m fine. I just—” Miss you. Somehow. Already. And really, what was the harm in saying so? “I know it’s sappy as fuck but—I miss you.”
“Yes. That is sappy as fuck. And reciprocated.”
“Good.” The route appeared in her head; the walk to the subway, taking the J to Manhattan. Worth it. Except— “Do you…do you still...?”
There was a miniscule pause, a well which contained all the pain they would have to work through, and then Ben said, gently, “Yes. I still live here.”
“Great. Okay. Give me an hour.”
The clouds had stayed upstate. The low rise of Brooklyn was bathed in sunshine and the sudden chill in the air, and Rey watched it pass from the roll-and-stop, roll-and-stop, roll-and-stop of the subway as it paused at Gates Av, at Kosciuszko St, at Myrtle Av.
She was used to seeing her old Williamsburg haunts from above, staring down from the elevation of the subways rails, but as they wound over the Broadway Triangle, past the tops of yellow-red trees and multicoloured graffiti on whitewashed brick, Rey was acutely aware of the time those places occupied; of being twenty-three and in the first flush of love, unaware that problems in a relationship wouldn’t just go away if she stopped thinking about them.
Now, as they made their gradual ascent up to the Williamsburg Bridge, light flickering through the criss-cross steel keeping the subway separate from the road traffic, everything shifted, just slightly. Same story, same subway line; different day, month, year, Rey.
In Manhattan, she got out at Chambers St and walked in a straight line for three blocks, past City Hall Park and the DoJ and the Starbucks on the corner of West Broadway. Her feet still knew the route; she was forced to concentrate on her butterflies, agitated by each step, so that it felt like she was constantly reaching the top of a rollercoaster and plunging down again. They’d been safe in the bubble of the wedding; now she was back in the bustle of Manhattan, where all their problems began, and Rey was afraid.
She stopped at the crosswalk. The people behind her exclaimed their displeasure and kept walking, water flowing around a stone. Her mind hummed with a presiding thought: I could just turn around and get back on the subway.
Her phone buzzed in her jacket—rough, cheap corduroy from Kmart, the men's section specifically, which meant the pockets were deep enough for her phone and wallet and keys. She fumbled it into the open air, wondering what Ben would say, if it would make her change her mind—
Of course. Rey smiled, as much of an instinct as sight and speech when it came to Finn. Don't miss me too much, he'd said all those hours ago, with an edge of seriousness. Poe had been loading their bags into the boot of the X-Wing, ready for the drive to the airport and the flight out to his family in Guatemala City; a stopover before Peru and the real honeymoon of climbing Machu Pichu. In the early morning Finn had looked so happy, with his tired grin and the light glancing off his wedding ring.
She put her phone back in her pocket. The traffic light had turned red again, and the crowd buzzed behind her; now they were water stuck up against a dam, save for the jaywalkers breaking through like droplets.
Her heart settled; her butterflies calmed. Finn; her touchpoint of safety, like always.
Catastrophising, she thought as the red hand turned into a green man, and the dam broke.
Ben's building was vivid red brick broken by arched windows and the angular meander of the fire escape. She hit the buzzer for the top floor and waited.
“Hey.” Ben's voice was metallic, echoing into the street.
Another buzz as the door unlocked, and Rey pushed into the lobby and the wall of warmth which came with it. Ben's building had no problem keeping above the mandated 68°F.
The elevator clanked upwards, and when she stepped out Ben was waiting in the hallway. “Hi.”
All of Rey’s nerves evaporated. “Hi.”
He reached out, and she took his hand; let him walk her backwards into the apartment through the open door, let him kiss her as they went. He touched her like it had been years, not hours. But then, she reminded herself, pressing into the shape and feel of him, until hours ago, it had been years.
His hand was warm on her back, and every scent was familiar; Ben’s laundry detergent and stripped wooden floors and—
...cardboard?
She opened her eyes, leaned back, and saw two boxes in the middle of the empty, cavernous room. A record-scratch-freeze-frame moment as her mouth fell open, and then—
“You’re moving?”
Her voice echoed against the walls as she stepped back. Ben chased after her with his hands but didn’t follow.
“Rey—”
Where were Luke’s offices? She stumbled over the list in her head. She was sure, so sure Luke had said New York, but there was Chicago, Los Angeles, London—how could Ben move to a place she’d sworn she’d never go back to?
“You’re moving,” she said again, struggling to process all the hollow spaces where Ben’s things had been. You're leaving. “And you still let me—we still—”
You still let me believe.
She turned, and this time Ben did chase her; did grab her by the wrist, so that she stopped short of the door.
“Rey.”
She stayed stubbornly still.
“Rey,” he repeated. It was gentle; perhaps that was why she let him turn her until they were face to face. She concentrated on Ben and not the vast blankness behind him.
“Yes, I am moving,” he said, tone modulated, like she was a frightened animal. Perhaps she was. “But I am moving—”
He broke off, shoulders shaking.
Rey frowned. “Why are you laughing?”
Ben took her face in his hands. “Rey. I’m moving to Brooklyn.”
That record-scratch-freeze-frame again. Everything in Rey’s head paused, waiting for her to drag an answer from her subconscious.
“...but you hate Brooklyn.”
Her voice came out smaller than she’d meant it to. Ben’s eyes fluttered closed for a moment and he bit his lip, curling up at the corners.
“I hate weird millennial Brooklyn.” He let go and stepped back. He was a dark outline against the echoing space of the loft. “Not Brooklyn Heights.”
Oh.Rey felt her tension drain. Her shoulders dropped; her brows uncreased. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” Ben shrugged. His tone drifted into seriousness. "Manhattan's wrung me out."
He fiddled with a belt loop on his jeans, and it abruptly struck Rey that he was nervous. Her panic receded, and she stepped into the space he'd left. When she wound her arms around him Ben was warm and solid, and his heartbeat was steady and a little fast beneath her ear. It was a mnemonic; the same heart against her own over and over again, years ago and yesterday.
"Manhattan's loss," she murmured into his t-shirt. "What happens to this place?"
"We sold it.”
“But what about—?” The family history which had bled into every surface. Padme at Georgica Beach April 1960.
“Mom didn’t want it hanging over us anymore.” He extricated himself but kept a hold of her hand. “Too many dinner plates thrown at the walls.”
Rey hummed, half-imagination, half-memory. She squeezed Ben’s hand and let go. The loft was filled with that cold sunshine, bleeding through glass and catching the dust in the air. There were still signs of life—the Keurig machine on the counter; Ben’s MacBook next to it; the edge of a mattress, visible through the bedroom door—but it was a shell, stripped of the history the Skywalkers and Solos had given to it.
Rey could remember where each piece of furniture had been the last time she’d seen it. Couch, she thought, wandering into the space, inclined to walk around objects which were no longer there. Desk, floor lamp, rug.
“When?”
“Thursday. Everything’s in the new place.” He gestured to the boxes. “This is all donations.”
Rey stood over them, peered down into the depths. The nearest one had two history books, a coffee mug which said lawyer fuel, an unopened set of Menorah candles.
“I could help, if you like. Take it all down to Housing Works, or something?”
“Yes. I would like that.” Ben crossed his arms, uncrossed them again, shifted from foot to foot. “And—I’d like to show you the new apartment sometime. If you want.”
“Yes.” Rey smiled. “Yes, I want that.”
I love you, she thought again, and as the silence held she felt the words coalesce, ready to roll off her tongue—
Ben’s cell must have been on the kitchen counter; the ferocity of the noise which cut through them could only come from Apple aluminium against marble.
“Shit.” Ben muttered. He swiped it up, mouthed the realtor at Rey, and answered. “Hi, Nien.”
Rey’s racing heart had nowhere to go; she exhaled, harder than a normal breath, and hoped Ben hadn’t noticed. His back was turned, one arm bent up to hold the cell to his ear, and it was making his bicep deliciously round under his Henley.
Rey cleared her throat, shook the words and the rush of lust away, and sat down amongst the boxes. The apartment was empty enough for Ben’s conversation to bounce off the walls. She crossed her legs and pulled the top of the box back. Underneath the mug, something caught the light, and she leaned in to see.
It was a stack of books, well-used, dust jackets bashed and flattened and worn down where they’d been read over and over. She recognised the titles like they were stamped into her own soul. Children’s Services had kept a set at Islington Council, and Rey had devoured The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe whilst the social workers tried to work out where her mother was.
She drew all seven out and balanced them on her knee, picked the top one off the pile. They weren’t in order. She was holding the fourth book; Prince Caspian.
"Are you really getting rid of these?" she asked as Ben ended his call, as he set his iPhone back down on the counter.
His legs appeared in her peripheral vision. She felt him brush gently, briefly at her hair, and then he crouched down beside her, took one of the books. It looked smaller in his hand.
"They're just taking up space," he said.
"Is this you letting the past die?"
Ben's smile twitched briefly and faded, attention caught on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. He twisted his wrist to look at the illustration on the back; Reepicheep, resplendent in his coat and feather. "Something like that."
“They were your father’s,” Rey said gently.
Musty-scented, pages yellowed, turned by two generations of Solo hands. That’s what I remember the most, Ben had said once. His voice, when he was reading them to me.
“I never look at them anymore.” Ben’s voice was soft; it felt like he was reasoning with himself.
"Maybe." Rey gently plucked the book from Ben's hand and stacked it with the others. She set them aside, away from the donations. "But you’d miss them all the same."
They walked to the Housing Works on Crosby Street. Isn’t the box heavy? Ben had asked, and Rey had hefted it onto her hip and said, What happened to ‘I’m stronger than I know’? before threatening him with taking a roundabout journey on a city bus instead.
“I still can’t believe you think Edmund should have stayed with the White Witch,” she said at the crosswalk. She adjusted her hold on the box and heard the contents—minus the books—shift around inside. Despite what she’d said, her arms were getting fatigued.
Ben reached over and took the box with one arm.
Rey scowled. “Hey—”
“When did I say that?”
He stacked the two boxes together and picked them up again, tucked into his arms and under his chin. The light went green. The road here was made of uneven bricks, and Rey grabbed Ben’s elbow to keep him steady, checked the traffic before walking them over.
“Don’t trip,” she grumbled, then kept her hand tucked in between Ben’s arm and the boxes. “I distinctly remember you saying that Edmund’s siblings didn’t appreciate him and he should have, and I quote, let them all get turned into stone.”
“Oh.” He let her guide him around a woman and a dog. “That.”
“Yes, that.”
“I revised my opinion.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I was doing a lot of projecting.”
She looked up, saw the tension in Ben’s shoulders and back. Perhaps it was from holding two full boxes of donations; perhaps it wasn’t.
“Oh.” Snoke.“Okay.”
It was another dynamic which had passed her by; what would parentless, thrown-away Rey know about familial schisms, about reconciliation? She was about to swallow the feeling away—that empty inadequacy which whispered you are beyond repair—but then Ben stopped, like he’d somehow felt it in the grasp of her hand on his arm.
“What you need to take away from this,” he said, “is that you were right about the Pevensies, and I should have listened to you.”
He weighted each word. I should have listened to you. Over the top of the boxes, he smiled. It was such a small platitude, on the surface, but his tone buried itself in her heart, a metaphor for three years of pleas; Ben, they’re your family. Now he was looking at her like nothing about the future could phase him.
Rey smiled, words too soft to have any real force. “I’ll hold you to that.”
They’d dropped the donations and gone four steps along the street before Ben said hold on and took her hand, led Rey into the Bookstore Cafe next door.
“I saw a Times article about this place once. It’s in that film I like,” Rey said, climbing the half-spiralled staircase. “The fate one.”
“The movie where Kate Beckinsale is an attractive therapist?” At Rey’s raised eyebrows, Ben added, “What? She’s attractive and she plays a therapist.”
“Fine. I can’t argue.”
She trailed her hand along the bookshelves; floor-to-ceiling, stuffed with multi-coloured spines. She could see Chrissy Teigan’s cookbook, and Pablo Neruda next to it, misfiled amongst the food section. Ben was following a step behind her, and the floorboards creaked as they drifted along the upper balcony. Even with the sun outside, everything had the taste and scent and feel of an old library on a rainy day.
“You’ve really never been here?” Ben asked.
There were books stacked on the edge of a nearby shelf, as though someone had meant to put them back and then forgotten—A Tale of Two Cities, Persuasion, Tom Jones, Winesburg Ohio—and Ben began to leaf through them.
“No. It’s beautiful.”
Ben hummed; not so much a response as a thought which had yet to escape his mouth.
Rey glanced at him over her shoulder; turned, walked backwards until she reached the far wall. Her back hit the shelves—she could feel their edges under her coat—and she watched Ben, a foot or so away, shuffling through Frankenstein and The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Hitchhiker’s Guide.
“Do you regret it?” she said. His head snapped up so quickly that she added hastily, “Keeping your father’s books, I mean. Now that we’re here.”
“Oh.” He put the rest aside, except for the copy of Nobody's Fool. “No. You were right about that.”
“Good. Okay.”
Ben looked over the edge of the balcony; frowned at the people down below who were drinking coffee and browsing books, even though it was clear he wasn’t quite seeing them.
“My mom’s not a reader,” he said, voice soft enough to blend with the store’s hum. “That is—she likes reading. She just doesn’t have time. But my dad would read everything. Pulp fiction paperbacks. Buzzfeed. Car manuals.”
She thought of Ben at the table in Dutchess County, reading the Harvard Law Bulletin. “Like you.”
“Yes. Like me.”
He gripped the balcony’s edge—squeezed once, knuckles whitening—and let go.
“You remember,” Rey began, “how I didn’t go to school when I was in Spain? And the UK had to catch me up?” Ben nodded. “Well, I could read already.”
“Shit, Rey,” he said softly.
“Yeah.” She looked at the shelves beside her. Somehow it was easier to think out loud when she wasn’t looking at Ben. “I always figured, at least my mum loved me enough to teach me how to read.”
He exhaled, and there was a split-second where Rey was afraid of the consequences; but he only tugged her away from the shelf and held her hand, looked her in the eye and said, “You’re worth more than some—some basic parenting. You know that, right?”
Bright sunshine. Sand in her shoes. Her mother’s voice, sounding out syllables.
“I think,” she said, looking down at her hand in Ben’s, “that I will know. Soon.”
Ben smiled, small and a little sad.
“You hungry?” he asked. He bit his lip, as though his question was really, will this be okay?
“Yes,” she said.
The sun was setting, casting slanted orange light over the tops of skyscrapers. It bisected the city in two; the light above and the shadow below.
“Do you think we should date?” Rey said.
Ben stopped, and because she was holding his hand, Rey stopped too; a jolt which locked her elbow and then pinged her back to him, like an elastic band.
“Date?”
“Yeah.” She moved again, until her arm was stretched out; anchored to Ben, unable to go any further unless she let go of his hand. “Coffee. Dinner. Movies. That kind of thing.”
“I know what dates are.” Ben still hadn’t moved. “Is that what you want? To be…dating?”
“What? No, not dating like…at the beginning, when you see other people. Just dating each other. Why?” Her heart sped up. “Do you want to be dating?”
“No.” Ben unrooted himself from the pavement and caught up with her. “I just—what you said yesterday. About not wasting time—”
“No, I know, I meant that. I’m not saying we should go backwards from where we are—” Like riding a bike, except way, way better, “—I just think...”
Their strides were matched now, a brisk New Yorkers’ pace. Rey looked down at their shoes passing over the paving slabs, each piece somehow a different grey, worn slightly differently, pitted with dirt and old gum or cracked in half.
“We’re different people now,” she said. “So it might be…nice, to learn who we are again.”
A moment of Manhattan quiet, full of traffic and people and noise, until Ben said, “Want to hear something amusing?”
“Amusing?”
“This sounds like my parents.”
“Your parents?”
“Yes. Their entire marriage was a rough patch, but—when I was maybe, twenty-five? They changed things. Dad would go out, Mom would dress up for the theatre or whatever, and then he’d ring the doorbell. Like he was taking her to prom.”
Rey’s perception of them bloomed, changed a little. Han and Leia had seemed to be in each other’s corner in a way that sometimes, guiltily, made Ben’s memories hard to imagine.
“Really?”
“We’re appreciating each other more. That’s what Dad would say.” Ben quietened. “It worked.”
The pause was filled by the rumble of the subway under their feet, by the vague updraft through the grate beside them.
“That’s the thing,” Rey said; found that her mouth was dry, forcing her to swallow before she spoke again. “I still have a—a long way to go, and I want you to be sure of what you’re getting into. I’m not fixed yet, and I don’t know if I ever will be—”
“Rey. We’re not broken watches that need new batteries.” When she didn't reply Ben squeezed her hand and prompted, “Yes?”
“Yeah.”
“We'll make mistakes. But we'll talk about them. That's the deal this time. Work as a team.” He stopped walking, held her gaze. “Because we'll make a pretty fucking great one.”
“A team,” Rey repeated. Like Finn and Poe. Like Han and Leia.
“If that’s what you want, yes.”
“Yes. That’s what I want.”
They were on the corner of Chambers Street again; back by City Hall Park, its trees losing their red-and-yellow leaves, and if they turned right and kept walking there would be the DoJ and the Starbucks and the jaywalkers again too. Rey wondered if life was simply a set of concentric circles, taking you back to the same places you’d already been.
“I hate it when I sound like Dr Kenobi,” Ben muttered.
Back to the same people, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For leaving.”
Ben frowned. “You don’t need to apologise.”
“But—”
“I don’t blame you for leaving. You understand that, don’t you? That you did the right thing?”
“But I abandoned you.” Rey’s own words cut into her, as overwhelming as a tide. She’d never said it out loud.I did the one thing I promised I’d never do to anybody.
Ben shook his head. “You couldn’t abandon me. I wasn’t there anymore.”
Her eyes felt warm. Self-aimed irritation spread through her, and Rey clenched her jaw, thought, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. Ben brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers, and when they came away they were shining.
“I wanted to stay,” Rey said, with salt water on her tongue. “I really, really wanted to stay.”
“I’ll be better,” Ben promised. “This time, I’ll be better.”
She kissed him, and even if it was wet and a little uncoordinated, it felt like home.
“I love you,” she said before she’d quite realised it.
Ben smiled; no, not a smile—it was that rare wide grin, the one she’d liked best and forced herself to forget.
“Good.” His voice was rounded with joy, pushing at the edge of his syllables. “It suits you.” He brushed the last trace of her tears away; then glanced at her feet. “Rey, you know you’ve been walking around with your shoelace undone?”
He knelt down, and began to tie it for her. Rey combed her fingers through his hair, soft and familiar under her touch. Across from them she could see City Hall, framed by autumnal branches. What had she said? That she’d elope or wait in line at City Hall, or never marry at all?
Maybe, she thought, looking at Ben down on one knee. But this—being here together; being a team—that, Rey decided, was enough.
He muttered a gently victorious a-hah, and stood up.
“Ready?” Ben asked.
He held out his hand, and Rey took it.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m ready.”
.