Chapter Text
Rey always goes out of her way never to step foot in the tiny bus bathroom, knowing what the boys get up to and how the sink doesn't work, and the fact that she's never—not once—seen anyone clean it. But tonight it feels like a godsend. Probably helps that it’s too dark to see much of anything.
Ben's pulling his boxer shorts back on when she steps out, letting the narrow door swing closed with a loud thwack. It's both a bit of a relief and a slight disappointment.
"Do you want to get some sleep?" he asks, snapping his head up.
“No!” It comes out a touch too eager for her liking. “I mean, I can’t really imagine bein’ able to fall asleep right now. Little bit wound up.” To put it mildly. “Always have trouble sleeping anyway.”
“Yeah. So do I.” His voice has the same shades of nervous tension as hers does.
She's never slept—just slept—with anyone before, either. Not like this.
He's cleared everything off the seat, aside from the blanket and a pile of their coats that he seems to have arranged as a makeshift pillow for two.
It kinda looks like a bird's nest.
The cold air raises goosebumps all over her arms and legs—and parts she didn’t even know could get goosebumps. Just seeing Ben in some very small amount of clothing makes her feel more naked. Or maybe it’s because he’s looking up and down her body as she sits back down on the bench, tucking her legs under the blanket.
Something in her stomach flip-flops as she lowers herself down onto her back and he rearranges the blanket to cover both of them. The wool feels scratchy against her skin. She hadn’t noticed that before, in the heat of the moment.
Strange how it feels an awful lot like it did an hour ago when they started sharing the blanket—and yet, it's completely, utterly, amazingly different.
"Do you want to sleep?” She tries to remember what people in her paperbacks do afterward. Why don’t they show this part? “Do you usually go right to sleep?"
"No. Well, not that there's much of a 'usually,’ ” he admits. “But when it happens, I play it back in my head and go over all the things that might have gone wrong and that keeps me wide awake for most of the night."
She can't quite tell if he's kidding.
"Are you doin' that right now?"
"No." His lack of hesitation sure doesn’t escape her notice.
"I suppose I don't really know enough to guess at what I did wrong, anyhow."
"Nothing. You didn’t do anything wrong.” He smooths his left hand across her unruly hair. “Are you, um, feeling all right?"
The question instantly prompts a bit of panic: Do I look ill? Am I burning up? But then she catches his meaning.
"It, ah, kinda pinched some—" Rey watches the concern wash over his face "—just at first, I mean. But no more than I reckon it's supposed to."
He exhales loudly—not quite a sigh of relief, but close.
“So, did you...like it?”
" 'It?' "
"Making love."
Every ounce of blood in her veins seems to rush to her cheeks when he says it like that: all matter-of-fact and forthright. At least in the dark he can't see how bad she's blushing.
“Yeah," she says softly. "Thought you could tell.” He looks down, like he's trying to hide a smile forming. "I, um—” she swallows hard, feeling her whole face heat up “—really liked it."
"Me, too." A quiet little hint of satisfaction prickles at the back of her neck. "That’s an understatement. Obviously.”
Ben sits up a bit more, reaching behind his back and patting his hand on top of his coat until he locates one of the pockets. There’s a muffled little rattling sound and Rey holds her breath, even though she doesn’t mean to.
But his hand emerges with a pack of Parliaments, rather than a bottle of pills. He taps the box against the seatback, before holding it out to her like an offering.
“Thanks,” she says, pulling one of the identical white sticks from the package and sliding it between her lips. Rey's not much of a smoker, but it’s something to occupy her hands. Better than twisting them up in the blanket.
The flame from his lighter illuminates the space between them, shining a yellow gold light across the planes of his face. It’s not quite as romantic as a candle, but it’s nice for the couple seconds it lasts.
Rey could look at that face for a good long while. In all kinds of light.
She takes a drag as Ben lights his own cigarette, and the hot smoke fills her lungs, making her feel warm again for the first time since they—well, did it.
We did it. She turns the three words over and over in her mind until they lose their meaning.
Or, more accurately, until she notices that the other half of the we is keenly focused on her neck and chest, and she glances down self-consciously.
“What? What is it?”
“Tomorrow might be a good day for you to wear a turtleneck," he says. Rey puts her hand up to her throat. “I got kind of, uh—carried away.”
She can't help touching above her collarbone and pushing down a little bit on the bruises. It's a good kind of soreness—all that evidence of being wanted.
The feeling makes her shift a bit to the right, a little closer to Ben, and let her shoulder press against his chest. Seems like a thing people do...after. Maybe he likes it, too, because he moves an inch or two to the left.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spies the black and white marbled cover of his composition notebook, peeking out of his other pocket, like a tantalizing mystery.
She takes another long inhale.
The smoke from both of their cigarettes gently swirls upward into the cold, stagnant air, one cloud twirling little tendrils around the other.
"Think you'll write a song about this?" He carefully knocks the ash off his cigarette onto the floor.
"I guess it depends what happens in the morning. The best country songs come from heartache, so...” Rey lets the silence linger, just to test him a little bit. He doesn’t make a sound. “I got a feeling it's not gonna be a duet."
She feels the muscles at the base of his throat contract as he swallows.
"That depends on you, as much as me."
"I already told you what I'm doin' here."
"Yeah." He takes another drag. "Well, I'm thinking about the future." He blows the smoke straight up.
"Running away," she mumbles.
There’s nothing to fixate on but the occasional bit of highway noise.
They smoke in silence for awhile, until Ben stubs out his cigarette against the metal window frame and lets the filter drop to the floor.
Then he reaches the fingers of his good hand over the crown of her head and lets them run through the little snarls, smoothing them out a little bit. Rey lets her head hang back and closes her eyes.
“Why does that feel so good?” It's like cool, silvery droplets running down her spine.
“Lots of nerve endings. Intimacy." His hand just feels so big across her scalp. "Maybe you just like it when I touch you.”
“Don’t stop,” she breathes. Goosebumps reappear in full force across her forearms.
“Just wait until I can use both hands.”
“On my hair? Or...other places, too?"
His mouth presses tantalizingly against her ear. “All of it.”
A thrilling little swooping sensation shoots down to her belly. Rey hasn't ever wanted to feel helpless, but the very thought of his hands makes her pulse race.
"It’s funny. I've never much appreciated men touching me. I mean, it looks nice in movies and stuff. But in real life?" She makes a sour face. "Lots of men don't treat their own wives right. I guess that's why I admired your folks. Just seemed like they loved each other so much, even if they bickered some. Listening to them felt like a little piece of hope—proof that there’s true love out there, even if I couldn’t see it with my own two eyes."
Ben draws his head back a bit and lets out an incredulous little snort.
"So you believe in fairytales?"
"Did I say something stupid?" She shifts forward, pulling the blanket up a little higher across her breasts like she’d just revealed too much.
"No,” he says firmly, pulling her back into his chest. “No, that's exactly what you're supposed to feel about them. Sorry, I’m—fuck, I don't want to be the one to ruin that for you."
"Just be honest with me." She turns her head back to look at him. "I like knowing the truth about things."
She feels him take a few deep breaths.
"They lived apart. For the last ten—no, maybe fifteen—years." Rey's kinda glad he can't see the way her face falls. “Han wasn't—" he pauses, breathing out again "—he wanted to be out on the road. A wife and kid might've slowed him down for a couple years, but it didn't last. Love doesn't make people change who they really are. Maybe it makes them feel guilty about it for awhile, but they don't actually change.”
Ben continues combing his fingers through her slightly-tamed waves. Maybe it's soothing him as much as it is her.
"And your mom?"
“Leia isn't exactly the settling down type, either. She was perfectly content spending her evenings holding court at Tootsie's, while Han was out on the road, doing God knows what."
Rey feels a little crease forming above her nose, despite her best efforts to maintain her composure.
"They weren't in love?" she asks, holding her voice steady, as if he's not casually tearing down several years of elaborate fantasy stories about a beautiful country music princess and the dashing scoundrel who stole her heart.
"I think they always loved each other. Just…in their own way." Ben inhales sharply and adjusts his posture. “They’d fight all the time, but they never talked anything through. Some argument would come up, one of them would get mad and take off to Acapulco, the other one would fly somewhere else. Then in a week or two they’d get back together, nothing solved. They’d act like it never happened.”
“What about you?”
He sighs.
“Nannies, boarding schools, summers with my uncle, pulling me into their act. The occasional military academy. Every rich kid cliche you can think of.”
“I never knew any rich kids.”
“If I keep talking about this, you're going to want to break one of those windows and escape."
"No," she says, looking down her handkerchief still wrapped securely around his right hand, wondering how deeply he believes what he’d said—that love really can't change who someone is at the core. "It's not in my nature to run away."
Ben pulls out another cigarette, but doesn’t light it.
"Han arranged for the plane because of me. I wouldn't shut up about how awful the bus was. When I refused to get on the flight, the last thing he called me was ‘ungrateful.’ " He turns the cigarette over with his second and third fingers. "Snoke forced us to continue the tour right after the crash. The rest of us, I mean. That's when everything went to shit. I mean, worse than it already was. I didn’t sleep for days. When I needed to stay awake to drive seven hours to the next gig, he got me a bottle of black beauties. And if I couldn’t wind down at night, he was right there with the benzos. I’d swallow anything in order to force the sleep and forget all of it for a few hours.”
He flips the cigarette around and around. It's almost mesmerizing.
Rey remains perfectly still. There’s only the sound of her careful, shallow breathing.
So he continues:
"Sometimes I think Snoke only keeps me around out of spite. He missed out on twenty more years of Han touring. Now he’s just wringing the last shred of profit out of anyone with the last name 'Solo.' He sends me one syrupy ballad after another. Never lets me record any of the songs I wrote. Tries any fucking gimmick out on me, just to fuck with whatever credibility I have left.”
Rey sits up a little, putting an inch or two of space between the two of them, and turns her head so she can see his face.
“Like playing duets written by a perky girl singer?”
“Something like that, yeah. He has creative methods of torture.” He stops fidgeting with the cigarette and looks at the perfect curve of her back. “I doubt this is what he had in mind.”
"How come you didn’t you up and leave months ago?"
He can’t help tracing his index finger from the nape of her neck all the way down to her tailbone. She still trembles a little bit when he touches her.
"I guess—” his throat tightens “—it’s not that I thought this would—" She raises an eyebrow. "I mean—performing together is... that’s why I’m still here." He glances at the bus ceiling and then down again. "I stayed because of you."
It's silent enough that he can hear her swallow.
"Feels like my whole life I had the opposite effect on people."
"When we sing together, it’s like—like I’m living in those songs for two minutes. I can fool myself into believing that someone would…" The words suddenly sound too desperate, so he abandons the train of thought. "I couldn't make myself leave."
Rey twists around a little further until her lips graze his cheek. He waits a second too long before turning his head for a real kiss because she abruptly shrugs off the blanket and swings her feet around to the floor.
Ben watches as she takes a couple steps to the right, leans down, and picks up something dark off the grimy carpeting.
"Are you sayin'—" she stands up straight again; his sweater is hanging from her right hand. "—That you like singing with me? That it makes you...happy?"
"I don't think I could pick happiness out of a lineup." Rey puts her arms inside his sweater and slips it over her head. It’s long enough to be a minidress on her—a rather tasteless minidress—but he's momentarily overwhelmed by the sight of her wearing his clothes. It's possible that he can distinguish that particular emotion. "But something like that," he says, in a barely audible voice.
Maybe she hears. Maybe she doesn’t.
She sits down next to him, lowering her hand onto the pile of coats they’ve been leaning against. A moment later, she lifts it back up with his notebook resting in her palm.
"Can I? Please? Unless it's a bunch of poems about how awful I am."
Mostly out of instinct, he reaches for the book, but she quickly pulls it back.
“Rey—”
"Is it a bunch of wild ramblings from your beatnik phase? Some of your 'workin' man' material?” He reaches around her, to no avail. “Lyrics about being locked up in the county jail?"
Ben's not proud of resorting to tickling—in fact, he can’t remember the last time he tickled anyone—but desperate measures and all that. Once he has the notebook back in his hand and Rey is clutching her stomach and doing some adorable combination of laughing and panting, he's suddenly overcome by the urge to give her all of it. Freely.
“You want me to burn it?” she asks, after he places the notebook in her lap and hands presses his lighter into her palm.
“Your eyes are good enough to read in the dark?”
"Oh." She presses her lips together and opens the cardboard cover. "I mean, I've seen you, uh—naked. How much more revealing could this be?"
Ben feels his eye twitch.
He glances over her shoulder as she turns the pages, one by one, tracing her fingers down the paper, holding the lighter's little flame up to the book, but not close enough to burn. There's an exhilarating little shiver shooting down his spine, watching her touch such a private object, handling it like it's precious.
"These are love songs," Rey says quietly. "Since when do you write love songs?" She turns her head to look up at him.
"None of these are finished, anyway."
She sits up a little taller, leafing back through the notebook and holding it open in front of him. "This one could be a duet."
The scribbling on the page is familiar: two months worth of ink smudges, crossed out tabs, and nearly indecipherable margin notes.
"That one's missing some lines. And part of the bridge."
"Hey." She leans over the edge of the seat and pulls at the handle of the guitar case he always shoves underneath, because he refuses to keep his Martin in the stowage compartment with everyone else's instruments. "Will you play it for me?"
“No.” Ben holds up his right hand. "But you could."
"And you sing?"
"If you want."
He watches as she undoes the latches and lifts the guitar out of the case by the mahogany neck, treating it with the kind of care one might reserve for a newborn baby.
"Gosh, it's beautiful." She runs her thumb down the glossy spruce front, which he'd had customized with an amber sunburst finish. "Feels nice."
"She's got a big, firm low end," Ben says, laying his notebook on the seat in front of her in a patch of faint moonlight.
"Always wanted to play your guitar, if I'm bein' honest." She cups her hands and breathes into them to warm them up a little.
Rey wearing his sweater—and only his sweater—while holding his favorite instrument in her lap is enough to make him forget all the tarnished, gnarled pieces of his life. It's more calming than whiskey, a bigger rush than pills, and more satisfying than smashing things.
“The intro is C-F-C-G three times, and then C—”
“Jesus, Solo, I can read letters. You got nice penmanship, by the way.” She gives him a close-lipped smile. Her nimble fingers slide down the strings and she strums through the simple chord progression a couple times before settling on a picking pattern.
After the third bar, Ben takes a deep breath, opens his mouth, and lets the lyrics pour out in front of another person for the first time.
"When I'm standing next to you,
There's a song to sing,
I know everything's feeling right."
He continues with the verse, blushing slightly at an unfinished line about steeple bells ringing.
"We'll come back to that one," Rey says, completing the bar and smoothly picking up the next line:
"When I hold your hand in mine—"
She nods at him to continue.
"Children's dreams take flight,
Through a starlit night,
That's what I see.
When you're next to me."
Rey's gentle playing trails off on the C chord. She nudges his leg with her bent knee.
"That's real pretty."
"It's not really a country song. But I tried to write something that sounded like...you. I guess. You could add some twang to it. Maybe an autoharp."
"Maybe. But I like it simple like this, just acoustic guitar and a voice. Or two. Maybe a brush on the drums. Nothing complicated." Her eyes glide down his face to his chest. "Maybe I'm rubbing off on you."
"In the best possible way."
Her right hand drops away from the strings and, with the way she's staring at him, he's almost tempted to toss the guitar and his notebook to the side and send his sweater flying over the seatback. But it's such a goddamn pleasure watching her play his song on his guitar, that he clears his throat and suggests they figure out the bridge. There'll be time for the rest of it, later.
"What about... F to—" she plays around a bit "E minor? No." She picks around a bit more. "A minor?" She nods to herself. "And then back to C, I think."
"Try A-flat on the next line," he suggests, closing his eyes in concentration, tapping into years of scales, chords, and arpeggios.
"Oooh." She strums the transition a few times. "I love it. And then C to G to resolve."
He hums through a bar of unwritten lyrics as she plays the chords from the top of the bridge, before picking up the next lines.
"You can mend the darkest hour,
With glo-o-oh-rious light."
Rey rests the notebook on her knee and jots down the changes.
"And then back to the verse," she says, before tapping the capped end of the pen against her lips. "We just need that first lyric to the bridge." She pauses thoughtfully, scratching something down across the lined paper.
She sets the notebook back down and Ben glances down at what she's added, in her uneven cursive. If there's a slight pop in his chest at these particular words, it's not as if he can help it.
"Take it from the last line of the verse?"
"...that's what I see,
When you're next to me."
Rey adds a little ornamental flourish going into the bridge, before joining him with an improvised harmony.
"This love for you I'm feeling,
Has a power that is healing,
You can mend the darkest hour,
With glo-o-oh-rious light."
She slows her picking down to a stop.
"Maybe we can write a song together," he says quietly "We just had to—"
"—take our clothes off?"
"—get some things out in the open..." He flicks the lighter on and off. "That, too."
"Another line or two, and it's done. You can take it with you to Los Angeles.” She picks out the Spanish guitar intro to California Dreamin.’ “Play it on street corners for loose change."
"So you do know other kinds of music,” he points out, grabbing the neck of the guitar and lifting it out of her hands. As soothing as it is to listen to her, the D-35 is getting in his way now.
Rey shrugs. "I turn the dial on the radio now and then."
“You should take the song. Just don't sing it with Dameron."
She watches as he places it back in the case, with noticeably less care than she'd used to remove it.
"I don't think I'd be able to play it with another person,” Rey admits, closing his notebook. She idly draws an invisible circle around the white COMPOSITION BOOK label with her index finger. “It'd just make me feel lonesome. Dunno how that's possible when I'm stuck with a pack of feral men all the time. Sometimes bein' around them, I feel more alone than when I'm all by myself in my room at night."
She traces around and around the oval until Ben flattens his left hand over hers, forcing her to look up.
“Rey...you could—”
"Why'd you wait so long to let me see this part of you?"
Her eyes scan back and forth across his face.
"I didn't think you'd...want this." This, meaning the notebook, his feelings, and literally everything that had happened this evening. "Sometimes it feels like I'm—I've always been too much for people." Too tall, too intense, too needy, too ready for a fight. "If someone actually scratched against the surface of who I am, it would slice me wide open. I'd start bleeding and I wouldn't be able to make it stop."
Rey slides her hand out from underneath his and places it over the cavity where his heart is working harder than it has in years.
"I did a fair job nursing your hand, though, didn't I?" He feels immobilized as she climbs into his lap, adjusting her bare legs and sweater-covered arms until they form a tight unit with his body. "The thing is, I know who you are now."
She holds onto him—digging her fingers into his shoulders like she's afraid someone's about to haul him away.
"Tell me who I am," he whispers.
How did he exist in the world for thirty-odd years believing that he didn't want this, let alone deserve it?
"You're a short-tempered, spoiled-rotten, sensitive-as-hell, wide-as-a-church-door, romantic." She bends her head down at just the right angle to rest her forehead against his. "And you're mine."
They fit.
Even his sweater feels more like it's hers than the dress she'd been wearing all night.
They should be all tangled up limbs and bumping noses—the awkward, unsynchronized movements of two people who barely know each other. Who've kept each other at arm's length for months. They should be fumbling and apologetic, like a couple on a blind date trying to dance together for the first time.
They should.
But instead their bodies seem to dovetail.
He cups her cheek in his left hand and searches her face like there's an answer written there in invisible ink and he's so close to being able to see it.
Rey's never been anyone's answer. She's always felt like more of a problem—a stubborn dandelion growing in between the sidewalk cracks. There's a song lyric in there. She turns it over in her head: something about how a man can make you feel like a rose...or a lily. Except Ben doesn't make her feel delicate.
He just really thinks this particular yellow dandelion is beautiful the way it is.
She tilts her head to the right and leans in, shutting her eyes and waiting for a faint tickle of breath against her face, followed by another gentle ki—
“Want to run away with me?”
She pauses for a moment, before opening her eyes and pulling back an inch.
"What?"
His hand strokes against her jaw.
"Don't you want to see the ocean?" When she doesn't respond, he presses. "Make a fresh start?"
Whatever serene music she'd been hearing in her head seems to skip, as if the needle hit a speck of dirt on the vinyl.
“This is my fresh start.” She leans back another inch. "I've been working my whole life just to make it to Nashville. Record my songs. Get on the radio. Maybe get to the Grand Ole Opry someday."
“The Opry?" He rolls his eyes. "They don't even believe in drums. Don't you want to be more than a carbon copy of Loretta Lynn? Or Dameron’s kid sister? Jesus Christ, you don’t have to be Sunshine.” He grabs at her shoulder with his right hand with almost frantic energy, before realizing his mistake and grimacing in pain. “Fuck," he mutters under his breath, shaking it out and collecting himself. "You can just be Rey. Write the feelings you actually have, not the ones you heard my parents sing about ten years ago.”
Her eyes start to sting a bit and she's not sure if it's because she so sure he's wrong, or because he might be a little bit right.
“Or you could stay," she ventures, casting her gaze over his shoulder and blinking away the start of any possible tears. “Just a little while longer. It wouldn’t hurt anything.”
"I'm not staying on Dameron's tour or this goddamn label." He tips her chin back toward his face so that she has to look him in the eye. "I made up my mind. I'm not doing it."
There's a stubborn finality to his tone and she's too proud to pout about it, so they just sit there, on either side of some invisible line in the sand.
After what seems like at least a minute of frustrated breathing and late-night winds whipping angrily at the windows, his large, cold hand meanders under the hem of the sweater.
"Just think about California," he says, in a more honeyed voice. The way her heartbeat is already thumping twice as fast as it should as his fingers make their way over her right hip means that he's definitely found an unfair way to bolster his side of the argument. "We can get on a plane tomorrow."
She's never been on an airplane. Never even seen one in person.
His sweater is warm and soft and still has a trace of Agua Brava laced in the knit, but she helps him lift it over her head anyway.
"What's one more week on the Midwest circuit, though?" she offers, weakly.
Rey feels her shoulder blades inching back, ever closer to the vinyl seat, pulling him down with her. She can't honestly say which of them is responsible.
"I can't play anyway. This is the right time to go." He pulls the blanket over both of them, kissing down the side of her neck. "Don't you want to do this somewhere warm?"
Dammit. She kinda wants to do this anywhere, but warm sounds especially good.
"Tour's gonna go back down south after Christm—ohh..."
"Rey." He shakes her shoulder as gently as he can.
She's not the daintiest sleeper, as it turns out. It's not really physically possible to stretch out on the bench seat, but she's managed to claim most of the width and a rather unfair proportion of the blanket.
Not that Ben minds. He could actually watch her sleep for a long time, with golden bands of warm light streaming in from the windows, illuminating the left side of her peaceful face.
But the sun's up, and he can't imagine Dameron will wait too long before smugly returning to the bus like a hunter checking on his trap.
He shakes her a tiny bit more vigorously and Rey finally stirs, rubbing her slightly makeup-smeared eyes and looking momentarily surprised to see him. Maybe all the daylight makes her shy again because she pulls the blanket a little tighter around her chest.
" 'Morning, Sunshine."
A month's worth of recollection sweeps over her face in three seconds.
She pokes at his stomach, making him flinch.
"Just checking that I'm not still asleep. What time is it?"
"Not sure. I neglected to wind my watch last night." Her fingertips against his skin are exactly the kind of distraction that had caused him to forget.
"Um," she clears her throat, "how's your hand?"
"Fine," he says, even though it aches terribly when Rey grabs his right wrist and examines the bandage
"Liar."
She pulls at his shoulder to make him lie back down next to her. No one's ever tried to snuggle up with him before.
"Rey, we can't—" His body betrays him by easing into a reclining position at her side. "We need to get up."
"For those early birds?" God help him, she wraps her leg over his. "Could be hours before one of 'em stumbles out of his motel room."
"We should pick up our things. It's a mess back here.”
“Right.” She kisses down his jawline. “ ‘Cause it was clean as a whistle yesterday and someone nicknamed ‘Possum’ might notice the mess.”
Dammit, she makes excellent points first thing in the morning.
“And put our clothes back on."
“Is that really what you want to do right now, Solo?”
Fuck, no, it isn't.
She nuzzles into his neck and moves her mouth down his chest and holy hell, is she persuasive.
"That door could open any moment,” he manages to point out in a choked voice.
“Fine with me. Let them find us here. Just like this. Don't you want to see the look on Poe's face when he finds me on top of you?"
And that's what stops him cold.
“The look on his face will last about three seconds, and I don’t want you living with the consequences for the rest of the tour.”
“I don't care.” She lifts her head up defiantly. “I want them to know!”
“You think it’s hard being a woman on the road with a dozen animals, wait until they find out about this.”
“As if they haven’t been picking out girls to sleep with at every damn stop.” She shifts off of him, throwing the blanket around her shoulders.
“It’s different for you and you know it," he insists, sitting up on his elbow. "They've been leaving you alone because they don’t think you...do this kind of thing.”
“I don’t.”
“And after I’m gone, you’ll never hear the end of it. It’s not right, but that’s how it is.”
Her expression is pure disappointment. And even though he's spent his entire adult life making terrible, reckless decisions for himself, he's not going to let Rey make impulsive mistakes.
She looks him square in the eye, as if to test his certitude. He doesn't blink.
"So we get dressed," she says, with cold resignation.
"We clean up. You go back up to your seat. We act like nothing happened." He glances down at her neck and shoulders. "Make sure you have your coat zipped up all the way."
"And after that?" She snatches up her dress and her ruined pantyhose.
"When we get to the theater, I'll tell Ransolm I need to get my hand looked at. And then I'm leaving. Maybe you are, too."
He gives her a hopeful sort of glance, which is not quite reciprocated.
"I told you last night. I've worked hard for this. To get here. My parents aren't listening to music from California."
"Your parents aren't—" he pauses on the precipice of something that feels dangerous "—that's not a reason to stay. You said you wanted to know the truth about things?" He's never been able to stop swinging at a thing until it's properly broken. "That's the truth. They abandoned you years ago. They don't get to dictate the rest of your life!"
Rey's entire head jerks a half inch backward like she's taken a sharp jab to the face.
"You don't know that." Her eyes glisten as she tightens her fist around the shiny fabric of her dress. "You don't know a thing about that."
I wish I didn't, he thinks, picking up the defiled suit coat off the floor and laying it over the seat back, where he'd first found it.
After what feels like over an hour of terse, silent waiting, there’s a hard, metallic clanging against the side of the bus.
Then, a delicate click.
Eight feet in front of him, Rey is curled up in her usual seat. Nothing is amiss, except for the cracked window and his pitiable hand.
The door slams open.