Lies, Love, and Breakfast at Tiffany's

by Julie Wright

  The problem with pulling out my keys was that now I had something new to fidget with. When Ben shot another look at my hands, I cupped the keys between my gloved hands and held them clasped together until Ben pulled into a parking place in front of Grandma’s villa.

  We all tumbled out of Ben’s car, and Grandma and Walt said they were going to take a walk through the gardens over by the pond on the property. Ben walked me to my car.

  “You hardly said anything all night,” he observed.

  I cleared my throat and stretched my fingers in the black gloves I still wore. “There wasn’t much to say, I guess.” My hands suddenly felt hot, claustrophobic in the gloves the same way I felt claustrophobic in crowds. I began picking at the fabric to try to strip it off.

  Ben noticed and took my hand, pulling on the individual fingers as I’d been doing until he was able to peel the glove away. He gently settled my hand back at my side and went to work on the other one. He moved slowly, his fingers hot through the satin. I watched as the material slid away, revealing my hand and then my fingers. I didn’t dare look up because I couldn’t trust myself to not grab him by the collar and kiss him until he pulled away.

  And he would pull away, because he was dating someone else, which made this small intimacy of him removing my gloves too much, too far.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said, my eyes fixed on my own hand—the one still in his. “I’m glad the tickets didn’t go unused.” I withdrew my hand from his and straightened. “You don’t have to worry about Alison. We’ve got the meeting all set up. It’s taken care of.” I had to mention Alison, if only to remind myself that she was in the picture. To remind myself that kissing Ben and wanting to kiss him were off-limits. I firmly believed that dating other people’s guys would bring the worst kind of karma.

  I gave him a quick hug and opened my car door.

  He tapped on my window. “Silvia. Where are you going?”

  “Tired!” I called. “Gotta go home.” To forget that he’s beautiful. To forget that he’s funny, to forget how safe he makes me feel. To forget everything before I ditched my resolve and encroached on territory that wasn’t mine. I pulled out of the parking space before he could say anything else and drove away.

  When I got home, I reached for my phone; I needed to call Grandma and apologize for leaving without saying goodbye. But my phone was gone. So was my clutch. Not with my black gloves. Not on the seat next to me. Not in my car anywhere. I thought about all the possibilities and all the places I was sure I had it. Ben’s car. I had it for certain in Ben’s car. Which meant it was probably still there.

  I groaned.

  I almost turned back but stopped. The last time I’d been in Ben’s house I’d fallen asleep on his couch. And there was that picture. How would it make me feel to see he’d taken it down? Because he had to have taken it down. No way would any self-respecting guy keep a picture of one woman on his fridge while he was seriously tangled up emotionally with another.

  With another groan, I shoved open my car door and headed inside my apartment. I slammed the door behind me and leaned against it. Beautiful Ben. Hottie Ben. Tangled. I replayed the night—a mental fast-forward—and then replayed certain parts in slow motion.

  The way he looked at me. The way he danced with me. The way he oriented himself to me no matter where we were in the room together.

  The way he looked at Alison. The way he danced with Alison. The way he hugged her back when she said goodbye to him, like the embrace was a thing to be endured.

  The way he stripped those gloves off my hands and brushed his thumb over my bare fingers. My eyes fluttered closed at that memory.

  And popped back open again. “He doesn’t love her,” I said to the empty room.

  I replayed everything again, faster this time. He definitely didn’t love her. So why was he dating her? Why stay where you don’t want to be? Especially since I felt certain that, whether he knew it or not, where he wanted to be was with me.

  I considered going out and confronting him with this information right then and there. If nothing else came from the visit, I could at least get my clutch and my phone back. But I was too vulnerable, too emotionally needy, too not ready.

  I’d do it in the morning. I dressed in my pajamas, cursing the lack of a phone. How was I supposed to text Emma for support or Grandma for advice if my phone was riding around in Ben Armstrong’s car?

  Hopefully, the conversation could happen without advice or support.

  Because in the morning, I was going to tell Ben he was with the wrong woman.

  “I might as well be reaching for the moon.”

  —Sabrina Fairchild, played by Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina

  When Ben answered the door the next day, his face went white like he’d seen a ghost, and then flushed as the blood that had drained from his face flooded back with force. “It’s a surprise to see you here. I thought you couldn’t wait to get away from me,” he said.

  “I left my phone in your car.” His initial reaction to me was so hostile, I could only think to explain my presence in the easiest form possible.

  Understanding dawned on his face. “That’s why you ignored me. I thought you’d . . . Well, that makes more sense than your radio silence. Not that radio silence was too far off the mark. You seem to do that to me a lot.” He shoved the door open wider to allow me access and stalked back into his living room.

  I followed him in. “What do you mean, I do that to you a lot?” Ben’s angry behavior derailed my intentions entirely.

  “No texts, no calls, no cookies to say thanks for helping on your film. I thought for sure I’d get some sort of contact when the press went wild after the junket, but nothing. But even before that, after you left Mid-Scene, you didn’t keep in touch.”

  “What are you talking about? I answered every time you texted or wrote.”

  “Exactly my point. When I wrote you. When you got the job at Portal Pictures, you never kept in contact with me, even though I tried to stay in touch with you, your answers were brief, and you never initiated contact. The only time we’ve spent together at all is when you were in a mess and needed help, and I happened to walk in at the right time. You say we’re friends, but we aren’t even good enough friends for you to have called me that night when you were having trouble with your boss. If my showing up hadn’t happened organically, it sure wouldn’t have happened by design. After that, I thought maybe you’d stay in touch, but you didn’t. No texts, no calls, no communication. Last night only happened because I’ve been bugging you, and your grandma got ahold of your phone.”

  Ouch. How did he know it was Grandma who had extended the invitation? Heat flooded my veins and pumped furiously through my thumping heart to my extremities. “That is entirely unfair!” I stabbed my pointer finger at him. “You have a girlfriend. I was being respectful of proper coworker boundaries.”

  He raked his hands through his hair as if the motion kept him from strangling me. “We aren’t coworkers. We’re barely coconspirators, and considering how you fled from me last night like I have the plague, that’s all we are. I got the message.”

  Ben had been mad at me before. We’d worked together too closely to not irritate each other every now and again. But this level of anger was new, and upsetting, considering how I thought the conversation with Ben would go today.

  “I need a glass. Water.” It should have been weird to be so forward in his house. Especially since there was a comfortable feeling there—one of safety, of acceptance, of just being who you were. Especially when, at the moment, I was a woman in the beginnings of an anxiety attack—something that had only ever happened when I was trapped in a crowd. I didn’t wait for him, but instead fled to the kitchen to seek out a glass. I went to the cupboards nearest the sink, opened them, and found plates and bowls.

  When I closed it, Ben reached an arm over my shoulder, opened
the cupboard just to the side of me, and pulled out a glass. In order to reach it, he had to press into my side, basically pinning me against the counter.

  Instead of sending me into a further spiral of panic, the cocoon of his body had an oddly comforting effect where I felt sheltered, not imprisoned. He placed the glass in my hand, put his hands on my shoulders, and slowly spun me to face him.

  He had lost his previous angst, but his mystified expression in his ice-blue eyes meant he still wanted answers—likely all the answers: the ones about why I hadn’t called him in months, and the ones of why I was acting like the resident crazy cat-lady.

  It was hard to think of answers with him close enough that I could feel the heat of his body against my bare arms.

  “Silvia?”

  He said it with the right tones, the ones Emma always used when she was joking around. I couldn’t help it; I responded automatically. “Yes, Mickey?”

  Ben busted up, leaning his head down on my shoulder while his body shook with laughter. “How am I supposed to respond to that?” he asked.

  I shrugged, grateful for how quickly his presence calmed me, grateful for how quickly we moved from the tense scene at the door to this playfulness. “You could always ask me how I call my lover boy.”

  Ben laughed harder. “I have said your name a million times, and you never once did the Dirty Dancing routine with me.”

  “It’s the tone. You’ve got to say it just the right way.”

  He stepped back as if only just aware he’d moved into my personal space. “If I use the right tone, will you always answer like that?”

  I shrugged again, my fingers playing over the pattern on the glass. “Usually. I always do for Emma.”

  He shook his head. “If only I’d known. To think I’ve missed years of this game.”

  Feeling hyperaware of him and the situation, I glanced at the glass and the patterns my fingers were tracing. I laughed. “Kylo Ren?”

  “What? Kylo’s cool.”

  “He needs counseling. Spoiler alert: he killed his father.”

  I remembered that I wasn’t there to comment on his glassware. My purpose in his house was to tell him Alison wasn’t right for him, to maybe put myself out there as being the one for him. I was still a little shaky on that part of the plan.

  “Thank you for the glass.” I stepped past him to the fridge, where I filled the glass with both ice and water and chugged it until the glass was empty. A Doctor Who TARDIS magnet held the picture with me in it firmly in place. So, despite the fact that he was furious with me when he answered the door, he hadn’t been irritated enough with me to take down the picture. And he hadn’t taken it down for Alison’s sake, either. Or maybe the picture didn’t mean that much to him, and he hadn’t really considered the ramifications of putting the picture in a location where he would have to see it every day.

  Not that any of my meandering thoughts actually mattered. Ben watched and said nothing, not even when I refilled the glass.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked after I had downed the second glass as well. “You’re being way too weird for a casual phone-pick-up.”

  I looked at the picture. I couldn’t do this here, not while staring at the picture of us with our arms over each other’s shoulders. I retreated to the living room.

  He followed me. When I reached the couch, I didn’t sit. Too much energy coursed through me to allow such static actions. I turned to face him. And then the words I’d wanted to say tumbled out, badly. “You don’t love her.”

  His eyebrows shot up, and his mouth fell open. “I don’t love who?”

  “Alison.”

  He stood there a moment, processing, the way Ben did with everything, before he said, “Really? And you think you have some kind of finger on my emotional pulse, enough that you can tell me how I feel?”

  “Yes.” I lifted my chin. “You’ve never once, in any of the times I’ve seen you together, thrown out a mortality statistic.”

  Ben raked his fingers through his hair again and scratched at the back of his head, a move of obvious frustration. “And that means I don’t love her?”

  “It means you can’t be yourself around her. Does she know that you can rattle off obscure statistics? Does she know that you know what the chances are of dying in a bowling accident?”

  His jaw worked. He was still mad at me, and likely getting angrier because this blunt conversation was obviously none of my business. But we had to have it now, while we still could, while he was my friend and not her fiancé or worse, her husband. His answer came out low, like a growl at the back of his throat. “No. She doesn’t know.”

  “See!” Nothing could have kept the gloat out of my voice.

  But Ben immediately shot a hole through the inflating part of my ego. “But that’s because I don’t know the chances of dying in a bowling accident.”

  “Oh.” For a moment, he had me stumped. “But you’re thinking about it now, aren’t you? The next time we’re together, you’ll probably have an answer. And that’s my whole point. Has Alison ever heard a mortality stat?”

  He didn’t answer, which, to me, was an answer.

  “You can’t be yourself fully when you’re with her, Ben. As your friend, I had to say something. I don’t want to see you unhappy.”

  He sucked in a ragged breath and turned his back on me. He stalked back to the kitchen, where, from the sounds of it, he got his own glass of water.

  I considered everything else we’d discussed since I barged in on his morning. I felt bad for not initiating texts or communications. Thinking back, it occurred to me that since I’d left Portal Pictures, he’d also made comments on my social media updates and had forwarded me a few jokes and online videos that were funny or poignant. He’d reached out to me on occasion, not a lot, not enough for him to act like he’d been dialing my number every hour every day for this whole time. But he had reached out. I just hadn’t reached back. Why? Why hadn’t I reached back?

  In the beginning, it was genuinely being busy.

  After that, it was out of respect to the girlfriend.

  But lately, the girlfriend barrier hadn’t mattered as much as me not wanting to be just friends.

  It had been easier for me to cut him off altogether than drag my emotions all over the place, acting the part of “just a friend.” Once I realized how involved my heart had become, I couldn’t go backwards.

  When I found out he’d been dating his old girlfriend from film school, it was easier to just step away. I always told Emma she forgave too easily and that was why she’d ended up in so many terrible relationships before she met Lucas. Emma always warned me that my ability to withdraw, to send a guy packing with little provocation, was my greatest flaw and why I never had relationships—bad or otherwise—which was both unfair and untrue. Mostly true, but not all true. But now. What did I do with Ben, now?

  I stood in the middle of his living room for several moments before realizing he wasn’t coming back. I made my way to the kitchen.

  With the fridge door open, Ben stood, bathed in the glow from the light. He had one hand on the door and the other on the side of the fridge, as though using it to prop himself up. The picture of us that had been on the fridge now lay on the counter.

  He’d tugged it off.

  I wasn’t stupid, slow maybe, and a smidge tunnel-­visioned when it came to my own life, but not stupid. My face on the fridge did mean something. Ben taking me off meant something more. I instinctively knew it wasn’t a bad-something-more, but an encouraging-something-more. We’d both managed to get under each other’s skin.

  “You go radio silent, too, sometimes,” I said softly.

  He didn’t let go of the fridge as he shrugged. “Self-defense.”

  I nodded. “I think that goes for both of us.”

  We both stood there, not saying anything as he used t
he fridge to cool down his entire house.

  “Are you okay?” I finally asked, not sure what else to say.

  “Just hungry. I haven’t had time to think about what to do for lunch, yet. And I skipped breakfast.”

  “Oh.”

  He continued looking at the contents of his intensely tidy and organized refrigerator. But the glazed-over eyes proved he saw none of it. The rapid rise and fall of his chest betrayed the swift patterns of breathing. Ben was not okay.

  I gently placed my hand on his, uncertain if touching him would calm him or provoke him. “I haven’t eaten either,” I said, choosing to stick to the mundane instead of talking about the elephant in the room—the picture, the feelings, the intentions. “Let’s go get some lunch.”

  He didn’t respond in any way to my touch, but he hadn’t pulled away either. He held perfectly still, aside from his breathing.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” I continued. “We might as well eat.”

  He did pull his hand away then and used it to rub his chin before he closed the refrigerator. He walked to the other side of his kitchen and out into the hallway. “Let me get my jacket.”

  “I’ll drive,” I called to him. He seemed too emotional to drive. The idea almost made me laugh. Ben was never emotional. This emotional thing was definitely something new.

  And terrifying.

  And exciting.

  I glanced at the picture of us that no longer took up residence on his fridge.

  And terrifying.

  “You’re mad. Utterly mad. I suppose you want to kiss me good night?”

  —Nicole Bonnet, played by Audrey Hepburn

  in How to Steal a Million

  Once Ben had his jacket on and his house all locked up, and we were in the car with no destination in mind, I asked Ben what he felt like eating. His lack of response meant it was up to me. I drove to Guisados, since it wasn’t too far from where Ben lived and because tacos had a knack of making the world better.