by Brent, Cora
Ben strokes me more urgently. “Let it happen, Camden. Fuck, I feel how ready you are and I know you’re almost there. You want to come. So let me make you come.”
And yes, yes I am ready. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it.
His fingers commit teasing torture, never too deep, just enough to leave me clenching and shaking.
“Ben. Oh my god!” I’m gasping and I’m coming hard, far more powerfully than I ever have from using my own hand. The orgasm rocks me to my core as I whimper and buck my hips and feel my muscles dissolve on his hand as wave after wave of insane pleasure devours my senses. I’m aware that I’d let Ben do whatever he wants to me right now but he doesn’t. He waits until I calm down before he takes his hand away and gently covers my legs with my dress. I’m still lying on the bench in my bra and now my brain is beginning to zigzag all over the place as I realize I just had almost-sex with Ben Beltran in the stockroom of a gas station market.
“Happy birthday,” he says in a soft voice and I sit up, ready to take offense if he’s making fun of me but he isn’t. Ben isn’t smirking now. He’s thoughtful as he watches me and his brow wrinkles with concern as if he’s worried about what I might be thinking.
I swing my legs around and push my arms through the sleeves of my dress yet I don’t zip it up again. My hand lands on his knee. There are still all kinds of aftershocks going off between my legs and I feel good. Really good. Enough to be bold.
“I can do something for you too.” I move my hand over the hard planes of his upper thigh.
Ben covers my hand with his. “You don’t have to.”
“I really want to.”
He grins. “Then I’ll let you.”
I know he’s watching my face as he unbuckles his belt and I’m hypnotized by the sight of him getting his pants open. He pauses for only a heartbeat before pushing his black boxers down and then showing off how hard he is. I haven’t seen a huge collection of dicks but I’ve seen enough to know that Ben’s is quite impressive. Somehow all my varied sex fantasies never considered how hot it would be to watch a guy stroke his own rigid shaft. He does so with expert ease, making it obvious that this is something he’s used to doing.
And I’m captivated.
I’m insanely aroused.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to be replaying this scene in my head again and again for decades to come.
“Show me how,” I beg and he groans when my hand wraps around him. He lets me do the work, guiding my hand up and down, and I love it. I love the hot feel of his skin and knowing that I get him so hard. I love it when he reaches around my back to undo my bra and then groans when he succeeds. I love it when he loses control and seizes me tightly, kissing me with sudden ferocity. I love the heat of his mouth and the way he trembles the instant he lets go and spills into my hand.
“Holy shit, honey,” he pants, still holding me close.
I wish he’d kiss me again but seconds later he seems almost embarrassed. He grabs a nearby roll of paper towels from a shelf, carefully wipes off my hand and then tactfully mops himself off before zipping up.
Now that we’re done I’m not sure what to say. A long moment of silence stretches out with Ben buckling his pants and me fastening my bra and zipping my dress. His sweatshirt is still folded up on the bench so I hand it over to him. He gives me a wry grin and pulls it over his head.
“It’s not true,” he says.
I miss the sight of his bare chest already. “What’s not true?”
He looks at me for a long time before answering. “Those stories about me hooking up with half the town. Sure, I have fun now and then but as for the mass orgies and the shades of lipstick on my dick, I don’t do that kind of shit. That’s not what I’m like.”
I can feel a smile trying to break through on my face. “I’m glad.”
“Hey.” He nudges my knee. “How are you getting home?”
“I was going to call my dad for a ride.”
“Could I walk with you instead?” He makes a face. “Sorry, I know it’s bitter outside. I’d drive you if I had a car.”
This time I don’t try to hide my smile. “I’d like to walk home with you. I don’t mind the cold.”
Ben checks all the locks and shuts off the rest of the lights before we leave through the main door. I’m mildly horrified when he sheepishly explains that he has no jacket because he left it behind at school and he doesn’t have another.
“You must be freezing,” I say, bundled up in my own down jacket.
He shrugs. “Nah.”
But when I take his arm in the hopes of transferring a little bit of warmth he doesn’t pull away. The walk to my house is not far but we take our time. We talk about Devil Valley. We talk about Black Mountain. Ben has a really wicked sense of humor and he skillfully mimics some of our more obnoxious classmates until I’m giggling uncontrollably. I don’t know why I never realized how funny he is.
We’re passing the bus stop when I confess to him that sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be one of the rich Black Mountain kids we go to school with. I bet life would be easier. It has to be.
Ben is real quiet after I say this. He tips his head back and stares up at the clear winter sky.
“Money doesn’t always make life easy,” he says and he sounds sad. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. “Sometimes it does the opposite.”
We walk in silence for an entire block but it’s not an uneasy silence. Cardinal Street is decked out with holiday lights and right now in the darkness it looks pretty.
“Do you have big plans for the holidays?” I ask him.
“Not really. Gonna work. Gonna sleep in. Gonna enjoy not taking the bus back and forth for a few weeks.”
“You won’t be visiting family or anything?”
“Nope.”
“We’ll drive out to Pennington to see my grandmother on Christmas day. She lives with her two younger sisters. That’s about the only family we have left.”
I wait for Ben to offer some information. He doesn’t.
I squeeze his arm. “Is it weird to say that there are so many things I want to know about you?”
He sighs. “No. But there are things I can’t tell you.”
“Ben.”
His voice sharpens. “You just need to trust me, Camden.”
“But-“
My words are cut off when Ben stops, pulls me close and covers my mouth with his. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and lose myself in the kiss, which isn’t hard. He’s an unbelievable kisser. He uses his tongue with abandon, slides his hands through my hair and gets close enough for me to feel all of him through our clothes. We kiss for minutes. Or maybe it’s hours. Nothing else exists during that kiss except the two of us.
When he finally breaks away he presses his forehead to mine and sighs.
“Do you understand?”
He’s telling me that in order to be in his life I’ll have to accept that there will always be a part of him that he will keep to himself. For a while I’ve thought that Ben Beltran is the keeper of many secrets and now I’m sure of it. And if I want him then I’ll have to surrender the idea of finding out what those secrets are.
I do want him. And so I need to try to trust him enough to do as he asks.
“I understand.”
“And you’ll trust me?”
“Yes.”
Ben walks me right to my front door. I hate the idea of sending him out into the freezing night alone and without a jacket.
“Ben, I’m sure my dad would drive you home. Come inside. I’ll ask him.”
“No, I’ll walk.” He pulls me in and kisses me once more. “Good night. And happy birthday.”
“Good night.” I’m holding onto him. I don’t want to let go. I’m afraid that the fragile magic of this night will be broken if I let go.
“I lied,” I whisper in his ear.
He backs up and looks at me funny.
I take a deep breath. “I lied
when I said I don’t know if I like you. I think I might like you too much.”
Ben lets a smile shine through. This boy lights up the night when he smiles. “There’s no such thing as too much.” He drops a kiss on my forehead. “I like you too, Galway. A hell of a lot.”
He doesn’t leave until I’m inside the house with the door locked. I know this because as soon as the door shuts I immediately look through the peephole. Ben sees the shadow and waves. Then he disappears into the darkness.
And I’m left here, leaning against the door with my knees weak and a smile on my face.
Ben
When my parents met my dad was married to someone else and my mother had just dropped out of college. Her parents had drowned in a boating accident a year earlier and she’d learned that the upper class life she’d grown up with was a façade of staggering debt and bad business decisions. Penniless and not used to making her own way, she had no choice but to leave school and get a job. Fate led her to a receptionist position at the Drexler Group, one of the largest property developers in the tri state area.
That’s where she met Harrison Drexler. She was young and naïve; he was rich and worldly but unhappily married. She got pregnant and he gladly arranged for a significant divorce settlement in order to be free and marry her. I was their only child and grew up in a very ritzy beachfront community. The other two homes in our cul de sac were occupied by my father’s older brothers and their families. My cousins were all boys, all far older, and most paid me no attention.
Angus and Grey were the exceptions.
Fraternal twins, they were six years old when I was born and I understood from a young age that they were people to be avoided. Some family tension arose when I was five and came home covered in bruises after an overnight visit to their house. Later I learned of the ugly confrontation between my father and Uncle Gannon. The boys never laid a hand on me again but they knew how to carry out torment in other ways. Especially Angus. In time I figured out how to dodge my deranged cousins and after they graduated from high school they found better targets to zero in on.
I realize now that I was a spoiled kid. I’m sure I never gave a second thought about why I could have anything I wanted. And I might have enjoyed the rest of my childhood in that moneyed world, groomed as the next generation of Drexler leaders that had dominated the local landscape for nearly a century, if not for the Marshlands.
The Drexler Group had been trying to get their hands on the Marshlands for years. A thousand acres of undeveloped, swampy land surrounded by expensive real estate. Anything built there would be worth a fortune once the land was drained. But it was a state environmental protection zone, home to some kind of rare frog. When the Drexler Group bought off some politicians and tried to get the status of the Marshlands changed, there was a public outcry complete with protests and news coverage and a whole lot of pissed off people. There was a particular group who called themselves the Marshlands Protectors and they wouldn’t give up, not even when giant tractors arrived to level the ground. Things got ugly and people were pushed around and it became a national news story. Then the two main leaders of the Marshland Protectors, a married couple, just disappeared into thin air. The protests stopped and all the trouble seemed to be over.
But really, it was just beginning.
My dad became withdrawn, depressed. He began spending long, lonely hours in his private office. He drank heavily. Sometimes he’d cry for no reason; tears would just start running down his face while he was sitting at the dinner table and then he’d quietly leave the room. Then came the day when my mother stepped into my room, sobbing and distraught. We would need to leave, me and her. My dad was in the process of arranging it. Something terrible had happened, something to do with the leaders of the Marshlands Protectors. My dad knew a thing or two about their disappearance. And he would tell the authorities when he was sure my mom and I were safe. He did not trust his brothers. He would make no confessions until he was certain we were beyond the reach of the Drexler men. An old friend of his, a former intelligence agent, was already working on securing new identities for us.
To me, this news was outrageous.
I didn’t understand.
I was furious.
And I wouldn’t be going anywhere or cooperating with anyone. My dad must have lost his damn mind. That was the only explanation. I would go to my uncles. They would know what to make of all this.
I waited until midnight, long after my mother had passed out after swallowing a few of her favorite sedatives. I had two choices; Uncle Layton’s house or Uncle Gannon’s. With the Terrible Twins home from college for the summer I shuddered at the idea of going near Uncle Gannon’s house so I skulked through the back gate to Uncle Layton’s. I knew the security code but I didn’t need it because the back door leading to the kitchen was slightly ajar. The house was dark and no one was in sight. Uncle Layton’s four boys were all grown and long gone and his wife Marjorie was summering at a Mexican resort. I wasn’t even sure if Uncle Layton was home and I felt like a prowler as I crept from one room to the next, expecting an alarm to go off or something.
I can never forget pausing at the base of the grand staircase and hearing voices, voices I recognized.
I can never forget climbing the stairs one dreaded step at a time.
I can never forget the pleading tone of disbelief in my father’s words.
I can never forget the sight of my cousin with a gun in his hand as my uncles stood by and passively watched.
And I can never forget that when the gun fired I failed to shout or tackle them or fight back in any way.
No, the fourteen-year-old coward that I was ran back home and woke up my mother. Maybe that was the last remnant of my childhood, hoping that mommy would fix everything. She’d tell me it had all been a terrible dream and in the morning everything would be as it should.
But it was no dream.
The story they made up was that my Uncle Layton had arrived home to find his distraught youngest brother in his house with a gun in his hand. He said my dad confessed to cheating on my mom and to stealing from the business. And then he said my father committed suicide right in front of him.
I never knew what hatred really was until then.
I also never understood how evil people were capable of being until then.
And I wanted to tell. God, I wanted to tell. I wanted to scream the truth from the rooftops and call them murderers to their faces. I wanted to see them carted away in handcuffs and sent to the electric chair. Instead I stood beside my mother at the funeral, silent and grim, while she sobbed. And I knew I would say nothing. I would say nothing because I’d made a promise to my mother and I was all she had left.
“Bennet, sweetheart, please listen. They’ll kill you. They will. And I can’t lose you too. I won’t survive that. Do this for me.”
The day after the funeral we left everything behind. That old friend of my father’s, a big bear of a guy named Reginald, was eager to help. He would make sure we reached a safe location with new identities. Most of my father’s assets were tied to the Drexler Group but he had managed to squirrel away some cash in several safe deposit boxes. Before putting us on a plane, Reginald drove us across three states in order to cover the trail and along the way he informed us we’d need new names.
“Marlia, we already talked about your name, that it’ll stand out because it’s too uncommon, so from now on you’ll be Michele. Bennet, I think we should keep your first name as close to your real one as possible. Just makes it easier. You’ll be called Ben as in Benjamin. But you can’t use Drexler or anything that sounds like it. Any ideas?”
My mother wasn’t listening. She was curled up in the seat next to me with her sunglasses on as she stared dully out the window. I was still reeling from recent events and I didn’t care what kind of name I was stuck with from now on. I had no desire to be a Drexler anymore.
“How about Beltran?” I said, thinking of my favorite ball player.
Reginald grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “Beltran it is. I’ll take care of the legwork.”
And so Bennet Drexler was erased and Ben Beltran was invented.
Ben Beltran settled down in the nondescript small town of Devil Valley with his heartbroken mother and pretended to be this tough, scrappy kid who would get attached to no one and had no stories to tell about his past.
To my surprise, being Ben Beltran was easy.
The money ran out quickly but my mom and I have gotten used to scraping by. Maybe I’ll never completely stop looking over my shoulder but if the Drexlers had any plans to chase us down they would have done it already. Now and then someone would ask questions but I was always able to avoid them without trying too hard.
At least until now.
Until Camden.
Camden is smart and Camden isn’t so easy to avoid. Especially because I don’t want to avoid her at all.
“Ben.” My mother raps my hand with an unlit cigarette to get my attention. “You’re not eating your breakfast and you just keep glaring at the wall.” She lights the cigarette and taps it over a ceramic dish even though there are no ashes to tap out yet. “Did you and Darren have another argument?”
“No.” I scowl at the mention of my mother’s shitty boyfriend. I shovel in a bite of cornflakes and hope this is the end of the interrogation.
My mother examines me. She reaches out as if she’s going to push the hair out of my eyes and then retreats, remembering that I’m too old for that kind of mothering and I’ll just get irritated. Then she smiles.
“Is this about a girl? Maybe the pretty one who works with you at Dee’s? I’ve seen her watching you. She goes to school at Black Mountain, doesn’t she? She and her family were at the diner on Saturday.”
