Some Assembly Required

by Lex Chase

  Patrick remained tight-lipped about what had happened between them in kitchens that night. Benji didn’t have words for that kind of aura transference. There was so much he still had to learn. Like how to replicate that interesting party trick that had left him shuddering for days.

  Benji wrapped his fingers around the Lego Yoda he’d fished out of the ball pit in Bambini Mondo a while ago. He liked to carry it with him because it was small and didn’t take up much of his energy to hold, and it was also convenient when he wanted to practice manipulating objects. He held his palm out, pouring his focus into the small plastic toy until it hovered just above his skin. Patrick was wrong about CASA having limits. Anything was possible if you had enough energy to expend.

  And boy, did he. Every time he thought he and Patrick were on the same page, Patrick threw a wrench in things, like he had at the romantic dinner Karin and Agnes had set up for them. They’d had a few tense make-outs since then, always with Patrick trying to push for something, like Benji wouldn’t notice his trembling hands or the way his breath stuttered out of fear, not arousal.

  It was hard to get to really know Patrick without all the conventional trappings of a regular romance. They couldn’t go for long walks or weekends away at a seaside hotel. They couldn’t have awkward barbecues to introduce their friends and family to each other, or wander around each other’s apartments taking in all the knickknacks and other ephemera that really showed who someone was behind closed doors.

  But Agnes and Karin’s dinner had shown him that although they couldn’t do it conventionally, they could date. It would just take a little more finagling and planning than the baseball games and concerts in the park that Benji had used as his fallback when he’d been dating in the mortal realm.

  He’d been at a loss for what to do until he’d stumbled upon an Impression who had been killed by a television. She hadn’t been in CASA long—not only was she completely unable to communicate with the man who’d been scoping out the television benches, she’d barely been able to communicate with Benji.

  He smiled now, remembering how fierce the Impression had looked despite being clad only in an oversized NKOTB reunion tour T-shirt and a pair of fraying granny panties. Her attire hadn’t stopped her from frantically trying to shove the customer away from the aesthetically pleasing and temptingly priced television storage solutions. Her hands had kept going through the man’s chest, and she’d been getting increasingly desperate. When she realized Benji could see her, she started yelling something, but he hadn’t been able to hear her. From the way she went practically apoplectic when the customer crouched to look at the price on the ORBA, Benji surmised that it was the offending piece of furniture. He couldn’t understand her crude hand gestures, but when the man pulled out his cell phone and started googling fish tank dimensions, he got the general idea.

  “Particleboard and water don’t mix,” he’d whispered in the man’s ear. The customer squinted at the ORBA and shook his head as if trying to clear it before walking away.

  The Impression went from faded to clear-as-a-bell as soon as the man left the aisle.

  “The idiot was going to put a fifty-gallon fish tank on one of these,” she shouted, still agitated. “And when it broke he was going to sever an artery trying to save the damn fish.”

  Benji smiled and reached for her, pushing a bit of his energy at her when she flickered. She went with him without question as he guided her toward the elevator so they could go down to the entrance.

  “I take it you had a ORBA?” he asked, curious but not wanting to probe too deep in case she didn’t know she was dead. Some of the Impressions didn’t.

  She snorted inelegantly. “I did. Stubbed my toe on it in the middle of the night when I got up for a glass of water, fell, and put both hands right through the flat-screen TV I’d saved three years to buy.”

  He wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, but luckily they arrived at the entrance before he had to respond. She clung to his hand when he stopped a few feet from the door.

  “I can’t go any farther,” he said apologetically. “But you go on. Great things are waiting out there for you.”

  She frowned at the doors. “I’m going to miss Netflix,” she said before squaring her shoulders and marching off into the unknown.

  Benji didn’t stay to watch her go through. He never did. It freaked him out a bit, and it made him jealous too. It didn’t seem fair that others could move on and he couldn’t. But she’d reminded him of one of the benefits to being on the mortal plane—streaming movies.

  How could he have forgotten about Netflix? And in that moment, his grand plan to start sweeping Patrick off his feet started to come together.

  Benji raised his head, listening carefully. Karin was coming down the hallway, her breathing more labored than usual. She was concentrating hard, carrying a laptop with several cords draped around her shoulders like scarves. He grazed his fingers over his Yoda one last time and tucked it into his pocket.

  “On the table?” she asked as she passed him with the laptop. That close he could see that her brow was furrowed and she looked a little sweaty. He was glad he hadn’t tried to transport the laptop himself, energy boost or no. It was precious, and he couldn’t risk dropping it. Without it, his whole date night would be ruined.

  “Yes, please. By the projector.”

  He’d been able to drag that over by himself, but it was lighter than the laptop and had a considerably shorter distance to go. Moving it from the cabinet to the table was nothing compared to Karin carrying a laptop up from the employee locker room.

  Benji had been relieved when he’d snuck up to the administration wing a few days ago and found that his Netflix login still worked. It was technically Charles’s account, but he hadn’t changed his login after he’d moved out, and Benji had taken that as tacit permission to continue using it.

  It had been hard, logging in and seeing his own profile had been deleted. Charles had always hated how the sappy romances and comedies that Benji favored ruined his own dull academic documentary recommendations, so he’d set the separate profile up for Benji when they moved in together. Benji assumed he’d just forgotten about it and that’s why he’d never deleted it after their relationship ended, but now he realized Charles must have kept it active on purpose. The unexpected kindness of that act had hit him hard. As had logging in and seeing that it was gone. He wondered who had been the person to tell Charles he’d died. It wasn’t like they shared any friends—Charles had taken them all with him when they’d split.

  Benji fell over the table when he turned around and saw Agnes there with her arms full of candy from the registers and a big steaming bowl of popcorn. Or rather, he’d done the ghost version of falling over something—starting so hard he went incorporeal and actually fell through it.

  The popcorn. There was no way to describe it. Benji’s mouth would be watering right now if it were capable. It smelled amazing.

  Agnes rolled her eyes and dumped her burden on the table Benji was currently sitting under. “Get up off the floor, and I’ll teach you how to actually eat it instead of just pretending to drool over it,” she said dryly.

  It was tempting. God, was it ever tempting. But as much as he wanted that popcorn in his mouth, he wanted the lesson to come from Patrick more. Even if that meant he didn’t actually get any of the hot, buttery ambrosia tonight. There would be other chances.

  He manfully suppressed a pout as he stood up, brushing his clothes off out of habit. Dust didn’t stick to him, not unless he willed it to. It was a neat trick, but took some getting used to. Just like everything else about CASA.

  “No thanks, Agnes. You’ve done enough just bringing the food up for me.”

  She pinned him with her laser-like stare, and he knew he wasn’t fooling her. Karin snickered from her spot near the laptop, making Benji’s transparency complete. Maybe he could get Patrick to give him lessons in not letting every single thought show on his face. After he got him to teach
him to eat because that was clearly more important. But it would be nice to go a day without getting mocked. Or at least a day with only Patrick mocking him.

  Agnes’s lips quirked into her slightly scary version of a smile. “Just might work,” she murmured, nodding.

  “We weren’t subtle enough last time,” Karin said in agreement. “Benji’s plan is much better.”

  He sighed as he moved over to snag a VGA cable from around Karin’s neck and start hooking the laptop up. She clearly hadn’t known what he needed, since she brought several. He saw an HDMI and what he was pretty sure was an old ethernet cable, though he had no idea where she’d have gotten that.

  Agnes craned her neck, watching him closely. “So you’re going to show a movie using this?”

  He wondered when Agnes had last actually watched a movie. Had they even had talkies then? He decided discretion was the better part of valor and bit back his joke.

  “I’m streaming the movie and using the projector to put it up on the wall. Kind of like how movie theaters do it.”

  Agnes poked at the laptop. The screen flickered from the burst of electromagnetic energy. She drew her hand back quickly, and Benji almost laughed. It was the closest to chagrined he’d ever seen her.

  Karin joined them, squinting at the laptop. “So there’s a movie reel in there?”

  Not for the first time, Benji wondered just exactly how old Karin and Agnes were.

  “Uh, no. Nowadays movie theaters are all digital.” He bit his lip when he looked up and saw two blank faces. “It’s hard to explain. But no, there are no reels of film.”

  He’d had a hard time figuring out what to screen for Patrick on their movie date, but after an hour agonizing over his choices, he’d settled on The Avengers. It was the perfect mix of comic book geekery, fists meeting faces, and the three-way dilemma of Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, or Tom Hiddleston. Robert Downey Jr. went without saying. But Hemsworth and Hiddleston were always a difficult choice that usually settled in a tie. It was exactly the type of movie he bet Patrick would have lined up to see on opening night.

  Benji was going to be kind of devastated if Patrick didn’t love it. Which was ridiculous, all things considered. But he wanted to give Patrick something special, to do something for him that no one else could. He and Patrick were alike in that way. They were both prone to grand gestures. Benji’s were just usually a little better planned out and a lot more well intentioned.

  “You’re doing a very nice thing here, Benji,” Karin said, and there was no mistaking the wistful smile on her face. She was definitely a little jealous.

  He grinned. “We could make it a weekly thing, you know. Movie night,” he clarified when both Agnes and Karin gave him a confused look. “Not that I wouldn’t like to have a weekly date with Patrick. I would. But we could have a movie night. For everyone, I mean.”

  It felt a bit silly now that he’d said it out loud. Could the Impressions even watch a movie? He wasn’t sure. There was still so much he didn’t understand about CASA. But Agnes and Karin definitely could, so it would at least be the four of them. Like a family night, since they were the only family he had now.

  “I’d quite like that,” Agnes said after a moment of consideration.

  Karin clapped her hands together. “Me too! How many digital movies does this thing have on it?”

  Benji smothered a laugh behind his hand, pretending to yawn. “Uh, they’re not on the laptop, exactly. We’re streaming them from a service that has a bunch of movies. Old television shows too.”

  If Karin was young enough, there might be an unfinished plotline out there that had been nagging at her for decades. Maybe she’d spent all this time wondering who shot J.R. He had to bite his lips together to keep from laughing at the thought of Karin with Farrah Fawcett hair and bell-bottoms.

  Agnes shot the laptop a look of deep mistrust but grudgingly nodded. “Streaming. Laptops. Digital movies. What’s next, cars that drive themselves?”

  They all looked up when someone cleared his throat in the doorway. Patrick leaned against the frame, looking reluctantly amused.

  “I figured the very vague note you left on my MILAN this morning to meet you here tonight meant you were reconsidering my blow-job offer. I didn’t realize it was a meeting to talk about future cars. I’d have dressed with more care,” he said wryly, gesturing at the stained Despicable Me shirt he’d plucked from Lost and Found a few days ago. Benji hadn’t had the heart to tell him it was a minion and not a Twinkie with a face. Patrick had been absolutely delighted by it.

  Agnes made a disgusted sound and wrinkled her nose at him. “If you cared about anything at all, you’d stop raiding that box and start materializing your clothes like the rest of us.”

  Patrick’s eyes widened. “What’s that I hear in your voice, Agnes? Concern? So you do like me!”

  She fixed him with a withering stare and rolled her eyes. “I’d like you to be gone,” she muttered before disappearing.

  Karin shook her head and followed suit, leaving the two of them alone in the conference room.

  Benji watched Patrick for a few seconds, sighing softly when he saw Patrick’s easy posture tighten up when it was just the two of them. “Just so you know, cars that drive themselves actually exist. Or at least, the prototypes do. They’ve had several moderately successful tests.”

  Patrick gave him a thin-lipped smile. “Time does march on, doesn’t it?”

  Benji cleared his throat, uncomfortable with the maudlin turn things had taken. He knew life was moving on out there without him, but he didn’t like to be reminded of it. And there was no better remedy for escaping reality than slipping into someone else’s.

  “Would you go to the movies with me?” he blurted, wincing at the abruptness of the subject change.

  Patrick’s brow furrowed. “Are you forgetting that pesky business of us not being able to leave the premises?”

  There was definitely interest behind the snarky attitude, and Benji gave himself an internal high five. Operation Movie Date was cleared for takeoff.

  “Welcome to the CASA Cineplex, sir,” he said, bowing low. “We’ll begin our screening momentarily. Please help yourself to concessions and find a seat.”

  Patrick was still looking at him like he was crazy, but his eyes were sparkling, a sure sign that Patrick was enjoying himself.

  Benji fiddled with the light switches while Patrick roamed around the table, finally settling on one of the two seats at the end of the table farthest back from the projector.

  “So we don’t disturb any of the other customers in our movie theater if we get frisky during the imaginary movie,” Patrick said with a conspiratorial wink. “I was always a back row kind of guy.”

  Benji snorted. He had no trouble seeing Patrick in the back row of a theater, though it had probably been to throw popcorn instead of get up to anything lewd. For all his bravado, Patrick was surprisingly prudish. Benji knew he’d been hurt by someone before, which accounted for a lot of his hesitancy to get intimate, but that didn’t explain why Patrick flustered so easily when their hands brushed. It was endearing.

  “It’s not an imaginary movie,” he said, pointedly refusing to engage in Patrick’s childish innuendo. He brought up Netflix and logged into Charles’s account.

  His hand hovered over the projector button. “I have a really important question for you,” he said, looking over at Patrick.

  “Gee, Beaver, I don’t know where babies come from. You’d better ask Pop,” Patrick said, his eyes wide.

  Benji’s lips twitched. “Asshole. Seriously, this is life or death.”

  “Afterlife or death, you mean?”

  Benji drew his hand back and crossed his arms. “Maybe I was wrong about you. I doubt you’d like this anyway. You’re probably all Superman all the time.”

  Patrick gave him an offended tsk. “Earth isn’t so badly off that it needs to import aliens as superheroes,” he scoffed. “Marvel all the way.”

  Benji
grinned and flicked on the projector. The title credits for The Avengers popped up on the large screen. “Right answer.”

  Patrick’s mouth dropped open. “No. They did not make my favorite comic ever into a movie. Did they? Did they really make Avengers into a movie? Who played Thor? Val Kilmer, right? Had to be Val Kilmer.”

  Benji snorted a chuckle. “What?”

  Patrick shrunk down in his seat a little bit. “Nothing.”

  Pure happiness bubbled through Benji. For the first time in a long time, he was exactly where he wanted to be. He could count the number of perfect moments he’d had during life on one hand, and he was thrilled beyond belief to realize he’d get to have them in the afterlife too. A lot more of them, too, if he had anything to say about it. He bet he could easily fill both hands and both feet with happy Patrick moments if he really set his mind to it.

  “Oh my God, I can’t tell you how happy I am to get to be the one to introduce you to the perfection that is Chris Hemsworth,” he said, delighted.

  “But first, we have a score to settle.” Benji would have pulled on his handlebar mustache if he had one. It was the ultimate villain moment. “I believe you promised to teach me how to eat.” He looked pointedly over at the popcorn and candy Agnes had arranged on the table.

  “Come on! That could take forever! I’ll teach you after, I promise.” Patrick pouted and rubbed his face when Benji didn’t unpause the movie. “Benji, it’s The Avengers,” he whined.

  Benji raised his eyebrows, holding Patrick’s gaze.

  “Oh, fine,” Patrick said. He didn’t bother getting up. Instead, he just teleported over to the table, appearing on it sitting with his legs crossed underneath him. “I hope you choke on it,” he said as he held a piece of popcorn up to Benji’s lips.

  “Now who’s forgetting that we don’t need to breathe?” Benji teased, the words muffled by the food.

  Patrick’s lips twitched and he withdrew the popcorn. “You don’t get to be the funny one. That job is already taken, by me.”