Benji and the Wireman

by Charlie Winters

  “Ben,” my mother snapped, grasping my arm sharply. “Stop.”

  She gave me that look. That look that said, don’t. Don’t do this. Don’t push another one away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “But he doesn’t.”

  “That’s okay,” Jesse replied, looking toward my parents. “Ben doesn’t like help. I know this about him. He’s been trying to push me away since I’ve met him. But, I’ve read a lot of romance books and the common theme is, the more they push, the harder we fall, right? So I guess what I’m trying to say is that he can push me away all he wants.” He gave a single shrug. “I’m not gonna give up.”

  “Jess—”

  “Hey, Ben,” he tried again, “I took off this week. I got all of my jobs covered, so I can be here for you and your family. For anything you need. I’ve got extra space at my house if you want it. Or, if you two would be more comfortable staying there, I’ve got a nice big king bed rather than Ben’s little pullout. It’s got a nice big screened-in pool. Hot tub. Outdoor grill. It would be like staying at your own hotel. And it’s only about five minutes away from here.”

  “Your house is only five minutes away from here?” I asked, my mouth open in surprise.

  “You’ve never been to his house?” my mother questioned.

  “Ugh,” I warned, putting my hand up. “Details.”

  “Ben,” Jesse said, pressing his palm to my cheek, “sorry to have to do this in front of them, but it is what it is. You’ve kind of left me with no choice. I’m coming to this thing with you. I’m not leaving your side this week. I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable or if it makes me seem like a crazy stalker. I assure you that I’m not. I am just crazy about you and I know that you know that. I also know that you feel the same way about me. So the sooner you let me help you with all of this, the better off you’ll be, alright?”

  I nodded and pressed a kiss to his lips. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” He grabbed his keys from the counter and tugged at the front door with ease. It didn’t even fucking stick when he turned the knob. “Alright. Now, I’m going to go grab my bag. My clothes are in the truck. You want to get cleaned up? We should take your parents to breakfast, right? Oooh, we should go to that place where you can make your own pancakes.”

  And then he was gone, the door shutting behind him.

  Everyone stared at me for, like, thirty seconds.

  “So… that’s Jesse,” I explained. “I think we might kind of be in love.”

  “Uh huh,” my mom said.

  My dad scratched the back of his neck. “Uh huh.”

  Jesse squeezed the batter from the plastic bottle out onto the griddle like it was nothing. Like being there didn’t mean anything. Like we weren’t there, across from my parents, as a fucking couple, who had just basically declared all of the feels in front of them not thirty minutes earlier.

  No, he was just picking through chocolate chips and lining them up into some sort of formation before dropping them onto his creation, looking up every once in a while to smile at the people who had made me… you know, like it was just another day.

  “So,” my dad said, “Ben says you’re an electrician.”

  “That’s right,” he replied, dropping a few chocolate pieces into the batter. “Mostly residential, but we do some commercial work for a few businesses. Factories. That type of thing. It’s not a bad deal though, seeing as I work for myself. My brother and I own the company.”

  I turned toward Jesse, giving him one of my famous what-the-fuck looks. “You what?”

  “Will and I,” he said calmly. “We own it.”

  “But I thought you said that your dad—”

  “No, my dad works in the office. I run things by him when we’re gonna be out or whatever, but Will and I bought him out about five years ago or so. He books the jobs, but that’s about it these days. He hasn’t done any of the real work in some time. I don’t even know that he wants to work anymore really. My mom isn’t happy with him working so much and they don’t need the money. Honestly, I think he just does it to get out of the house.” Jesse finished his pancake and flipped it onto his plate. “Will you look at that? A masterpiece.”

  “But,” I said with a pause, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  Jesse turned toward me for a second, carefully pouring syrup over his chocolatey mess. “Why didn’t I tell you what? That I owned the company? Would it have made a difference?”

  “No. I mean, I guess not. I just figured it would have come up. We’ve talked about a million things. And we’ve talked about your job, like, a bunch of times. I mean, haven’t we?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. You never really ask about it.”

  I laid my head on his shoulder. “Really? Oh my God,” I said quietly. “I’m awful. I babble about my job all of the time.”

  “That’s because your job is cool.” He looked up at my parents. “Isn’t that job cool? I mean, you know, every time I’ve ever been at the gym and there have been captions on, I’ve never really thought about the person on the other end doing that, you know? I definitely want to watch him do a show sometime. I love that machine. It’s so great. I mean, the buttons are all black! That’s amazing to me. He doesn’t even know what they are. He just… knows.” He turned to smile at me before taking a huge bite of pancake. “He’s really smart. And so funny. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled more than I have since we’ve met.”

  I watched him chew, just quietly smiling through the bite, my mouth open, with the words on the tip of my tongue.

  “Will you excuse me for just a minute?” I said, quickly scrambling from the booth and bustling out into the hot Florida sun.

  It was hard to breathe for a moment, but I stared at a park bench (“Call Sally Strand! Strand Real Estate! Selling Satellite Beach!”) and tried to catch what little breath I had left in my lungs.

  “Ben?” Jesse’s voice came from behind me. It was quiet and almost weak, not like the man who had sung my praises just a few moments before inside the restaurant.

  “You sure about me?” I asked, my voice cracking. “I mean, are you really fucking sure, Jesse? Because I… I was one second away—”

  I paused and wiped my eyes, staring at that bench again.

  “One second away from what, Ben?”

  “One second away from telling you that I loved you in there!” I sniffed out a laugh. I was pretty sure I was fucking crying, but whatever. It was only the busy parking lot of a cramped pancake restaurant, but I guess if I was going to have a mental breakdown in front of my new boyfriend, here was as good of a place as any. “Oh, yeah. And, to make things worse, it’s not the first time I’ve thought it either. And I almost did it in front of my parents. And we’ve known each other, what, two weeks? Yeah, my mom said I was out of my goddamned mind. So I lied to her, Jess! I lied and told her that, yeah, I was probably just feeling emotional about Oma and that I probably didn’t really mean it because how in the fuck could I really mean that? How could I look over while you are eating a stupid chocolate pancake and know that I want to ride into the sunset with you just because you said one nice thing about how smart I was because the fucking keys were black!”

  “Are you done?” he asked calmly, brushing my hair behind my ear.

  “No.” I folded my arms over my chest and stared at that bench.

  Maybe I should have called Sally Strand. If I would have, maybe I would have ended up in Satellite Beach instead of Indian Harbour. She would have placed me in a nice fucking condo with no electrical problems where I wouldn’t have met this… this…

  “Goddamn it!” I screamed.

  “Whoa,” Jesse said softly. He pressed his hands to either side of my neck, holding my head in place. “Alright, you need to stop for a second, okay?”

  “You want me to call you a Lyft or something? Have them take you back to your truck?”

  He laughed and pulled me in for a hug. “Babe, why would I want you to call me a car?”

  �
��Because I’m sure you want to run away, right?” I mumbled into his chest.

  “No.” Jesse lifted my chin with his thumb. “I want us to go back inside so I can make you a Mickey Mouse pancake. I am a master at pancake art, alright?”

  I stared at him as he quietly laced our fingers together and led me back into the restaurant. He slid into the booth first and then patted the seat beside him with a smile for my parents. They were both looking at me, of course, as if I had just lost my goddamned mind—which, to be honest, I just had.

  “You alright, little bear?” my mom asked.

  “Uh huh,” I said, picking up the squeeze bottle and squirting an insane amount of batter onto the griddle.

  Jesse quietly pried the bottle from my fingers and set it down next to him. Then he took some mini marshmallows and dropped a few of them into the batter. “Hope marshmallows are okay,” he said softly. “You like those Mallomar cookies, so I figured they were safe.”

  Oh, God, the feelings were coming back… ohgodohgodohgod.

  Jesse took the squeeze bottle and made a second pancake, squeezing the batter into the shape of a heart. Then he took the little chocolate chips and spelled out my name… right in the fucking middle. The minute I started to get up again, Jesse grabbed my hand and tugged me back down with a sigh.

  I just… couldn’t. My throat swelled like I had swallowed a goddamned hornet and all I could do was stare at my dad through glossy eyes across a sticky booth while my boyfriend just casually flipped his love pancake and smiled at my mother. Meanwhile, Oma was somewhere—just somewhere—just… cold in a box. She was waiting for us while we ate pancakes like nothing was wrong, but everything was.

  Everything was just wrong.

  “Jess,” I sobbed quietly. “I want to go home.”

  I dropped my chin to my chest and stared down at my hands on my lap. Jesse carefully used his spatula to collect the two pancakes and placed them on the plate. He pressed a kiss to the side of my mouth and whispered, “I know, baby. Let’s go.”

  Sixteen.

  Jesse

  I couldn’t do anything for Ben. I felt helpless, just randomly wiping down the counters and rearranging the magazines for the tenth time while his mom was back there with him, door closed, just… fixing him. Helping him. Meanwhile, his father sat on the sofa and I… well, I was just some asshole scrubbing out his sink for the third time and waiting for him to magically become… Ben again.

  “He’ll be alright,” his dad finally said. “He does this… sometimes.”

  I nodded and squeezed out the sponge. “He’s said as much. I’m just trying to help, but maybe I’m getting in the way.”

  “No,” he answered immediately. “I know we don’t know each other, but that thing you said earlier, you know, about you not going anywhere? I hope that’s true. He needs to see that you aren’t going to run anywhere. See, Oma was a little different for Benji than just about anyone in his life. That’s why this is happening, I think.” He gestured to the bedroom. “He’s got a lot on his mind. Of course, he loves his mom and me, sure, but Oma… did you know that they talked on the phone almost every day of his life?”

  I shook my head. “No. He didn’t, I mean, he hasn’t told me much about her other than that they were really close.”

  David laughed softly. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it. I always worried about their relationship in a way because she was getting older and losing her memories a bit and, well, that always hurt Benji. He’d bring something up that they had talked about the week before and if she didn’t remember it… boy, he’d be in a funk for days. It would be over the smallest things too. They’d watch television shows, you know, while they were on the phone with each other. They’d talk about some silly outfit or who looked fierce,” he said with a deep laugh, “and then the next week he’d bring up the outfit again and she wouldn’t remember it. He’d go into a sort of depression, sometimes for days, just about some silly gown, you know?”

  “He cancelled our date because Anna couldn’t remember him,” I told him.

  He nodded. “Yeah, he told me. But, he also told me that you didn’t take no for an answer. You came over anyway, even though he said he wasn’t ready.” David smiled at that. “That’s a good thing. Maybe Bridgette and I spoiled him as a kid, I don’t know, but he’s always just kind of gotten what he wants. If he wanted to be alone, we just let him. He was always pretty emotional and cried a lot and, as you can imagine, he was bullied pretty good as a kid, so that didn’t help either. Luckily, what you see is what you get with Ben though. He never was afraid, even with the bullying.

  “He’d always show up at school the next day with more glittery lip gloss or a different pink sweater,” he said with a shrug. “He wasn’t afraid to face his demons and a lot of that had to do with his Oma and Grandma Nancy. I gotta say if it was me, I wouldn’t have been so strong. I would’ve begged off the first day I took a punch to the gut, but not Ben. He’d have rather died than to be someone else. All the flamboyance and craziness that most people think is an act… man, I wish I could say that it was, but that kid has acted like that since he was about five. Heck, I don’t know… maybe earlier than that. It’s who he is. He wouldn’t know how to be anyone else.”

  “I’m glad he’s not,” I said honestly. “I’ve never really been one for… that, if I’m being straight with you. When I met him, I was surprised because I found myself trying to figure out a reason to come back, you know? To see him again and I’ve… I’ve never dated a guy like Ben. I’ve always—”

  “Dated guys like you?” he asked.

  I was ashamed in that moment, looking down at the chipped countertop in embarrassment. “Yeah, maybe,” I admitted. I looked back up to meet his eyes, eyes a little darker blue than Ben’s. “Actually, I never really dated much at all. A few really short-lived relationships here and there, but I guess there was a lot of self-hate there for a long time with me. I knew I was gay and I was learning to live with that. My brother knows and he’s really supportive, but my parents are another story. They don’t like it and, even though we don’t talk about it much, I know how they feel. So, it’s been pretty hard to live my life out in the open like I’d like to, especially when so much of my life is tied up with them. I work with my dad every day and… shit, this is embarrassing.”

  “Go on,” David said. “It’s alright.”

  “He doesn’t say much, but I know it embarrasses him. I know he’s embarrassed by me. You know, I told him I was seeing Ben and,”—I stopped to cough out a laugh—“he asked me if I was going to march in the parade now. He doesn’t understand anything about being gay. He doesn’t understand anything about me because he’s never asked. He won’t ever ask either. I told him that I hoped he’d come around, you know. I hoped he’d want to meet Ben because he was the best thing to have happened to me in a really long time and, you know, he just turned back to his work and ignored me. He just… ignored me.”

  David stood and started to come my way. Fuck, was he going to hug me? I hadn’t been hugged by my own father for as long as I could remember and… thankfully, he just put out a hand and placed it on my shoulder.

  “I like the way you act with my son,” he said. “And I like the way he acts with you. I’ve never seen him act like that. When he was with Zach, he seemed embarrassed by who he was. Almost apologetic, you know, which is funny because Zach isn’t exactly the manliest guy on the planet. But he also talked less when Zach was around or he talked about stuff that Zach liked instead of stuff that he liked.” David shrugged. “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to do that with you. Or at least not yet. I hope he doesn’t lose who he is.”

  “I don’t want him to,” I answered. “I love the way he talks. I love that he likes romantic comedies and crappy popcorn and incessant talking with his hands and hot pink shorts and just… everything. I don’t want him to change any of it.”

  “Well, I don’t know that Zach wanted him to either… at the beginning,” David returne
d with a small frown. “Just try to remind yourself why you started to fall for him in the first place.”

  The door to the bedroom cracked open and a red-eyed Ben walked out, his cheeks flushed with heat. He was beautiful and heartbroken and I wished we were alone so I could kiss him the way he deserved to be kissed. I wanted to strip him naked and kiss over every square inch of his body until he forgot about every woe that the day had brought.

  Ben slowly walked over to David and wrapped a single arm around his father’s back. “Sorry, Dad,” he mumbled.

  “You’re fine, little bear,” David replied. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Ben let go and came straight for me, wrapping both arms around my waist and squeezing tight. He didn’t let go at all. He just breathed in over and over, clutching me as if I would disappear.

  “You alright?” I asked him, petting the back of his blonde hair.

  “Mmmhmm,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing to us. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s been a hard day. It’s only going to get harder before it gets better.”

  “Great,” he said with a laugh. “It gets harder.”

  “Yep,” I assured him. “The next few days are gonna be shit. And then every day after that is gonna be easier because I’m going to be here to help you. We’re all gonna be here.”

  I looked up to see Bridgette mouthing Thank You to me over Ben’s head. God, she was like looking at an older female version of Ben. I nodded to her and pulled Ben closer into my body. He snuggled in tightly, loving the feel of his warm breath against my neck. “We have to go to Oma’s. There’s paperwork and stuff,” he said softly. “And then we have to go to the funeral home. Oma already arranged one, I guess.”

  “What do you want me to do, Ben?” I asked. “Want me to come with you?”

  Ben shook his head. “Mom and I will go. I think you’ve seen just about enough crying for one day.” He laughed softly. “Is the offer for your house still good? Maybe you can take my dad there and set them up or something. We could just meet you there after?”