First of all: why would I tell Ben about ordering testicles for dinner when I was a kid?
Second of all: no, no, no!
Ben smiles, flashing that solitary dimple at me and my pulse wavers.
“No, to be honest Mr. Glass, Elizabeth hasn’t told me all that much about herself,” he says.
Dad looks properly put out. He furrows his brow, stretches his arms out over the sides of the booth and before I can stop him—before I can steer the conversation into safer territory—he’s off.
And so begins the lunch that nightmares are made of.
From the dredges of hell, my father pulls out every single embarrassing childhood story about me. There’s the time that I locked myself in an outdoor trunk, and when I measured out two cups of salt for the cookie batter instead of sugar, and how I threw up on Jacob Hoffman’s shoes when he asked me to be his girlfriend in the seventh grade. And there are more—way too many to count. My brain starts to hurt with the horror of it all.
Even after we finish our lunch, my dad’s still going. His eyes are glazed over with fondness, and he’s chuckling as he describes a tiny rosy-cheeked Elizabeth that I can barely remember, demanding a hot pink cast when she broke her arm after falling off a playground slide.
Ben isn’t moving. He’s sitting back in the booth looking at me, and he’s got this expression on his face that sends goose bumps up my arms.
And I’m thinking about the time years ago that my parents took me to California and we drove north from the resort to see the redwoods. I stood at the base of a stand of ginormous trees, and looked up through the lens of the camera that my grandmother had sent for Christmas. But they didn’t look like the redwood trees from the photographs I’d seen. It was like squinting through a kaleidoscope—all greenly light and twinkle and strange hypnotizing lines. I told mom what I thought and she said, “The trees are the way trees have always been, Elizabeth. What’s different is the way that you’re looking.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Vinyl Vertigo
Back at the house, things are still in hangover mode. The television is on an endless cycle of infomercials. Ainsley and Payton have crashed on opposite ends of the same couch. Their socked feet are entangled. There’s a half-eaten bowl of pre-packaged macaroni and cheese between them with two forks sticking out. And Laurie has been resurrected from the floor. Now she’s slouched in the armchair with a droll look on her face and a bag of microwave popcorn in her lap.
Dad and I trade goodbyes in the doorway because he says that he’s in a “time crunch” to get to that conference. I think that maybe he just wants to avoid another foray into my home, a.k.a. The Hotbed of Iniquity.
He squeezes me one last time. He shakes Ben’s hand enthusiastically and tells him to, “Watch out for my girl.” Meaning me I guess. The exchange makes me cringe in embarrassment, but Ben takes the whole thing in stride—grinning and nodding his head appropriately.
And then dad is gone, and Ben and I are standing side by side surveying the scene in front of us. I should probably grab a garbage bag and start with the small stuff, but it’s like I would rather have pins shoved under my fingernails than clean-up day-old party trash at the moment.
Ben must be thinking the same thing because he turns to me and says, “I’ve got to go do some stuff. Want to come?”
That’s how I wind up in the passenger seat of Ben’s car on my way to do “stuff.” He hands me a cord and tells me that I can choose the music. I plug in, scroll through the songs on my phone, and settle on one of my recent favorites.
When the music starts, Ben gets a funny look on his face.
“What?” My tone is careful. I’m teetering between annoyance and mortification.
He shoots me a sideways glance and shakes his head. “Nothing. I just didn’t peg you for a listener of emo kill-yourself type music.”
Now I’m offended. “Excuse me? What are you, like the god of music?” I point to the speaker. “This happens to be an excellent song off an incredible album.”
“Whoa, down girl!” Ben laughs. “I completely agree with you. This song is great. The baseline is intense and the drummer nails the bridge. All I meant is that I didn’t have you pegged for this type of music.”
“And what, exactly, did you have me pegged for?” Ahhhhh! Why does that so sexual coming out of my mouth? My face blushes scarlet.
Luckily, Ben is oblivious. He’s listing off names of artists I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to. My dismay is growing. All I can manage to spit out is, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Ben laughs again as we get out of the car. “Don’t be offended, Ellie. The real you is turning out to be even better than I originally thought. And that’s saying a lot.”
The compliment takes me by surprise and I make a misstep. Ben catches me by my elbow before I manage to topple over. He stands me up and brushes the falling hair away from my face.
Shaking off an a shiver, I follow Ben toward a narrow, lonely looking shop tucked into a brick building between a dry cleaner and a place that makes the bold claim that they have “The Best Enchiladas in the Galaxy.” We’re about two blocks too far off of Main Street for me to feel comfortable and I find myself sliding closer to Ben.
“I still can’t believe you ever thought that I would listen to that crap.”
“Consider me put in my place,” he says softly, bending his face to my ear.
He pushes on the brass knob of a non-descript black wooden door. An old bell serenades us as we walk in. I look around, taking it all in—the yellowed lighting and the dated couch that’s shoved into a small alcove to our right. Brown is working its way into the masking tape colored walls from the corners and the cash register looks like it matriculated from a factory sometime in the late 1970s.
The place goes back a lot farther than I anticipate. There are music posters everywhere and rows upon rows of vinyl records stretching to the back wall. It smells like a cross between nacho chips and stale office space. The floor is made up of worn burnt orange carpet smudged with shoe marks and the occasional ground-in piece of chewing gum.
I turn my head to Ben. “A record store, huh?”
Ben tucks his hair back and a wide, dimpled grin breaks his face apart. “It’s a little more than that, but… yeah.”
As we walk down one of the aisles, a harassed looking guy appears from a backroom door. He’s got wire-rim silver glasses and graying hair that meets in the front in an abrupt widow’s peak. He grumbles a greeting when he sees us and ushers us to the front desk. He and Ben have a quick conversation about strings and flatrounds and frets.
I nod and pretend to follow along, but really, I have no idea what they’re talking about. Ben glances down at me and smiles knowingly with one corner of his mouth. In response, my heart dips. When he slings his arm casually over my shoulder and introduces me to the guy—Harvey—my pulse officially redlines.
Back on the street, Ben explains that he was ordering a few things for his instruments. He tells me that repair and part replacement are Harvey’s bread and butter. The records in the store are more of a hobby than a profit producing business.
“So music is your thing?”
Ben is steering us down the sidewalk. He stretches his long arms out and shrugs down at me. “Yeah, music is sort of my life right now, but it’s not the only thing that I care about if that’s what you’re getting at.”
The bait is too tempting. “So, what else do you care about then?”
“Ha!” He squints his eyes and chews on his bottom lip. Dark hair falls across his forehead. Distracted, he brushes it away. “Let’s see… I care about recycling, and unrest in the Middle East, and about the desperate plight of the polar bears, and that libraries and mechanical pencil sharpeners are disappearing, and about winning at Scrabble. I care about my little brothers and my mom and…” he darts a quick look at me, “about my friends.”
I tip my chin forward. Our footsteps are in sync. “Okay, that was a pretty good
answer.”
“I always aim for pretty good,” he asserts seriously. “And you Elizabeth Glass? What do you care about?”
“I care that you don’t ever call me that again!” I slap his arm playfully.
“Fair enough!” Ben laughs as he skips back to dodge me. “But, at least answer the question.”
I shake my head and sigh, loud and breathy. “I guess that I care about getting into Columbia Law and joining my parent’s firm one day. I want them to be proud of me.”
The moment that I’ve said it, I wish that my answer was better. I wish that I had said that I, too, care about polar bears, and pencil sharpeners, and about deforestation in South America, and about the sanity of the people that walk around the planet thinking that the mullet is still a reasonable hairstyle, and about calzones not being at all the same as pizza.
I realize that we’ve stopped walking and we’re standing still on the sidewalk looking at each other.
“I’m sure that they’d be proud of you no matter what. You’re an amazing person.” He frowns. “Is Columbia really that important?”
“I guess that you could say that Columbia is the culmination of all of my planning. It’s something that I’ve been working toward for as long as I can remember.”
“But, it can’t be the only thing that matters to you.” Ben’s face is a puzzle. How can his eyes manage to be reserved and earnest at the same time?
“Well, noooo….” I drop my shoulders. “I care about my friends, my family, and more funding for space exploration,” I say.
His brow creases. “Space?”
I laugh. “Yeah. I know that it sounds completely geeky, but I love watching all those NOVA specials about how the universe was formed, and about black holes, and all that kind of stuff. If I had been blessed with mathematical superpowers, I think I would have liked to be an astrophysicist.”
“Astrophysics, huh? I can see that…” Ben’s head is angled to one side and he’s smiling. “Anything else?”
I answer quickly before I can think about it too much. “Photography. I care about taking pictures.”
I’m walking again and Ben takes two quick steps to catch up. He reaches out for my arm and pulls me to a stop beside him.
“Pictures of what?” His fingers glide down my skin until they are resting against my palm.
I shrug, keeping the pretense that my insides aren’t turning to goo from Ben’s touch. The reality is that my heart is rioting and I’m a ball of kinetic energy. “Anything really. Faces, landscapes…”
Slowly, so that I’m not even sure that he’s aware that he’s doing it, Ben laces his fingers through mine. “Will you show me?”
I shake my head and look down at my brown boots. I let my eyes follow the long jagged cracks in the cement and come back to the epiphany that is our fingers threaded together. Suddenly, I realize that we’re alone, in a dead space between two buildings.
“I don’t show anyone,” I say breathily.
“Ellie…” My name falls so softly from his mouth that it makes me shiver. “I didn’t ask if you’d show anyone. I asked if you’d show me your photos.”
The expression on his face is so hopeful and open that all the words get garbled in my chest. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m nodding. Ben smiles and the dimple makes an appearance on his cheek.
Our hands are still clasped together sending jolts of electricity up my arm. We’re so close that our shoes are touching and his warm breath stirs the tiny, curling hairs around my face.
What happens next is not something that I plan. It’s not something that I even think about…
I kiss him.
I stretch up on my toes and softly brush my mouth over his. It’s gentle. The first leaves of spring. And for the smallest moment, Ben is too stunned to move. And the air is still. So still.
Then, he seems to register what’s happening and his hands slide to my waist. He lets go of two tight, strained breaths against my mouth, and everything changes. Now I’m not the one doing the kissing.
This is no shy, just-between-friends kiss. This is a kiss unlike any that I’ve ever had. It’s the kiss of a hundred thumping kick drums, a raging earthquake.
Ben’s strong arms pull me against him and I fold. He parts my lips with his tongue and it’s like discovering that you can fly. One minute you’re tied to earth by gravity and everything you know about the world, and the next you’re up, floating, soaring, and the houses and people below are tiny, insignificant specs of dust slipping away.
Ben picks up the tempo. His fingers move over my spine and up, up under the fabric of my shirt until he is touching bare skin. My lips find his neck and my hands find his stomach and everything crashes around inside of me. I can feel his knocking heart moving under his skin, crawling into me. Ben kisses along my hairline. His pink tongue flicks against my ear.
Suddenly, I miss his mouth. I kiss up, up, up, until our lips are fused and we are exploring—tasting, sucking, burning—ungluing everything. A million tiny bells ring in my ears. Everything brightens, like the sun has been shoved out of its hiding place from behind the clouds.
Ben is the first to break away. I am left gasping and clinging tightly to his shirt so that I don’t go sideways or mysteriously disintegrate. He lifts his long musician’s fingers to my face and presses his mouth to me. He murmurs into my hair. And, I’m not sure, but I think what he says is, “wow.”
I know it’s Ben when I hear the soft tapping on my bedroom door that night. I’m incredibly grateful that I decided to put on my cutest pajamas just in case.
Twisting to the side, I usher him into my room and close the door gently behind him. Then we’re standing in the middle of my green oval area rug staring each other down. Ben’s hair is pulled back in a low ponytail and I can see his neck. I have to push aside the thought that I know what it’s like to lick it.
After an eternity of awkward, sexually frustrated seconds, Ben hooks his hands in the pockets of his jeans and the corners of his mouth tip upward. My heart expands.
“I thought you could show me your pictures,” he says evenly.
“Oh,” I say, covering up my wilting heart. Oh, you mean you aren’t here to ravage me?
He just smiles like he can read my thoughts.
I shake my head to clear it. “Yeah, of course. Just—just grab a seat.” Where? My desk chair is currently being swallowed by LSAT prep books and forcing him to sit on the floor seems rude. “On the bed. The edge of the bed.”
He sits.
On. My. Bed.
I’m over at the desk fiddling with the keys on my laptop. I find the file with the Paris photos. They are the ones that I shot two summers ago when my parents took me with them to Europe for ten days. I yank out the power cord and lop over to the bed with my arm looped under my computer.
The thing about mattresses is that they dip when you set things on them. Weighted objects, like bodies, tend to fall together. Ben and I start out with a good half-foot of boundary space between us, but as the minutes pass, we slide closer until our hips are almost touching. My whole body is on high-alert,
Ben sifts through the images, spending more time on a few of the shots—especially the ones that I’ve taken of people—mostly strangers I encountered on the street.
“This one,” he says, gesturing to the screen of my laptop. “It’s really beautiful, Ellie.”
I flush. The photo is of a white-haired man holding a horn. I remember that he’d been sitting outside a small Parisian café playing his horn in the afternoon. I’d already been ready for the shot when the sky opened up and a thousand fingers of rain came tumbling down. The horn player paused, his mouth an inch from his instrument, and looked up at the sky. That’s the moment that I caught with my camera.
Ben’s going on. He’s telling me that he likes another shot. He’s describing qualities of light, but I’m somewhere in my head. Lost. I notice how his long musician fingers are touching the keys of my laptop and I’m remembering th
e way that they felt spread over the bare skin of my lower back. We are too close and my skin is beginning to burn underneath my clothes. My hormones are turning me into a fire hazard.
“What?” Ben’s lilting voice breaks through my reverie.
God. He’s probably concerned about my heavy breathing and the unattractive red splotches that I’m positive are breaking out all over my face.
I let my hair fall forward like a shield. “Nothing. You were saying…”
But Ben has stopped talking. When I chance a look, he’s doing that silent stare thing. It’s alarming how much it affects me. How it sucks away all of the air in the room. How it sends tingles through my entire being and makes my body hum with anticipation.
“Ellie,” he says softly. He shifts the computer so that it’s no longer a barrier between us. The tips of his fingers gently brush the side of my face. I close my eyes and part my mouth to breathe.
“Ellie,” he repeats my name. Then, he leans toward me and his lips flutter over my eyelids, sending a wild hum through my limbs.
I open my eyes and he’s looking at me with so much heat and desire that I have to remind myself to breathe properly. I pull his shoulders down until we’re falling back onto the mattress and Ben is over me. Supported by his forearms, he hovers, watching me intently with those gold-flecked brown eyes. His hands slip lower. I lift my hips to meet his and the room tilts.
There is nothing imaginary or gentle about what moves between us. It’s like a tsunami. Our mouths crush, crash, against one another. Our hands pull—skin, shirt collars, hips. I am frantic to have all of him pressing down against me. I yank the shirt he’s wearing over his head. I slide my fingers over his rippled bare chest and edge my way along the waist of his jeans. Ben moans into my mouth. His knee comes up between my legs and I do some moaning of my own.
With his hands, he traces tiny circular patterns on my body, bringing every one of my pores to life. He is the musician and I am the instrument. I glide beneath him, barely breathing, barely thinking.