Page 74 of One on One
When adults refuse to talk, kids fill in the blanks with something scary. And a missing dad is a pretty big blank.
Ben continues. “Sometimes he’d be gone for weeks or months. Other times it was years. The last time, Mom got pregnant with Natalie. It’s weird to think about it, but at that point she was the exact same age I am now. And she was responsible for two kids with no help.”
I press my lips to his chest, feeling his heart beat against them.
“After that, I told her I didn’t want him around. I made a PowerPoint presentation to plead my case.”
A load-bearing wall in my chest cavity crumbles. “No,” I say, my head snapping up. “Ben.” I tighten my arms around him. “Were there slide transitions?”
“Twelve-year-old me would never have expected a PowerPoint to be taken seriously without slide transitions,” he says. “Clip art too.”
It’s so him and so heartbreakingly vulnerable that I have to close my eyes. Ben learned too young that there are people who chip away at your limits to see how much room they can make for themselves. How much of you they can get without giving anything up. It’s them or you. You have to choose. I had to learn this lesson too, but not until later.
“I don’t know exactly what happened after that,” he says. “My mom didn’t tell me back then, and she either doesn’t want to rehash it now or has blocked the details out of her memory. But I haven’t seen or talked to my dad since.”
I place a whisper of a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you for telling me,” I say. “You don’t know where he is?”
His chin pokes out. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
It explains a lot. The unwavering loyalty to the people he loves, because that’s all he ever wanted, and he knows whatit’s like not to have it. The trust he places in the people who’ve given him loyalty in return. This is why he won’t give up on Maynard. Maynard chose him, mentored him, took care of him. Did everything his father didn’t.
My throat burns and I let out a shaky breath.
“Hey, I don’t want to make you upset,” he says, trying to turn my face up to his. I bury it in his chest instead. “We’re all good now, and we have been for a long time. Though I sometimes feel bad for Natalie. Guilty. My mom and I know the alternative—him being around—is worse. She has to take us at our word on that.”
I sit up straight. “No,” I say with force. “You should not feel guilty. Your sister has you. And between you and your mom, that’s all she needs.”
He looks at me, his mouth rippling, turning down and then up into a faint smile. I’ve affected him, somehow. It can’t be what I said, because it felt so inane.
We’ve spent several thousand hours of our lives together. Yet I’m just beginning to understand him. “I didn’t actually know you at all in college,” I say.
His hand catches my waist. “Do you know me now?”
I nod.
“Good.” The faint smile again. “Do you think this ever could’ve happened back then?”
“Us?” I try to imagine it. Ben, the Disney prince, and me, the main character in a music video directed by an overdramatic teenager. “I wasn’t adult enough to date an actual adult. I would’ve ruined it.”
“I can’t imagine it either. Which is wild because it feels so inevitable now. Even if it weren’t for Hailey, I never would’vebeen able to wrap my head around the possibility back then. You scared me. You were fearless and funny and confident and so smart. I wouldn’t have known how to handle you.”
I try to ignore how moved I am by the compliments. “You wouldn’t have survived it. Cause of death: girlfriend picking a fight because we didn’t fight enough. An actual thing I would’ve done at the time.” My face ignites when I realize I used the wordgirlfriend,even though it was in the context of the eight-year-old relationship we never had. I’m sure he notices, but he lets it go.
Instead, he whispers, “I like you so much.”
The words land like a Taylor Swift key change, and my heart grows a pair of wings. But my brain immediately hits the panic button. Like the sprinklers above us might start spraying at any second. My whole body does this wiggle like I’ve just felt a spider crawling down my back, and I cough.
I recover enough to take one of his hands. I turn it upright and trace the lines with my finger. “Ben,” I say. “Please, can we not say things like that until the season is over?”
He looked so comfortable and open a minute ago, reclined unself-consciously like someone in a painting who knows he’s being studied and depicted on canvas but doesn’t mind. Now he sits up against the headboard. “What do you mean?”
“We’re in a fantasy world right now. This is a once-in-a-lifetime season. We’re traveling nonstop, with nothing else except us and the best basketball this team has ever played. Right now we don’t have to worry about anything outside our little snow globe. We’ve never gone to the grocery store together or spent an hour trying to decide what to have for dinner on the third boring Friday night in a row. We canpretend the budget cuts aren’t coming, that things aren’t about to change. It’s not real. It’s likeThe Beach House.”
“I always knew I hated that show,” he says. “Hm.” It’s a contemplative noise, and he goes silent, thinking. “Wait, so does that make me Logan? Is this the hammock room? There should be some melted chocolate somewhere around here…”
It coaxes a smile out of me.
He squeezes my knee. “It’s like Italy, you mean, right? Oliver said nice things in the snow globe and then as soon as you went back to normal life, it didn’t work out.”
