Page 7 of The Legend Next Door
His eyes.
God. His eyes.
I wasn’t ready for his eyes.
“What are we talking about?” says a smooth, albeit bored-sounding, voice from the corner of my living room. Marcus has let himself melt into my beanbag. He’s one with it now and not going anywhere anytime soon. He looks up from his phone and glances expectantly at me and then at Vanessa.
“Oh, you know, Jer here is still banging on about how hot the boy next door is,” she explains.
“Um, excuse me, Ness,” I say, breaking the word into three separate syllables, “but Ben’s not a boy. He’s a man. Believe me, he’s about as far from a boy as a human being can possibly get. He’s all man. He’s a man’s man. The kind of man who cooks meat on an open fire and chops wood with an axe and doesn’t even know that those are manly things to do because they just come naturally to him. He’s like that, but, like, better. He’s what would happen if you took masculinity and pressed it through a sieve until the juice was removed and all that was left was the grit. That’s what he’s like.”
“So, wait,” says Ness, not following my analogy, and honestly, who can blame her, “is he the juice or the pulp?”
“He’s the pulp,” I explain patiently, “the grit. The hard stuff left over when all the softness of masculinity has been extracted.” My voice drifts and fades because, for all I’ve just said, Ben Stirling’s eyes don’t match his face. “Ben Stirling,” I whisper a couple of times for no reason except that I like how it sounds. “It’s unfair how some people aren’t just born with a hot face and body, but they get a hot name as well, don’t you think? Have you ever noticed how often that happens?” Neither friend answers, so I say, “Ben Stirling,” in a dreamy voice, and then, “Ben Stirling,” in a deep voice typically used in trailers for action movies and thrillers.
Ness and Marcus look at me funny, so I stop there. There’s a fine line between perving over someone and being creepy, and I think that last “Ben Stirling” might have nudged me over.
“Did you say BenStirling?” says Marcus.
“Uh-huh,” I reply, loathe to say his name aloud again so soon after my recent performance.
A pair of deep-set coffee-brown eyes blink at me from the corner. Marcus taps on his phone screen, clicks on something, and then turns the phone toward us. “Isthisyour new neighbor?”
Vanessa cranes her neck to see Marcus’s screen and considers the image on it for no more than a couple of seconds. “If that’s your new neighbor, you’re one hundred percent right, Jer. He’s definitely not a boy. That man is a soft Dom if ever I’ve seen one.”
I look at Marcus’s phone, fully expecting to see an unfamiliar face, but I’ll be damned. The man on his screenismy new neighbor. Marcus has good stalking skills, but that was quick even for him. “Yeah. That’s him. Hot right? How did you find him so fast?”
“Jeremiah,” says Marcus. “This is Ben Stirling.TheBen Stirling.”
I’m finding it hard to follow as my brain severely short-circuited at “soft Dom” and has yet to come back online. Vanessa pats me urgently on the knee to draw my attention to what Marcus is saying. It doesn’t help.
“He’s a hockey player,” Marcus spells out when it becomes clear that simply saying his name over and over is of no help to me.
“Hockey? Aw, yeah, Luca has mentioned hockey a few times. I think they enjoy it.”
“Jer…” starts Ness.
“He doesn’tenjoyhockey, Jeremiah. It’s not a hobby to him. He’s one of the greatest players in the history of the game. He is alegend. Anicon. He was the captain of the Tampa Bay Blackeyes for almost ten years. He’s scored more goals than any other player, living or dead.”
“Oh,” I say, slightly huffy from humiliation, “well, in that case, he probably does enjoy hockey, doesn’t he? You don’t get that good at something without enjoying it, do you?”
“Jer,” Ness says again, eyes dancing with something like faintly suppressed glee, “do we need to run through your interaction with this man in granular detail to assess how badly you embarrassed yourself?”
I relent and give them a blow-by-blow account of what happened from the time I arrived on Ben’s property to the time I left. I cover what I said and what he said. Where I sat and what I did with my face, including several live-action replays. I cover it all in granular detail, like Ness suggested, though I leave out what he said about his wife, and I don’t mention that Luca flew his plane down the stairs. Or that Ben calls him sweetheart.
I’m not sure why I leave all that out, but I do.
According to their assessment, there was a lag at the beginning of the conversation, which was when I was supposed to gush and fall over myself at being in the presence of greatness. Ness and Marcus assure me that what happened is a disaster and there’s nothing I can say or do to come back from the situation without humiliating myself further.
“So, anyway,” Ness says, rather cheerfully. “What would you let him do to you?”
“Huh?”
“You said, ‘The things I’d let that man do to me,’ but you never got to what you’d actually let him do.”
We’ve talked about him so much now that I’d almost forgotten how we got onto the subject. I think about his face again, and I think about something else I haven’t told Vanessa or Marcus. I think about Ben Stirling’s eyes. Even though everything else about him is hard and tough, just like I said, his eyes are different. They’re vast and fragile, misty blue orbs that shine a light on such an intense vulnerability that my insides clench when I so much as think of them.
“Anything,” I say at last. “I’d let him do anything to me.”
