Work Text:
Don’t read the last page
But I stay when you're lost and I'm scared and you’re turning away
I want your midnights
But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day
It begins during the reception after Leia’s funeral, with Rey bent over the marble countertop in Luke’s guest bathroom, her dress crumpled around her hips as Ben parts her legs with his knee. He hasn’t been fully tracking time or events since listening to the message Artoo left on his voicemail, so he truly has no idea how it came to this. He can only remember fragments—a particularly soft gasp, a cluster of freckles on the curve of her white nape, the wet and welcoming give as he pushes inside to get deep enough.
After, he hangs his head and tucks himself back into his slacks, trying to avoid looking at his reflection in the mirror. And at her.
“Ben?” Her voice sounds small and tentative.
You just fucked her, something inside him points out, equal parts accusing and incredulous. You just—
“Ben. If there is anything I can do to—”
He is slamming the door behind him before she can finish.
…
The second time is at a private memorial function that Leia’s campaign office put together, and Ben never had any intention of showing up, but Lando ambushes him right outside the Governor’s office and pulls him into the passenger seat of his car.
“How’re you holding up, kid?” he asks gruffly.
Ben has to clear his throat. “Very busy. Midterm elections coming up.”
Lando sighs and his hands tighten, white-knuckled on the steering wheel. Ben ignores it, choosing to focus on the way the fat drops are splattering against the windshield. The way it rains in September, it’s unlike any other time of the year. Tired and dreary, it paints everything in tones of dull grey.
A stupid month, September.
He slips inside the conference hall ten minutes late, and leans back against the wall at the back of the room as Poe Dameron takes the microphone to tell some presumably funny story about that time Senator Organa smacked him four times in a row. Like a mother, he says, and Ben lets the buzzing sound inside his head take over as his gaze wanders—to the smiling picture next to podium, to his own shoes, to the bellflower pots someone thought of setting up on the stage, purple and blue and white. Rey arrives at some point, from who knows where, and even though there is an empty chair in the second row, and another in the third right next to that guy who briefly interned for Snoke before jumping ship—Phil? Finn?—she remains standing less than an inch from Ben.
He doesn’t acknowledge her, and instead thinks about whether Bazine has finalized his schedule for next week’s fundraising dinner, and will the email migration to the new server complete smoothly, and should he go for a run in the park tonight—no, probably not, it’s raining too hard, he should just drag his ass to the gym.
His hands are icy cold, but twice during the never-ending succession of speeches something warm and solid squeezes his fingers. Ben ignores it.
“Hey. Can we talk for a minute?” She’s still there, tugging at his sleeve.
No, Ben thinks. No, I don’t want to talk.
Then again, maybe she doesn’t want to talk, either, because she guides him to a windowless room and after a feeble attempt—“I’ve been trying to call you at work.”—she doesn’t say anything for a long time. The walls are white and thick and no noise filters through, not the chatter of Leia’s former staffers and not the patter of the rain. The sounds within the room are all the more hollow and loud because of it: the catch of her zipper, a hushed Is this okay? that Ben doesn’t bother answering, and the long mahogany table sliding on the floor when he loses control and thrusts a little too forcefully.
The pleasure she pulls out of him cuts so deep, it’s almost painful.
On his way out he’s intercepted by Artoo, who gives him a letter. Ben recognizes the neat, loopy handwriting on the back of the envelope and instantly stuffs it into his breast pocket, out of his hand and out of his sight.
…
The third time—he is so wasted, he’s not certain it even happens.
A dream, maybe. Likely, since he’s been dreaming of Rey for so long and so often. Not much he can do, about it. He was dreaming of her well before Artoo’s call; before that ride in the Statehouse elevator, when she’d pressed the stop button to look up at him with those ridiculous, earnest eyes of hers and told him that he should quit, that Snoke was using him, that he was better than that; he dreamt of her before Snoke’s won his campaign against Leia’s, he dreamt of her in the months leading up to election day, and he definitely dreamt of her the night after they first met, that tense handshake backstage at one of the debates seared like a wound into his brain.
He dreamt of fucking her, dreamt of sitting her down and explaining her the dirty tricks they used to win the election so that she could fight back properly, and he dreamt of her just being there, impossibly beautiful and way out of reach, staring at him in that way of hers. Calm but expecting, like there is something of value hidden inside him. Like she will not give up until he shows her.
Since Artoo’s call, Ben has drank too much and slept too little, and there is simply no reason for Rey to be at the bar nearest to his place at one am on the day that would have been a dead woman’s birthday. No reason at all.
So maybe the third time, and the way his teeth sink around the tender skin of her collarbone: maybe it’s all a dream.
…
He was, as it turns out, named in the will.
He’s at work when he receives Threepio’s email, on the phone with a highly suggestible congresswoman as he tries to not-so-subtly intimidate her into behaving in a way that Snoke would consider acceptable. Ben clicks on the message and leans forward on his desk to better see the monitor. And then he leans a little closer.
It doesn’t add up. When Han died he didn’t leave Ben anything, and Ben was his grandfather’s sole heir, which means that whatever exists on this Earth that is even remotely Skywalker is already in his possession. Plus, Leia was always the give-everything-to-charity type, and—
He’s reading the address of the property for the fourth time, when Bazine peeks into his office.
“Snoke asked if you can meet with him now to go over the Williams issue—he has a 3 o’clock. Is that okay for you?”
Ben nods; closes his email software; looks around for his tablet; walks to the door; and heads to Snoke’s office. Halfway through, he takes a detour to the bathroom, chooses the stall farthest from the entrance, and throws up the protein bar he ate for lunch.
...
The fourth time, she comes.
They should be discussing the ostensibly bipartisan effort towards the implementation of legislation on federal test-based accountability, but instead she is coming, wet and deliciously tight, all around him. Ben sees it in the way her eyes widen, the light brown glossy with a sharp edge of surprise, that she didn’t expect to. It should make him wonder what she is even doing here, with him, like this, but then she actually says his name when it happens, as if he had gotten something right for once, as if it were his doing. It’s not, but it’s okay, and Ben comes, too, right on the wake of her orgasm, hearing himself grunt like the barely civilized beast that he is.
Two minutes later they are decent again, and Hux knocks on the door to join in the meeting right as Rey is saying something that has to do with help, and mother, and talk about it. Ben has never been so relieved to see him.
…
He thinks there probably won’t be a fifth time. In his head, he just labels the fourth as the last, archives it in a hidden, poorly-lit corner of his mind with numbers one through three, and leaves it there to gather dust. Something to think about in case he never develops normal, healthy sexual urges and continues being pathetically, undividedly obsessed with her for the rest of his natural life.
The very likely case.
A fifth time is surely out of the question because of what happens when they run into each other at the Statehouse, the week before Leia’s staff disbands definitively. Rey spots him and immediately turns to Dameron and that former intern of Snoke’s, who glares at Ben like it’s his part-time job.
“You go ahead. I’ll be with you in a minute,” she tells them softly.
It’s clear that they don’t want to leave her behind, especially not alone with Ben. Ben can sympathize, because a pretty big chunk of him doesn’t want to be left alone with her, either.
“Hey. How are you?”
She looks smaller than usual, rocking on her heels in her flat shoes. Younger than usual, too.
Small and young. And he thinks of nothing but fucking her. Jesus Christ, he’s disgusting.
“Good,” he tells her.
“Really?”
Ben is genuinely confused by her interest.
“Do you… are you busy?”
“Midterm elections are coming up, and we’re—”
“No, I mean—right now. Can I… buy you lunch? Something to drink? Coffee, maybe?”
Ben likes to drink. He likes to drink a lot lately, but coffee mostly tastes like acid and burns down his throat.
“No. Thank you.”
It’s a simple answer, but it triggers something complicated in her face, a war of some sort that culminates into her walking into him and pushing up on her toes; threading her fingers at the base of his nape and holding his head.
Ben realizes that the hallway is deserted but for the two of them, and he is suddenly petrified.
“What do you need?” Heartbroken, that’s what she sounds. “Ben. What do you need?”
His hands come up to her wrists, wrap around them, and linger for a moment. Then, as gentle as he can muster, surely not gently enough, he guides her away.
“Nothing.”
“I want to help. I really do, I just don’t know what to…”
Her voice catches on something, and she seems angry for a moment. Resigned. Ben has no idea what she means. Why she is here. Wasting her time and energy on him, when if only he could he’d get away from himself as fast as possible.
He is proud of how even his voice sounds, the moment he finally manages to speak.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
…
The day he quits his job, it’s been a month and fourteen days since Artoo’s call, and there are bellflowers in the trash can. Ben halts to stare at it—the wilted blooms, the pastel yellow pot, the plastic garbage bag tucked into the bin. Phasma is typing an email at her desk, but appears to notice where Ben’s gaze is pointing at.
“The flowers were all withered,” she tells him conversationally, in no way defensive. “Wait—Do you think it’s recyclable?”
Ben blinks several times. “The plant will make more flowers. At some point. If you…” Ben has no idea what one does to keep a plant alive. Water it? Mulch it? Sing to it? “Take care of it.”
Phasma shrugs. “I’m not much into flowers, anyway. And I hate most shades of purple.” She bends forward to grab the paper she just printed. “So.”
Ben nods. “Right.”
All of a sudden he feels, for the first time in years, a moment of intense self-awareness. He has always known, but now he knows, deep in his gut, that this is his job, this is his life, these are his choices, and those bellflowers are going to disappear the moment the janitor comes in to empty the trash, probably sometime after ten pm, when the hallways are dimly lit and the only sounds left to hear are the computer fans and the whirring of the vending machines.
“Ben. You’re here.” Bazine is, in a tragicomic twist, wearing a lavender dress. “I left coffee in your office, and I sent you four documents I need you to sign off on within thirty minutes. And—are you still planning to go over the Chassez notes before meeting with Snoke?”
There is no final straw, because there is no straw at all. And there is definitely no back that breaks. Really, it’s a simple matter of a pot of bellflowers in the trash can. Ben turns to Bazine, and fails to keep the surprise from his tone.
“No. No, I don’t think will.”
…
His new place is not as high rise or downtown as the old one, but it has the advantage of not being surrounded by taller buildings or unceasingly high-traffic streets. During the day, he can actually see the sun if he cares to. At night, he sometimes manages to sleep.
On Halloween children from the neighborhood knock at his door, mummies and fairies and new superheroes that are not Batman or Captain America and thus he has no chance of recognizing. First he panics; then he just grabs cliff bars and twenty dollar bills and lets them fall into their pillowcases.
He doesn’t much bother furnishing or decorating, but he does get a liquor cabinet, and a vinyl player, and a pot of bellflowers that he puts in the very middle of the breakfast nook. Ben hasn’t had breakfast in two decades, anyway.
The plant dies sixteen days later, its leaves sallow and curled into themselves.
Overwatering, the internet tells him.
”Yeah, probably,” his neighbor to the left—whose jasmine bush is thriving—confirms. “Water once every two to three days should be enough.” She shakes her head with an odd combination of indulgence and disapproval. “It’s hard to murder bellflowers, let me tell you. In barely two weeks. You have a special talent, young man.” She still has a ‘Leia Organa for Governor’ sign stuck in her yard. Ben looks the other way.
On the seventeenth day, he drives to Target and buys a new pot.
…
Sometimes, he wonders what a mental health professional would diagnose him with. Most of the time he doesn’t, but sometimes he does, and it’s in one of those rare moments that he thinks that going to his Law School’s Alumni Fundraiser might be a better idea than staying at home, listening to a Leonard Cohen’s album in the dark.
This whole brooding thing, it sounded badass when he was a teenager, but now it’s just pathetic.
He really, truly had no idea that she would be there. Or that she was an alumna. Or still alive, really. He had been doing great, he personally thought, some days not thinking about her for whole hours—others… well, not quite that long, but that is to be expected. She is… beautiful. Needlessly so. So beautiful that Ben thinks about walking out of the the very room he just walked in, because things are difficult for him already, and he really doesn’t need this shit. Rey spots him before he can, of course, and excuses herself from the very white, very wizened, very starchy group she’s conversing with to head his way. Ben is musing—with a healthy dose of ironic detachment—that things cannot possibly get any worse, when Maz intercepts Rey and grabs his elbow.
His ironic detachment begins to cackle.
“Look at the two of you. My favorite students. Both number one in your classes, some… what, ten years apart? Ben, have you met Rey Sanders?”
Ben exchanges a brief look with Rey, and immediately decides that any course of action that does not include going along with this is simply not worth the effort. When she extends her hand for him to shake, he doesn’t allow himself to think about the last time they touched. Because it’s irrelevant.
“Rey is working for congressman Holdo, now. And Ben—You are still working for the governor, right?” Maz asks, and Ben has to give it to her, that if he didn’t know that she hates Snoke with the passion of a thousand suns he wouldn’t be able to guess. Ben wonders how different his life would have turned out, if he had half her poker face.
“I am not.”
Maz hesitates, and then her smiles widen. “Oh. That’s… interesting.” Maybe not so good a poker face, after all. “What are you—”
Someone calls Maz away then, right then. Ben’s ironic detachment is laughing maniacally, now.
“I didn’t know you had quit.” Rey’s voice is soft, but it holds some surprise.
Ben says nothing. As has been his lifelong policy when he isn’t asked a direct question.
“I tried to call your office, but I thought you just weren’t answering your—”
“Sorry, children. Where were we?” Maz is basically hugging them, now. “Was I telling you about this fascinating case I’ve been involved in? Supreme Court worthy, let me tell you.”
Ben doesn’t look at Rey for the rest of the night.
…
The air is crisp with winter when Ben steps out, the contrast with the suffocating heat of the hours spent inside the building so pleasant that he almost doesn’t mind it, that he parked several blocks south.
“Is it true?” At the words, he turns around on the sidewalk. “Your job?” Rey’s lips are almost blue, her hands tucked in under her armpits.
She really is violently beautiful. Ben never thought he’d care about banal things like lips or hair or tits, but here he is, standing in the cold with his coat half open, noticing. There is something elemental about her, something that has him think true nonsense. She should pose for a portrait, she should have his children, she should stay still for him to study and measure, allow him to science the mystery of what she is. Ben finds himself wondering if she likes sushi, if she has siblings, if she’s dating someone. It might be the first time since college he’s even thought of the word ‘dating’.
“Yes.”
Rey nods. “So, maybe you’ll have some free time.”
“Free time?”
“To go grab a bite to eat? With me?”
He doesn’t understand. Why would she want to eat with him? Is she hungry? “I—”
“Rey. Cab’s here.” A small girl with black hair is standing a few feet from them. She’s looking almost comically back and forth between Rey and Ben, every few saccades stopping to linger on Ben and stare at him like… well. Like most people do.
“You should go. Your ride is waiting.”
“Yes, but do you—”
“Have a good night, Rey.”
…
Once he gets home he pours cereal in a bowl and then stares at it, trying to recall what it was that he was hoping for, that seemed so important, when he was twenty and decided that joining Snoke and turning his back on… everything, really, was the right thing to do.
Whatever it was, he thinks, he must not have found it. And yet, here he is.
Ben wishes he could remember it, the macguffin of this story of his.
...
She is standing on his doorstep, her hair golden in the soft porch light, a faint smile on her red lips. She is shielding herself with a large paper bag.
“What are you—”
“I got food.”
“… food?”
“Yeah. It’s this thing you put inside your mouth and chew. For calories and vitamins and stuff. So you don’t die. How old are you again?”
“Thirty six,” he answers automatically. What? Why is she here?
“I’m surprised you managed to stay alive this long without eating, but now I’m here and I’m happy to teach you how to—”
“How do you know where I live?”
She adjusts her grip on the bag. “Why? Is it a secret?”
“I just moved.”
“Then consider the food a housewarming present.”
“How did you know that I—”
“Ben. I have my sources.” She bites into her lower lip and smiles mischievously—and several things happen at once.
First, the blood rushes away from his head, with a speed that leaves him a little dizzy.
Second, it moves to his cock. It does so in a slight roundabout way, first heading for Ben’s heart, which gets squeezed as if in a vise; but it nevertheless reaches south pretty quickly, and now Rey Sanders is standing at his door and Ben is having an erection for the first time in months.
He sort of hoped to be done, with this kind of things.
Third—she notices. Probably not all of it, but some of his confusion must register on his face, because she knows exactly when to push slightly past him to get inside his house, heading confidently down the hallway and into the kitchen like she’s the architect who designed the floor plan.
Fourth…
Yeah. Ben adjusts himself, turns around, and follows her inside, because Rey is not leaving him another alternative.
…
She has brought Thai, which typically Ben doesn’t much like. But chewing is as good a way as any to keep his mouth full, and Ben has nothing to say at the moment. They eat in silence, standing by the kitchen island, Rey staring at Ben, and Ben staring at the carrot slice floating in the green curry.
“Why did you quit?”
Bellflowers in the trash can.
He takes his time to swallow his bite. “Not for whatever reason you’re probably thinking.”
”You don’t know what I’m thinking.“
He truly doesn’t. The workings of her mind, whatever prompts her to act the way she does, are so beyond him that she might as well be a piece of wood drifting in the ocean.
“So, what are you doing now? In your life, I mean?”
I sit in that chair, the one by the window, feeling like I just emerged from some very deep waters, and I try to understand how exactly I ended up down there. If there is a specific moment I fucked up, if I could have been anyone else, if it’s only a matter of time before I dive in again. I try not to think about you, and I most definitely try no think about her. Every once in a while, I’ll catch a game. There is no map, I’m starting to understand, only landmarks we can choose to orient ourselves to, and the ones I have picked so far were clearly bad ideas. But I don’t know what, who else to follow, and the thought of being my own guide is paralyzing and terrifying.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all? For work?”
Ben shrugs. He doesn’t really need to work, she must be aware of it. He has accepted a teaching position for the fall, but that’s months away. “I am independently wealthy.”
Rey steals a piece of tofu from his plate. “No shit.”
…
They don’t clean up, afterwards.
Rey just walks into him like it’s something she’s done a million times before, like his body carries an indentation in the shape of her, and with a small, reassuring smile just takes his cock out of his jeans. Ben tells himself that if he’s not strong enough to say no to this, then at least he shouldn’t encourage her, but three pumps in and he has an arm around her waist, pressing her tighter into himself and kissing her messily.
She brings him off with slow pulls of her hand, and he comes all over the place between them; when he opens his eyes, she’s licking her palm clean.
He’s still swimming along the pleasure while she asks, “Can I come over again?”
He will never, ever understand. “This—it’s not a good idea.”
He feels her smile in his chest.
“What about next week?”
…
She comes by during the weekend, while he’s having a particularly bad day.
Ben always hated weekends, the boredom and the loneliness and the lack of activities. The fact that at the end of the work week both his parents had been either too tired or too taken by each other to pay any attention to him. Sometimes there had been books to read and swim meets and old movies, but by Sunday night he had always been in the darkest of moods.
Then again, Ben was never one to enjoy himself much at all, no matter the day of the week.
Rey takes a good look at him and toes off her shoes, shimmies out of her jeans, throws her sweater on the back of the couch, and then… Ben is getting a mind-bending blow job that he obviously does not deserve.
She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t talk to him, she shouldn’t even wave at him when they accidentally pass each other, because that’s how shitty a person he is. And yet, she’s on her knees in front of him, naked and pink and moaning like sucking his cock is something that she wants to do, and when she looks up at him with her mouth full, the pleasure runs down his spine so suddenly that there’s nothing he can do to make this obscenity stop.
He opens his eyes to her swallowing what’s left of his come. She grins playfully as she wipes her lips with the back of her hand, and suddenly Ben understands what people mean, when they point at a sunrise or some stupid landscape to use it as proof of the existence of God.
“I enjoyed that.” She is looking up at him. “Did you?”
He can’t possibly answer her. For one, his vocal box is probably liquified somewhere down his spine, but there’s also the fact that she’s still naked in front of him, cheeks rosy and one long curl sticking to a pointed nipple. She is still on her knees, fidgeting a little.
“Can I also…?”
She is, thankfully, more adept at communicating than Ben is. “That would be nice.”
She is, also thankfully, more adept at everything else. They’ve done this before, but at the time Ben was blissfully mindless and little more than an animal. Now he’s not and he lets her guide him—where to position between her legs, how to stretch her with his fingers, when is the right time for him to slide inside.
He loses control almost immediately, his thrusts becoming exaggerated, too deep and too hard as soon as they begin and then again, every couple of minutes. Each time, Rey throws back her head, exhaling noiselessly, and gently puts her hands on his hips to slow him down. It must be a chore for her, to teach him how to do this, but she makes it look like it’s what she came here for. Like he’s something special.
“You feel great,” she slurs a little, and he knows that she must be lying, but there is the fact that she’s clutching the fleshy part of his shoulders, and even the sheet with her other hand. “There. There’s—good. God—”
It’s nothing that he’s doing on purpose, but at a certain point he must hit something right and she doesn’t seem to be able to talk anymore. She becomes, for some reason, both tighter and wetter, and all of a sudden she clenches around him, and—Ben loses it completely, her gasps and the dark sweep of her eyelashes tickling the skin of his jaw.
…
Afterwards, he carries her to bed, and they do it once more.
This time he touches her everywhere, and she kisses him a lot, messy and open-mouthed, and it’s a monumentally bad idea. Even for him.
…
“I love Maz.” Rey is smiling. “She used to be my favorite. Back in school.”
Ben is not smiling. “She’s the most annoying person to ever live.”
It wasn’t meant to be a humorous statement, but Rey laughs like he just came up with the joke of the century. It feels good, listening to her. Good, but not sex-good. It’s a different thing altogether, one that he doesn’t care to examine.
“Is that…” she moves away from the bookshelf she was studying, towards the windowsill. “Bellflowers?”
Ben transferred the plant to his room. Since it gets better light during the day, and all that.
“Yes.”
“Oh. Was it a present?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she repeats. “It’s just…” She looks around. “It’s the only plant you have. As far as I’ve noticed.” Ben has never put much stock in nakedness, his own or others’, but neither has he seen anyone this comfortable with being completely bare in the center of a room, and in broad daylight. While stared at by someone like him, to boot. “People usually don’t just own one plant, you know?”
“I can only take care of one plant at the time.” More like none at all, frankly.
Rey cocks her head, pensive. “It looks like you’re doing a good job with this one, though.” She traces the corner of one leaf. “Do you know—you probably know, that bellflowers used to be…” He’s not sure what she sees in his eyes, but it’s for the best, that she decides not to continue. Instead, she comes back and sits on the edge of the bed.
“I like bellflowers.” With her fingertip, she follows an old scar on his shin. Lacrosse. Sophomore year. “But my favorite is lily-of-the-valley.”
“I’m not familiar.”
She lights up like she herself is in full bloom. “I know—we should go to the botanical garden! The have awesome winter stuff in the greenhouses.”
“I…” What? No. It’s a terrible idea. To go anywhere, the two of them. She shouldn't even be here. “Don’t you have to go to work?”
“It’s Saturday. I told people I’d be MIA for the day.” Shit. “Let me google their opening hours. Where’s my phone? Right, probably downstairs.”
No. What? No.
“Hey, what’s your wi-fi password? I’m out of data for the month.”
“I’m… not sure.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“… maybe somewhere around the modem.”
“Okay, I’ll go look for it.” She pauses at the door jamb, and really. No one pulls off naked quite like she does. “You don’t have other plans, right? For the day?”
Ben looks at his bellflowers, breathes in slowly, and shakes his head.
…
When Ben comes home—after dropping Rey off, after a dinner at a vegan bistro that “is not that good, but they’re friends of a friend and they could use the business”, after a yellow butterfly decided to rest first on his eyebrow—Rey insisted on snapping a picture of that—and then on his nose, after she grabbed his hand and dragged him to the cactus and succulent exhibition, after he caught himself telling her about that time he played Robin Hood in his seventh grade play, after a million smiles that made his heart stutter—when Ben comes home, the sheets smell like sweat and sex and her.
Over the following week, the scent thins, and then fades away completely.
...
She comes over the following Friday morning, wearing a pencil skirt and looking frazzled but happy. She stands on the porch and doesn’t appear to want to come in.
“Can’t stay. Debate approaching, you know it. But I made this for you.”
She drops a Tupperware in his hands, pushes up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek, and then runs down his gravel driveway and ducks back into her Uber.
He waits until the car has turned around the corner to take off the lid, finding a small square cheesecake with some raspberries wedged inside the corners. He eats it sitting on his doorstep, sharing it with his neighbor’s obese cat, who will take up visiting him every morning in the vain hope of a repeat.
It’s maybe a little too sweet for Ben, but by the last bite it has grown on him.
…
The next day he goes into the attic, unboxes his TV set, and sets it up on the lone piece of furniture in his living room. He tinkers with it until he can use it to tune into C-SPAN to watch one of Holdo’s speeches, noticing her soothing, competent manners, and the way Dameron stares at her nervously from behind the podium. Rey is nowhere in sight. Probably somewhere backstage, or maybe even in the audience.
Ben looks around for his phone and begins to compose a text for her, only to realize that he doesn’t have her number. It takes him a good half an hour to find her email from his old work contacts.
What Holdo just said about higher education—they’re going to use data that the Heritage Foundation will release hours before the debate to disprove it. Make sure you check them out.
He hesitates for a second.
And if Dameron is not fully onboard with the candidate, you might want to keep him off camera.
Twenty minutes later he gets a thumbs-up and two pink hearts in response, and twenty minutes after that, when he turns on the bathroom light to brush his teeth, his cheeks are still flushing red.
...
He wakes up after a few hours of sleep and stares at the shades that his neighbor’s patio light projects onto the ceiling, thinking about when he was child, how Amilyn would always come visit with implausibly colored hair and sneak him Skittles and Swedish fish. Han had known, of course, and not minded—sometimes even shared in on the Skittles—since his attitude towards most of the rules in their household had always ranged from slightly skeptical to utterly appalled. Ben had enjoyed that, having an ally of sorts when Leia has seemed like a despot; but over the summer, when Ben and Han had stayed at the Falcon for whole weeks while Leia remained in town to work, he had always found the lack of structure that came with being alone with his father very disorienting. When his mother had finally joined them at the cabin, August dwindling down humid and bright, Ben had been secretly relieved. Maybe even happy, although it’s hard to say now that all his memories, even the good ones, are tinged with a hazy mix of guilt and resentment.
At night, before going to bed, they would all make s’mores while his mother referred to the Falcon as a shack. His father would quip back and call it a charming cottage, and then they’d recount the story of how they’d met on those very grounds, making Ben uncomfortable and forcing him to pocket his s’mores and go eat them in his bedroom. And now—now for some reason that he doesn’t understand the fucking place is his, and…
He just wish it wasn’t.
Ben thinks of Amilyn’s speech, of her campaign, and of the candy Leia never found out about. Or maybe she did. Ben realizes suddenly, as if breaking out of daze, that now there is no way of ever knowing.
…
Rey comes to see him a few days after the debate, and lets him lick her cunt.
She is hot and wet and tastes like a wish granted, and initially tells him when and where and how much pressure, but then it’s just a mess of moans in the back of her throat, even when Ben asks “Like this?” or “Are you—?” and he has to figure it all out by himself.
After she comes he wants to continue kissing her there, lap her up lip to lip, but she giggles and pushes his head away and then it’s impossible to forget that he is hard, too, so hard it hurts. He thinks about fucking her, but she looked so tired earlier, perfectly mid-yawn when he opened his front door to find her standing there, that he ends up just lifting himself on top of her and pumping himself off on her stomach with a jagged grunt. All the while, she loops her arms around his neck and kisses him like they’re teenagers making out, tightening her grip even more as he sighs his orgasm in her mouth.
…
It’s dark outside, when she gets up from the bed.
“I better go.” She smiles at him from over her shoulders. “l’m only pretending to be awake.”
Ben can feel his jaw work before he’s even speaking. “You don’t have to.”
“What?”
It was hard to get out to begin with, and Ben is not going to repeat himself. But when she cocks her head to study him he thinks that maybe she heard him the first time.
“Okay.” Her tone is slightly disbelieving, but in a kind way. Perhaps. Ben is not good, at disentangling these things. “Thanks, Ben.”
…
She is a heavy sleeper, a warm, dead weight on his chest that doesn’t move for hours, one fist curled in the sleeve of the sweatshirt he lent her. She finally turns the other way around three am, and Ben’s fingers itch to pull her back to himself. So he gets out of bed, wandering around his still-half empty house in search of something to do for hours.
In the morning he fucks her gently, sweet, sleepy sex that makes his eyes cross in the back of his head and has him wish it wasn’t a workday. Then he makes her coffee, attempts to figure out what to do with his arms as she types and save her number into his phone, and stands next to the neighbor’s cat as he watches her leave.
…
She texts him in the early afternoon.
Rey: <Just saw Snoke—he looks crabbier than usual>
Rey: <I think he’s wasting away from missing you <3>
Rey: <Shit is really hitting the fan>
Rey: <I’ll be super late tonight, okay?>
He doesn’t recall making plans to meet again.
Ben: <Okay>
…
She notices it while she’s taking off her earrings to leave them on top of his dresser, simple silver loops that have caught in his shirts a number of times in the past.
“Is this her letter?”
Ben turns immediately, follows her gaze. There is usually a stack of old novels on top of it, to hide it from sight, but a few days earlier Rey mentioned never having even heard of some books that—she really needed to read. All of them. For Ben’s mental wellbeing. So Ben moved them and— “How do you know?”
“I got one, too.”
It takes him by surprise, but not justifiably so, because Ben has no idea how close Rey and his mother ever were. He had thought maybe not so much—somewhere between casual friends and co-workers. Just a conjecture, though, based on nothing.
“You haven’t opened it?”
“What?”
“The letter.”
He feels it surge inside him, the anger. Here, in this fishbowl of a house, hidden away from everyone, it’s been easy enough to stay calm, easy and safe. Numb. But now that he feels it grow inside him, hot and unrestrained, Ben welcomes it—it’s familiar at least, something to latch onto, something to feed him and carry him through while this bitch of a letter lies there, tucked in the very same spot where he tossed it half a year ago. It’s a little creased from its brief stay in his breast pocket, and at the sight of its bent angle Ben’s rage swells in fat, rich waves that carve a well-known path for themselves.
Fuck this.
This is not Rey’s business. The letter is nothing, and she is nothing, nothing, no more than a hole to fuck. Everything else is noise, and if only she shut up while he—
“Hey. It’s okay.”
Her fingers—they’re always cool. The perfect temperature, since Ben runs as hot as one gets. They feel like water, running up and down his nape.
“You can take your time.” His mind must be playing tricks on him, because she has guided him to his bed and pulled him on top of her, between her legs, and is looking up at him, now, staid but earnest. “She would want you to take you time.” Maybe it’s Rey. Who’s been playing tricks. “It’s good, Ben. You’re good.”
Ben does fuck her, then. His face—she guides it to her neck and lets him hide, his sweat and everything else pooling at the base of her throat.
…
He orders an Americano, and the girl forcefully punches three buttons before tossing her blue-streaked hair.
”And for your girlfriend?”
Ben opens his mouth to—
“I’ll have a vanilla soy latte.” Rey smiles, sinking a little into Ben’s side. “Hot, please.”
…
If it bothers her that the only activities Ben is currently involved in are training for a triathlon, reading crappy sci-fi books, and taking care of one particularly resilient pot of bellflowers, she doesn’t let it show. She starts spending the weekend at his place, and then the weekdays, though there is no difference, really. People in their—her—line of work technically don’t have days off when elections are about to happen, which means a lot of phone calls and Skype meetings and Slack conversations and frantically refreshing FiveThirtyEight.
“Ah,” he hears her say at the end of a long conversation with Dameron. “No—I’m at Ben’s. If it snows again he can probably drive me.”
He blurts it out as soon as she hangs up. “Does he know?”
“Know, what?”
Ben finds it hard to speak in general. Repeating himself is out of the question, and Rey knows this, but she also knows how to extract meaning from him and his half sentences. Very deftly.
“Oh—about us, you mean? Of course.”
“Are they… okay with it?” If Poe knows, everyone else must know, too.
“Yeah. You’re not working for Snoke anymore, so there’s no conflict of interest.” Rey squints. “But even if they weren’t, I don’t care. I care exactly zero about what anyone would say—”
“What would Leia say?”
It’s truly a mystery, why he said that. Because he certainly hadn’t planned to talk about his mother with anyone. Never. Not again. Hasn’t said her name out loud in months—except that he just did and now there’s a whole lot in this room, besides himself and Rey.
Way to break your streak, Solo.
Rey looks at him with that inquisitive, calm way of hers. The first time they’d met, right before they were even introduced, he’d overheard her whisper something to one of Leia’s interns, something that involved the words son and monster. Another self-righteous hothead, he’d thought at the time. Passing judgment, knowing nothing. What happened to that?
“What do you think she would say?” Rey’s head is tilted.
There is a burning sensation in his chest, hot and wet and damaged. It was there already, but now Ben can feel it, and it hurts like someone has repeatedly run a fucking pike through his heart, for months.
“Why do you keep coming around?”
She doesn’t look taken aback by the question. “Because I want to see you.”
“Why are you even here?”
She was sitting at the table—the oak table he decided to buy after he saw her try to balance her laptop and the civil code on her thighs while also talking on the phone—but now she stands, comes to Ben’s chair, and slides down to kneel between his legs. “I’m here because you’re letting me.”
Her hand on his knee—it’s like a new center of gravity. It seems like a bad idea, all of this. But Ben is wrong more often than not.
“I know she would be happy for you,” she says finally. “And for me.”
…
Rey has finished eating her waffle and there are at least three more in the kitchen, but instead of standing up to get them she has decided to add butter and syrup to Ben’s and to dig into it. He would point out that it’s supposed to be his breakfast, or how irrational this entire behavior is, but he knows from experience that it will not make a difference. Instead, he says:
“There is a place.” He presses his lips together. Then orders his jaw to unclench. “I would like to take you.”
Rey finishes chewing on the waffle, and then looks up at him. “Yes?”