I laughed softly. “His name is Jesse. And I’m not even sure we’re friends, Oma.”
“Oh, yes,” she mumbled. “The non-friend who has offered to renovate your house… for free nonetheless.” She closed her eyes and smiled into the pillow. “Now go so I can have a few hours with Grandma Nancy.”
I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Love you, Oma Anna. Sleep tight.”
“Love you too, little bear.”
Four.
Jesse
This time, I was early. I didn’t want to seem too eager, so I drove down to the Starbucks on the corner and stopped in for an iced coffee. I contemplated getting one for Ben—it was the polite thing to do, right?—so I brought out my phone and tapped out a quick text.
Getting an iced coffee from Starbucks. Want something?
A few seconds later, my phone pinged.
It’s like you know me. Vnt ic skn vnl ltt, pls!
I stared at the phone, trying to decipher the words on the screen. When the guy behind the counter smiled at me and asked for my order, I just showed him the text and asked, “do you know what this means?”
He smiled back and said, “Venti iced skinny vanilla latte, I think.”
“Oh, okay,” I mumbled. “One of those and a grande iced coffee. Just black, please.”
Five minutes later, I was in Ben’s driveway again, the butterflies in my stomach doing actual fucking somersaults this time. Jesus, what was I doing? And why was I reacting this way?
I knocked on the door gently, careful not to spill our coffees, and waited while blowing out a deep breath of nervous energy. Ben answered with a pair of khaki shorts and a smile… and nothing else. He was shirtless, the band of the shorts riding down at least two inches past his navel. The length of the hem wasn’t exactly modest either, creeping up mid-thigh at best, but I did my damnedest to keep my eyes up top.
“Hey,” I said casually.
“Hi!” Ben took the latte from my hands and gestured me inside. “Thank you so much for this. Oh my God, I’m so glad you came. I was just ready to fucking kill myself trying to scrape this bathroom by hand. Please tell me you brought that wallpaper steamer thing.”
“It’s in the truck. Just let me put this down and I’ll—”
“No, no. You just got here. Sit for a second. It’s like ridiculously hot outside, right? And I need a break.”
Ben plopped down onto an oversized white sofa and gestured for me to join him. It was this really crisp cotton material, like something you’d see in a Cape Cod magazine about decorating. The coffee table was made from gorgeous driftwood, matching two end tables with white modern lamps. Other than that, the whole living room was filled with moving boxes.
“I’m afraid I’m going to dirty up your nice couch. I just came from the gym.”
Ben lifted an eyebrow and let his gaze drift down my torso. “I can tell,” he teased. “I’m joking. Sorry… I’ll try to be less… me.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means I’m a big flirt. I can’t help it. I just say things. It’s a bad habit. My boyfriend says that someday, some guy is gonna kick my ass.”
My heart sunk a little as the butterflies kicked back up. “You’ve got a boyfriend back home?”
He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. “Eh. Kind of? I don’t know. I mean, yes and no. It’s sort of long-distance at this point. I mean, we didn’t exactly break up, but we didn’t exactly not break up? It’s super difficult to tell right now. When I left, Zach didn’t offer to come with and I didn’t ask. But like there was no real promise of a together-forever,” he said dramatically, pressing his hand to his heart. “I honestly don’t know if he even gives a shit that I’m here. He’s called me once and he’s sent like one text. I’ve been here for days. I mean, if I was your boyfriend and I moved away, wouldn’t you want to know what was up with me?”
I stayed still, staring at him like a fucking idiot. “Um… yeah. I guess. Yeah.”
Ben waved his hand dismissively. “Ugh, what am I asking you for? It’s the weirdest thing to ask you. Anyway, when I told him about Oma, Zach just sort of made it all about him. He was concerned about the lease and how he was going to pay without me or whatever. He didn’t even care that I was leaving, you know? Or like… about us. I guess that’s why I’m saying that I’m not sure he’s my actual boyfriend. If you would have asked me a month ago, I would have said absolutely yes. Now, I don’t know. I may even just say no, you know?”
“Sure.” I leaned back into the soft sofa, trying not to stare at the way his stomach folded into three little parts. He’d gotten a little sunburn the day before…
“So last night, I got this selfie from him and it’s really bothering me.” Ben scratched his blonde hair. “I don’t even know why I’m talking to you about this.”
“What was it?” I asked, suddenly perking up.
“He was… like… naked, but… I don’t know. I just sent him a normal picture of me in the pool and he sent me one back of him in bed. But it was like seconds later and he was… ugh, this is stupid.”
“He was what?”
“He was like… never mind. Can I get you something to eat?” Ben popped up off the couch and headed toward the kitchen. “I’ve got this like Skinny Pop stuff or these Pop Chip thingies—barbeque and regular. What’s your poison?”
“Um… whatever you like,” I answered, following him to the counter.
I wanted him to get back to the previous conversation. I wanted him to tell me about Zach. About the photo. What had bothered him about it? It was clear that Ben wanted to talk, but now he was shutting down, his hands shaking a bit as he poured the popcorn from a bag into a large ornate turquoise and gold bowl.
When he slid it over toward me, I held it up and stared at the detailed diamond pattern. “Wow. Cool bowl.”
“Yeah?” He shrugged his shoulders. “I like vintage glassware. I bid on it at an auction. It’s a Culver. I’m not actually sure why I bought it though… it’s party ware and it’s not like I have a ton of parties.”
“No?”
Ben shook his head and let out a snort of laughter. “Nah. I’m actually kind of a homebody. I like socializing and I love trying new things, but I guess when it all comes down to it, I’d rather be at home watching a movie or making dinner. I love cooking and making craft projects and redecorating and just… everything, I guess.”
I smiled at him instinctively, a wide grin splitting my lips.
“What?” he returned, putting his hands on his hips with a pout. “What did I say?”
“Nothing. I like that answer. You like everything. That’s a great answer.”
“Why? What do you like?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Ben said, coming closer. “Tell me about your typical day. What do you do? And don’t tell me about work. I want to know about a day off, not a work day.”
“Alright. Um, I guess I like to sleep in because I don’t get to do that most days. I work out most mornings, I guess, but I hate working out, so it’s usually pretty quick. Sometimes I surf down in Satellite if the conditions aren’t too flat, but I suck pretty badly, so it’s not that often. I, uh… I like to read. I like to go to the beach in general, so I might take my Kindle down there and do some reading or—”
“What kind of books do you like?” Ben interrupted.
If I told him, my secret would be out. It wasn’t that I was trying to keep my sexual status a “secret,” per se, but he had a boyfriend. It was better this way. So, I just kept it light. General.
“Um… you know. All kinds. Sometimes mysteries, sometimes I even read romances,” I said with a blush.
“Romances?” he asked, poking my arm once with a slender finger. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for the romance type, Mr. Solomon. Ah, the pretty girl who’s going to lose her fledgling farm to the evil CEO of the corporate conglomerate… you’re just full of surprises.”
If
only he knew how many.
I lifted the iced coffee to my lips and took a long drink from the straw, watching as Ben’s eyes drifted over my Adam’s apple as I swallowed. Fuck, this was going to be a long day. When I set it back down on the counter, I wiped a droplet from my beard and blurted, “I know how to fix that pool water problem.”
Ben shifted forward and leaned on the counter, his blue eyes going wide. “Really? Oh my God, it was kind of slimy last night on the bottom, but I was so desperate to get in it, I didn’t even care. But I knew I was going to have to read up on it because I couldn’t let it go much longer. I loved your text about how the margarita matched the water… so funny. I know it’s sad, right? I’m such a bad homeowner.”
“You’re not. You’ve just never had a pool, right?”
“Exactly,” he said, letting his eyes drift close for a few seconds. “But I’m soooo excited about it.”
“I have one. A pool. So, I, uh… know how to maintain one,” I babbled.
“You do?” His eyes opened and focused on mine. “Like a big one? Surely not like my little sandbox pool back there.”
I nodded, swallowing thickly at the salacious way Ben said ‘big one.’ “Well, it’s not huge, but yeah. It’s a lot bigger than that one. And I have a built-in hot tub on the back of it.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Ben jumped up once, kicking his legs out to the side.
I nodded again dumbly. “Uh huh. It, um, came with the house I bought.”
“Do you use it? Like every day all day? Like you wake up and get in the hot tub with your coffee every morning and then fall asleep in it at night and do crossword puzzles in it and watch Netflix in it on your tablet and practice your yoga in it or whatever?” Ben struck a complicated yoga pose, bending himself in half until his head touched his knees, his face popping through the other side.
“Um… not really. I rarely get in it, actually.”
Ben popped back up, his face flushed red. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know. Listen; do you want me to go get the wallpaper thing?” I thumbed toward the door. “We can get started.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. Sorry. Once I get started rambling, it’s hard to stop.”
I fished the keys out of my pocket. “I’ll just go grab it.”
“You want help?” Ben asked, scratching the soft blonde hairs below his navel.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Um, sure,” I muttered. “I could use a second set of hands.”
Ben bent over. Like… a LOT.
He bent over to fill the water compartment. He bent over to scrape the baseboards. He bent over to stretch his back. And then bent backwards to stretch his front, giving me a show of the pink band of his underwear as his shorts slid down, giving me a nearly-obscene view of his soft dick through the cotton.
I turned away every time, looking for excuses to leave the room. Sometimes I just refilled my plastic coffee cup with water and stared blankly at a wall while chugging it, begging my dick to deflate before I could reenter the space.
And Ben… well, he talked.
He told me about his job as a closed-captioner. How initially, he’d gone into the field because he’d had an aunt who’d been a court reporter turned captioner and how the money had been great. She’d been able to work from home and make her own hours, basically. He’d liked that, so he’d gone to court reporting school after high school and once he’d finished there, he’d applied for an internship with a captioning company, which was a lot harder to come by. They were unpaid and you had to buy all of your equipment.
It was a bit like being an anesthesiologist, he’d said, “but a lot less expensive.” The equipment was still a ton of money for him and he’d spent the first year after his internship paying it back. He’d worked a lot of shifts captioning late night infomercials to start or QVC products—makeup, mainly—but sometimes vacuums or “hideous wrap dresses for old ladies.”
“God, you don’t know how many times I thought ‘I should buy that’ at three in the morning, you know?” he’d said with a laugh. “I mean… I even bought this stick vacuum that’s still in the box. I think I dragged it with me from Topeka. Still in the fucking box. And oh my God, don’t even start me on the makeup. I got an entire starter kit from Bare Minerals and gave it to my mom. She didn’t know what to do with it, so I just gave her an entire tutorial because I’d gone through it like eight times. I mean, not to toot my own horn or anything, but it totally changed her life.”
After a year or two, they’d switched him to a few news programs, even getting to do some of the higher profile channels like MSNBC, and he’d learned a ton about current events.
“I mean, I even knew who the Prime Minister of Canada was, you know? I’d never known that kind of stuff in my life because I just never paid attention. Of course, I knew that Celine Dion was from Canada, but I was clueless about pretty much everything else. I started knowing what was going on in actual government… and not just here, you know? Like… everywhere!”
When his numbers started to improve, they gave him a shot at the big boys. Sports. He was able to pick up a few slots on Saturdays doing a college football game here and there and that was where the real money was. It was kind of like advertising. You knew you’d made it when you finally got an ad for alcohol. Well, sports were kind of like that for a live-captioner. If you captioned the Super Bowl, it was more important than just about any other live coverage throughout the year, including any speech the President gave—those were the unfortunate facts.
“I didn’t know anything about sports,” he’d said. “I mean, I hadn’t played anything and here I was with my headphones on, getting ready to caption an event I’d never played in my life. I threw up twice before my first game, you know? Anyway, I had to do all of this prep before it even started. Like they give you the names of all of the players and you basically type them all in to the steno machine with a sort of shorthand type of method. So, like if you were, say, doing a game where LeBron James was playing, rather than to type out his name, you would type it in beforehand and maybe use LJ and two asterisks as your shorthand, right? Then every time he scored, you would type that in. Then, if the other team had an LJ, you would use a different combination for him. It would type out his name… blah blah. The worst were the hockey games. Their names were like a hundred characters long and even when the announcers would say them through my headphones, sometimes even if I’d look at the roster, I just couldn’t get it… I didn’t know. And then I’d freeze up. You only get so many mistakes, you know? If you fuck up too bad, they take you off and bring in someone else.”
“Did you?” I asked. “Fuck up?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said honestly. “Like a gazillion times, but so did everyone else, so it’s not like they can just boot everyone off. I was one of the ones who made fewer mistakes than other people, so I was able to keep my slot. And then I got better. And then…”
“Then what?”
“Then I even got a shot at the Olympics.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Ben shrugged. “It means they gave me a slot when I’d only been captioning a few years. It was almost unheard of that someone my age would even be given a chance, you know? I was nervous as fuck, but the money you could make per event was like three times what I made captioning a normal show and… I didn’t end up sucking too badly.” He smiled widely and let out a small laugh. “I mean, that opened a few doors for me on the schedule. I still have to do the QVC stuff a few times a week, but I have a little more freedom than I once did. My schedule is pretty tight now. I do a lot of the same shows and I know what to expect. A lot of captioners fight for slots… it can be kind of cutthroat sometimes.”
“So, you’re lucky.”
He smiled brightly. “Very. And I love it. I love putting those headphones on and hitting that switch, you know? You never know what’s going to happen on any given day. Every single day, something new happens at work. That’s the beauty of li
ve television. It’s never the same.”
“Wow.” I stared at him. “It sounds cool.”
He scratched his belly again. “It does, right? And sometimes there are some ridiculously hilarious stories, you know? Like about what the other captioners write? Like if they mess it up once, sometimes it fills it in over and over… like autocorrect, kind of.”
“Like what?”
“Okay, so you know that old show with Siskel and Ebert where they reviewed movies? Well, I think that maybe it was Roger Ebert giving the review or whatever… I can’t even remember… not important. Anyway, the movie was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, right? Well, the girl who was captioning didn’t have a list of the movies in front of her and she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Sometimes, there’s a picture screen, but a lot of times, there isn’t. I think she was pretty much typing into a black screen. Anyway, she didn’t understand the name of the movie, so she typed it in as Sisterhood of the Traveling Penis.”
I stared at Ben, my mouth opening wide. “That’s not true.”
“Oh yes, that is true, my friend. She typed it over and over and over for the entire segment until someone from our office caught on and basically cut the feed.”
“Sisterhood… of… the… Traveling… Penis?”
Ben nodded his head, a wide grin spreading across his lips as he bounced on the heels of his feet. “Yep. Penis. Penis, penis, penis.”
“My God, you are so full of shit.”
“I swear to you. Jesse, it’s fucking true. Why would I lie about that? She typed something about how The Sisterhood of the Traveling Penis was always sweet and sometimes surprisingly touching…”
“Surprisingly touching?” I asked.
“That’s what he said,” Ben added. “Ba dum bum.”
I laughed aloud and scrubbed my hands over my face. “You’re a fucking idiot.”
“You like it.” He smacked my arm once. “Okay. Take me to the store with the pool crap. I have to have this pool working like ASAP. I can’t slip around in that KY wrestling tub anymore. I have to have that thing in working order so I can be a beautiful bronzed god by the end of the week. Right now, I look like Casper slathered in raspberry fro-yo. I’m just all light pink and blech. Disgusting.”
Benji and the Wireman Page 3