Ben drives his own car away from the hospital and it doesn’t occur to me to ask him to take me home. Which is how I wind up at his townhouse, following him up his porch steps and listening for the clickity-clack of Maurice’s paws approaching the door.
“Hey, buddy.” Ben’s voice is very different when he’s talking to his dog. “I’m here. Yes, I know I’m late.” Ben gets the door open and immediately squats down to receive affection from his dog. I watch this uptight man who was afraid of needles revel in having his entire face licked by a mangy old dog and … it does things to my pants.
Ben reaches past Maurice for the harness I left sitting out on the table, and I wait for Ben to comment on my sloppiness, but he just seems excited to be reunited with his hound. He grins up at me as he fastens the leash. “Want to come walk with us?”
I nod, not quite able to articulate why I feel overwhelmed by the sight of all this. It’s not like I’ve never seen people with pets. Eliza has an entire herd of goats and a babysitter-donkey for them. But it’s different with Ben. He’s welcoming me into a very special partnership and it’s intimate. Responsible. Ben Barber is a real adult, and I like that about him. Very much. Even as I realize I am inadequately un-adult by comparison. This man has his entire life together and I don’t get why he seems so committed to helping me reroute mine.
He and Maurice amble slowly down the sidewalk toward the alley. It occurs to me that walking a three-legged dog at a snail’s pace is the perfect antidote for Ben’s sore legs from all the shots. I stuff my hands in my pockets and walk beside them, kicking gravel. I usually feel uncomfortable in silence like this, and I notice the absence of that discomfort right now. With Ben and Maurice, I feel … still. It’s nice.
Maurice raises a leg to pee on a trash can and we pause while he gets himself situated. Ben’s eyebrows lift up and he turns to me. “Oh. We didn’t do your lead collection.”
I wave a hand. “That’s okay. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Ben presses his lips together, considering. “I should have taken you home.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m all out of sorts.”
I punch him softly in the shoulder and then freeze when he winces. “Shit. Your shot. Anyway, I was going to say it’s okay because, you know, I gave you rabies or whatever.”
“Hm.” Ben stoops to gather up Maurice, who started to dig in some garbage. We walk a bit and Ben sets the dog down near some grass at the corner. My breath catches when I look up and see the entire city sprawled below us, sparkling in the dark. All the lights of downtown shine against a clear sky with a bright, white moon.
“Wow.”
Ben makes a pleased sound. When I look over at him, he’s smiling, his face transformed with happiness. But he’s not looking at our beautiful city. He’s smiling at me.
I tuck my hair behind my ears and lick my lips. “I see why you like living up here.”
“Best view of the city. But you being here definitely makes it prettier.”
Both of us blush at his blatantly honest words of praise. “You can’t just say things like that,” I whisper.
“Why not? It’s true. You’re gorgeous, Eila Storm.”
I breathe through my nose, trying to make sense of the hurricane inside my stomach. “I forgot you’re planning to woo me.”
He chuckles at my use of his weird word. “How am I doing?”
“Come on, Ben. I can’t be wooed. You can’t woo me. My life is a mess.”
Maurice yaps at a firefly and lunges forward. We follow him into the park, letting him totter around nipping at bugs. Ben runs a hand along his cheek, like he’s unhappy with how his skin feels. “I thought I was helping you iron things out with your side hustle.”
“Side hustle? You mean the hops?” He nods. I snort. “I don’t have a main hustle, Barber. This is it for me. All I’ve got going on.”
“That’s not true. You’ve got great sisters. You’re calm in a crisis.” He gestures to his legs.
“The bat incident hardly counts as a crisis.”
“Well, it felt like it to me. And I benefited from your help with all that. I would have just laid on your porch freaking out if you hadn’t been there.”
I decide to stop arguing with him about it and glance up at the moon again. It really is a beautiful night. If Ben were a different person, I’d grab him by the shirt collar and kiss the hell out of him. I would drag him home and do all sorts of things with him, none involving soil collection. But Ben Barber isn’t some guy I grab at a party to have my way with quickly and never talk to again.
He’s proper and respectable and loves the shit out of his dog and suddenly I want very much to be home in my chaotic plant-filled shower. “I’m going to check the bus schedule.”
I pull out my phone and gasp when Ben rests a hand on mine, covering the screen. “Eila. I’m driving you home.” His tone doesn’t leave room for argument, so I nod. He whistles quietly for Maurice and spins back toward the house. Ben fishes his keys from his pocket and lifts the dog into the back seat of his car where, of course, he has some sort of dog car seat harness set up.
We drive in relative quiet, each of us only talking to Maurice, until Ben pulls up along the missing curb by my house. He glances up at the porch, where my sister has the light on for once. “Let’s just grab the soil samples and I’ll drop them off when I go to work tomorrow.”
I turn to face him. “You’re not afraid we’ll step on a poisonous snake in the dark?”
He frowns at me. “Eila. First of all, snakes are venomous. And second, we have Maurice. He’d scare them all off.”
I can’t think of an argument for that, and I hurry up the steps to find the detritus of the lead kit from Ben’s giant wipeout earlier. He pulls a small-but-powerful flashlight from his pocket to light our way and I quickly fill the sample container while Maurice supervises. I screw the lid on tightly and bite my lip, realizing as I hand the jar to Ben that I’ve become very invested in the results. Every instinct I have pushes me to run away from the possibility of getting shut down, to kick Ben out of the yard and try again off-grid with the lot across the street, paperwork be damned.
But then Maurice licks my ankle and Ben smiles at the sample, holding it up in the moonlight. And I worry a tiny bit less about the outcome.