Love Letters Post #11

Notes: *Head thunks down onto desk*  So…after an extremely busy weekend (read: hosting someone who invited themselves over for a visit, huzzah) I’m finally on track again.  I’ve got so much writing to do it isn’t even funny, but I’ll handle it.  And hey, I always make time for Love Letters.  We’re almost to the con, people!

 

Title: Love Letters

 

Part Eleven: A Memory Barely Better Than A Lie

 

***

 

 

Ben actually did manage to do some work in those final two weeks before Ryan came out for the con, and while it wasn’t work that necessarily made him jump up and down for joy, it was work that he was suited for and that made Linda very, very happy.  Ben wrote the foreword for the 50^th anniversary edition of his grandfather’s book.  An Educated American was a ridiculously successful biography, and had sold more copies than any other book in the same genre except for one about John F. Kennedy.

Because the book itself was a personal look into the life of Benjamin Franklin, not just about his myriad political and scientific achievements but also about his family, his hobbies and his philandering, Ben though it was fitting to write a more personal foreword about his grandfather.  Various editions of the book had already expressed Benjamin Bache’s education (at the University of Pennsylvania, where anyone with their family’s pedigree could get in), his family life (married to Ben’s Grandma Joelle for thirty years, before she died of cancer, and after that never married again) and his personal interests (Revolutionary-era art, Revolutionary-era original documents, pretty much Revolutionary-era everything).  What Ben was supposed to provide now was the truly personal touch that only a family member could.

That was where things started to fall down.  No one in Ben’s immediate family had been much for “personal touches” in any sense of the word.  His grandfather had been so absorbed in history, so positively steeped in a world that had long since been laid to rest, that it was almost impossible to draw him out of his studies, memories and contemplations of the past long enough to remember to eat and sleep.  He had been an invisible presence in Ben’s life, not an active grandfather, despite the fact that he and his mother had shared this house with the man for years.  Ben might see him sometimes in the morning getting a cup of tea, and they usually ate a rather silent dinner together in the evenings, but that was it.

It was no wonder his mother hadn’t turned out better at expressing her affections, Ben thought morosely as he stared down at the blinking cursor on his computer.  Ben had been lucky to get a pat on the shoulder from her as a child, never mind an actual hug or kiss.  He thought for a moment about the open physical affection that DeeDee had displayed back in North Carolina, and wondered how it would have been to grow up with a mother who had wanted to touch him.

Ben snorted derisively.  He’d seen the effect of that family’s child-rearing, and it didn’t escape his notice that both Brody and Ryan had done their best to get away from their parents as soon as possible.  Circumstance had brought Brody back but from what Ben saw Ryan had pretty much severed all ties, and it would take another funeral to get him back to Concord.  The grass really was always greener on the other side.

Fine, then. If that pithy phrase was true, then there had to be something Ben could say about his grandfather that would appeal to readers.  Something personal and heartwarming that maybe Ben had forgotten or overlooked.  Ben stared around the living room for inspiration but none struck, probably because all of decorations that had been there before were still stowed in his grandfather’s library.  He sighed, got to his feet, and walked a little heavily down the hall to the library’s door. 

Ben hadn’t gone into the library since his deconstructive rampage, and he really didn’t want to go back in either, but the strongest memories he had of his grandfather were associated with this room.  Something would spring up.  Otherwise he’d just make something up.

The library was the largest room in the house, with a very high ceiling but only one window, whose drapes were always drawn to prevent the sun from damaging the books and documents.  The air smelled of leather and dust and, very faintly, of pipe tobacco.  It was funny; Ben’s grandfather had never smoked in here, another precaution against damaging anything, but he’d stowed the pipe in a drawer of his desk when he wasn’t using it.  The smell had faded from the rest of the house, but in here, where there was very little air movement and Ben hadn’t bothered to clean in those entire two years, the smell still lingered.

Pipe smoke, pipe smoke…Ben shut his eyes and focused on the scent, urging it to spur a memory, any memory, that he might use.  He could see his grandfather, see the tweed jackets and faded brown corduroy pants, the full white beard and neatly combed head of hair.  He could see the stained teeth and the thick, ropy veins running across the back of the man’s hands as he gesticulated or turned a page.  Hands…Ben hadn’t liked those hands on him, they had always been batting his own hands away from things while his grandfather shouted, “Don’t touch!” 

That was the memory that stuck the most, those knobby knuckles rapping on the back of his hand while the man yelled, “Don’t touch, don’t touch, don’t touch!”  Not exactly the thing Ben wanted to write about in a foreword.  He opened his eyes and stared despondently around the room, looking for anything else that might inspire him, anything else that might save him from committing a literary lie.  In the corner furthest from the window, on a specially-made desk with an incorporated display case, sat The Letters.  Benjamin Franklin’s personal letters.  Not the ones to his family, but the ones detailing his more outstanding scientific achievements, shared amongst friends.  Two leather-bound notebooks lay within as well, filled with notes on his work. 

Ben walked over to the display and laid his hand on the glass, smudging it but not caring.  He followed the spine of the top notebook with his finger, and remembered doing the same thing as a child.  That notebook he actually had been allowed to touch, very briefly as his grandfather readied it for a professional restoration.  It had been sitting on the desk on a piece of parchment paper, and while his grandfather was out of the room Ben had reached out and run his finger very gently over the leather binding.  It hadn’t felt like much, cool and a little dry. 

When he’d looked up again his grandfather was standing in the door, not angry, not saying anything at all.  Ben had jumped away from the desk and tucked his hands behind his back, not wanting them to be smacked for touching, but his grandfather had just come to his side and knelt down next to him, and they had stared at the notebook together for a moment.  “It’s history, Benjamin,” his grandfather had said softly.  “It’s our history.  It’s important to preserve it like the treasure it is.  Don’t touch it again without gloves on, all right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good boy.”  Except Ben had never touched it again at all, he’d never gotten the chance to.  After the restoration the documents were locked up and never removed, despite requests from numerous universities in Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore.  His grandfather had just…refused.

Ben wiped a hand down his face.  He remembered some of those arguments, various librarians and historians coming here and getting into shouting matches with his grandfather, a few even trying to sue him for withholding the letters from a wider consumption.  It hadn’t been pretty.

Well.  At least Ben had one decent memory to write about.  Now to couch it in ways that diminished the assholishness of its origin.

It took a week to get the foreword down and another week to get it ready for Linda, who read it in fifteen minutes and called him immediately, filled with raptures.  “Benjamin!  This is loooovely!  What a sweet moment between the two of you, I’m sure you learned so much from your grandfather!  This was such a good idea, I’m just about to throw my own shoulder out trying to pat myself on the back.”

“Oh don’t do that,” Ben said absently, flipping through the second volume of Janie and the Phantom.  Janie was trying to reach the end of a maze, where the Phantom promised her she’d find a magical item that would help her on the rest of her journey.  The trick was surviving to the end; the maze was filled with monsters, and each time Janie confronted one she had to find a new way to fight it.  The battles were all based on classical examples: she beat a sphinx by answering a riddle, a gorgon with its own reflection, and an enormous spider by betting it its silk wasn’t strong enough to hold it, and tricking it into tying itself up.

“-enjamin.  Benjamin!  Are you even paying attention to me?”

“What?  Yes!”  A little guiltily, Ben put down the graphic novel.  “What did you just say?”

Linda sighed.  “I was asking if you’d come up with a new topic for your next book yet.  Any luck?”

“No.  Not yet.”

“Benjamin…”

“Please don’t start,” he told her.  “I’ll have it, all right?  At the beginning of April.”

“The first of April, Ben, that’s as far as I could push it.”

“The first of April, then.”

“Good.  Lovely!”  And just like that, Linda’s mood was back on track.  “I’ll make sure everything goes through with the publishers for the foreword, and it’s just wonderful, Benjamin, really.”

“Thank you.”  She hung up and Ben took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then glanced at the clock.  It was the last Friday of the month, and Ryan was flying in today.  Ben had offered to pick him up, but apparently the hotel had already supplied a shuttle and Ryan felt bad cancelling it, so Ben was going to meet him at the con instead.  Along with Michael, who was so delighted by the prospect of sticking his nose into Ben’s business that he’d actually been calling Ben once a day, just to fuck with him.

“It’s fate, darling,” he’d said yesterday.  “Fate that I meet your lovely lad.  I have to vet him, after all, make sure enough he’s good for you.”

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Ben said. 

“No, you’re right.  Rather, I should vet you after meeting him to make sure you deserve such an adorable young thing.”

“You are not my relationship counselor,” Ben told him with a groan.  “You’re not my anything.  Your opinion is immaterial.”

“I’m your friend,” Michael reminded him gently.  “And friends help each other.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to spike your wheel, but I do want to meet the boy in order to evaluate the possibility of this all going pear-shaped and leaving you with yet another hole in your poor, battered heart.”

“If things go wrong, it’ll be my fault, not his,” Ben said honestly.  “You know how I am.”  “Challenging” was the way Michael had described Ben at the end of their intimate relationship.  “Rather too much of a challenge for me right now, darling.”  And Ben knew it was true, he knew he was a hard person to get to know, but that was the beauty of what he had with Ryan.  Ryan already knew Ben; he knew more about Ben than Ben could remember about himself, thanks to the letters.  And for reasons Ben still wasn’t entirely sure of, Ryan seemed to really, really like Ben. 

“Hmm,” was all Michael would say.  “So, are you dressing up for the con, darling?”

“Ryan’s bringing a costume for me.”

“Let me guess…Sherlock Holmes?”

“No,” Ben laughed.  “Although he was thinking about it.  No, I’m going as Hawkeye.”

“Ooh, very nice!  You do have rather the same cast to your features, don’t you?”  Michael hummed contemplatively.  “I happen to have a long leather jacket and an eye patch left over from a brief foray into piracy, I think I’d make a smashing Nick Fury.”

 

 

“Positively smashing,” Ben agreed.

“Oi!  Don’t insult me with your terrible attempt at being British, mate, it makes you sound like even more of a poor hapless American.  Right, then.  Hawkeye for you, Fury for me…what’s your man coming dressed as?”

“Black Widow.”

Michael laughed.  “Oh darling, we’ll have to confine the pair of you to the hotel to keep from causing accidents in the street.  This will be a very exciting weekend.”

“Yeah,” Ben said, smiling wide in anticipation.  “It will be.”

Love Letters Post #10

Notes: Again, no accuracy with regards to MileHiCon, that happened in October, not February.  But here it is, a new part, in which our hero toys with the idea of a nervous breakdown and our other hero can’t make microwave popcorn to save his life.  Enjoy!

 

Title: Love Letters

 

Part Ten: It’s a Ben Complex, Not an Oedipal One

 

***

 

Halfway through February, Ben’s muse was still eluding him.  He looked through book after book for inspiration, and found himself gravitating toward personal letters between friends, between husbands and wives and from parents to their children.  Ben couldn’t do letters again, though.  His last book had cited almost fifty of them, and as Linda kept emphasizing, he had to choose a topic different enough to appeal to readers already familiar with his style, while being similar enough to bring in new readers who had heard about him and wanted to get in on a good thing.  This made very little sense to Ben, but then he had no real ability with marketing.  All he was good at was research and writing, and even that was questionable these days.

It was eight in the evening on a Friday night when Ben set down the book he was reading and sighed.  Not because Abigail Adams wasn’t a fascinating woman—in fact, her correspondence with her husband John was some of the most personally revealing and explicitly affectionate available from the time period—but because he was suddenly reminded of the fact that a woman who had lived and died over two centuries ago had had more of a life that he did now. 

Ben stared tiredly at the wall in front of him, where a print of the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware had been hung by his grandfather over fifty years ago, and remembered for the first time in months how little he actually liked the painting.  Not for its subject matter, but because it was one more artifact in a house full of artifacts that seemed designed to remind him of everything his future would be.  Ben’s future, all of his professional aspirations, rested on the past.  There was nothing contemporary about him; even his jackets were tweed with little patches at the elbows, and goddammit, he was only thirty-two! 

A strange mood crept over Ben as he glanced from the painting back down to the book, where Abigail Adams’ stiff gaze looked out at nothing.  The desire to pick up the heavy book and smash it into the painting, shattering the glass and ruining the print, came on hard, a violent and almost overpowering feeling.  Ben rolled his chair away from his desk and clenched his hands together, averting his eyes from the first president standing so nobly at the prow of a boat. 

It was no good, though.  There were paintings everywhere, almost all of them revolutionary in tone with a few daring pieces here and there deigning to reach into the nineteenth century.  His grandfather had everything from a portrait of Paul Revere to not one, not two, but three different depictions of the Declaration of Independence.

The prize of the art collection was an extremely valuable original portrait of Benjamin Franklin, painted by Gilbert Stuart, that rested in the environment-controlled, bulletproof display case in the library that also held some of their cache of Franklin’s letters.  It had been priced at half a million dollars, not that anyone in the family had ever been inclined to sell it.  When his great-grandparents had been penniless, their farming hopes wiped out during the dustbowl in Oklahoma, they had still kept that damn painting and carted it around with them to their new home in Denver.  They had been faithful custodians of the past, which had survived all these years to now end up in Ben’s ungrateful hands.  Ungrateful, because right now just thinking about that painting made Ben think that selling it would be the least of the evils that sprung to his mind.

Destroying everything, the rational part of Ben’s brain piped up, wasn’t a good option.  There had to be another way to purge his sudden, vicious animosity towards everything historical.  After a moment’s consideration, Ben got up, reached over his desk and almost threw his back out hauling the giant Washington print, in its unfathomably heavy oak frame, down from the wall.  He carried it back to the library and leaned it glass-down against the wall behind his grandfather’s leather easy chair.  Better.

Twelve more paintings and framed manuscripts joined it in the next fifteen minutes.  When Ben was done the walls were completely bare, but at least he wasn’t looking at them like he wanted to take a claw hammer to them anymore.  It was a little depressing though, to realize that without his grandfather’s collection up, there was literally nothing else to look at.  Ben hadn’t put anything of his own on the walls; he didn’t even have anything to hang on the empty, forlorn hooks anymore.  He had lived in this house for almost two years, and he’d never bothered to put any personal touches in beyond the contents of his closet and his computers.  Even the dishes had belonged to his grandfather or mother, one more part of his heavy inheritance.

A text alert on his phone jolted Ben out of his depressing reverie.  He picked it up and took a look.  What r u doing tonight? J

Ben stared at the message for a long moment before bursting into slightly hysterical laughter.  Ryan had to have some sort of sixth sense when it came to timing, because he was somehow always there lately when Ben was starting to feel like Jack Torrance from The Shining.  He typed out, Contemplating whether or not to burn my house down and start over and sent it before he could talk himself out of it. 

Ryan’s reply came back almost immediately.  Sounds kind of drastic.  Is it haunted?

Well, after a manner of speaking.  Just feeling a little claustrophobic tonight, maybe.  That was better than telling Ryan that he’d taken all the art off the walls and hidden them in a room he rarely went into.

U should go out.  Get drinks with suit porn guy!

“Oh, not going to happen,” Ben scoffed under his breath.  You just want him to send you pictures of me drunk.

Id settle for pics of u relaxed and happy.

Yeah, those would be nice.  It had been a while since Ben had felt really, honestly happy though.  Happy with life in general, not just when he was on the phone with Ryan.  God, he couldn’t even remember the last time…maybe…possibly not since before his book was published.  Publishing had been a lot less about happiness and a lot more about stress than he’d expected.

Then you should come and take some, he settled on at last.

I will soon.  2 weeks!!!

Ben smiled down at the phone.  Ryan was the only person he corresponded with who could get away with excessive punctuation.  Even Brody hadn’t been immune to Ben’s admonishments when he sent texts along like MY TEAM LOST N LAST FUCKING MINUTE OF THE FORTH QRTER JEZUS CHRIST!!!!  The caps lock Ben had overlooked—that was just Brody, loud and in your face.  The exclamation points had been a deliberate mockery, though.

Its going to be at the Hyatt, right?  That was where MileHiCon had been last year.

No, the Sheraton.  They only moved it a month ago, organizers have been busy as hell.

Oh, no.  Oh hell no.  Texting wasn’t fast enough for the kind of confirmation Ben suddenly needed.  He called Ryan and waited breathlessly for him to pick up.

“I knew you had to hear the dulcet sounds of my voice,” Ryan teased as soon as he answered, and the tension that was building into a headache just behind Ben’s eyes eased without him even realizing it had been there before.  All joking aside, it was really, really good to hear Ryan speak.

“Yes, it’s like listening to a choir of angels,” Ben replied.  “Listen, do you mean the Sheraton downtown or the one close to the airport?”

“Um, downtown, I think.”  There was a rusting of paper for a moment, then Ryan said, “Yeah, it’s the one downtown.  Why?”

                Ryan was going to love this.  So was Michael.  Shit.  “Because suit porn guy is the events coordinator there.”

                “Really?”  Ryan sounded excited.  “Cool, I’d love to meet one of your friends!”

                “I think you two will get along really well.”

                “Aww, don’t worry, we won’t leave you out, Ben,” Ryan cooed.  Ben rolled his eyes.  “Have you started thinking about your costume yet?”

                “What costume?”

                “Whatever costume you want to wear for the con.  You can’t just go to a science fiction and fantasy con and not dress up, Ben!  This is, like, the only type of event other than Halloween where adults can cosplay without people looking at you like you’re a freak.”  Ryan hummed thoughtfully.  “You could pull of a classic Sherlock, I bet.  Or maybe Dr. Who.  Or you could go all out and do something against the grain, like, I don’t know, Hawkeye.  You kind of look like that actor and I personally would love to see you in skintight black and purple holding a bow.  I could be a gender-bended Black Widow!  We’d look amazing together.”

 

Seriously, just picture her with less chest and less hips, I could make her Ryan:)

                “Hawkeye and Black Widow…are they from the Avengers?”

                There was silence for a moment.  “You haven’t seen The Avengers?  Really?”

                “I don’t get out a lot,” Ben admitted.

                “That’s because you’re working too hard,” Ryan said.  “That’s what makes you think wicked thoughts about burning down houses.  You need to relax.”

                “I’m on a deadline.”

                “I’m always on a deadline too, but that doesn’t mean I don’t go out when I can.”  Ryan sounded kind of serious now.  “You’ve got to take the time to relax and let go of your work.  I get some of my best ideas once I haven’t been staring at a drawing board for eight hours.  Do you have an Amazon account?”

                “Yes…”

                “Start downloading The Avengers.  Seriously, right now, it’s an awesome movie.  Once you’ve got it I’ll start it up over here and we can watch it at the same time.  Do you have any liquor?”

                Ben knew when he heard that sentence that this was going to be something he would regret.  He also found that he didn’t care at all.  “I’ve got some gin.”

                “Cool, I’ve got a bottle of tequila around here somewhere.  We’ll watch the movie together, and every time it makes you laugh, like for real, we do a shot.  This is going to be so good for you, Ben.”

                Ben opened up his computer and logged in to his account.  “I’ll call you back once it’s downloaded.”

                “Ooooor,” Ryan drawled, a little of the south coming back into his voice, “you can keep talking to me while I make popcorn.”

                “I’ll just distract you and it’ll get burnt like last time.”

                “Last time was a total fluke,” Ryan said.  “I can handle it this time, I can.”

                And really, Ben didn’t need to be talked out of spending more time with Ryan.  “Okay.”

                In the time it took the movie to download, Ryan burned not one but two bags of popcorn, at which point he gave up and switched to pretzels instead.  He found his tequila, Ben grabbed his gin and when they were ready, Ryan counted down and the started the movie simultaneously.

                “You see?” Ryan said a few minutes in.  “You see what I mean?  He totally looks like you.”

                “My arms aren’t that nice.”

                “Shut up, everything about you is nice.”  They kept watching, and when Ben laughed during Natasha Romanov’s botched interrogation, Ryan said, “Shot!”  They both did a shot.

                By the time the movie was over, Ben couldn’t really remember the first half of it but he totally agreed with Ryan as to its awesomeness.  And that guy had an awesome costume.  It was just… “Awesome,” Ben told Ryan.

                “I told you so,” Ryan replied, then giggled.  “God, I’m so drunk.”

                “So’m I.”  Ben checked the time.  “Wow, it’s midnight here.  So it’s…” How many hours ahead was Boston again?  Meh, didn’t matter.  “Even later where you are.  You should go to sleep.”

                “I don’t want to stop talking to you,” Ryan said matter-of-factly.

                “But you’re sleepy.”  Ben knew he was, he’d heard the man yawning.  “Sooo sleeeepy,” he sing-songed.  “Put down the booze and go to sleeeeep.  But drink a glass of water first.”

                “Yes, Mom,” Ryan snarked.  He immediately followed up with, “Oh, but no, I totally don’t think of you that way, that’s so gross, I so don’t want to sleep with my mother, just with you.  I’m not Oedip…Oedib…edible?  It’s not that but it sort of sounds like that, but anyway I’m not, so just don’t even listen to me.”

                “Okay,” Ben said agreeably.  He was tired…but he felt better than he had in days.  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?  Sleep well.”

                “You too,” Ryan said, sounding reluctant but exhausted.  He hung up the phone, and Ben stared at his empty screen and thought hard for a moment.  Something Ryan had just said…it was kind of important, made him feel good, it was on the tip of his brain…ugh, he couldn’t process thoughts right now.  He needed sleep.

                Because Ben might not have been drunk for a while but he did have a long memory when it came to hangovers, he made himself drink a glass of water, left another beside his bed along with some Tylenol, and pulled the wastebasket within easy reaching distance.  Sleep came easily, for the first time in weeks, and was entirely dreamless.

                When Ben woke up the next morning his mouth was foul and his brain ached a little, but not nearly as bad as it could have.  He took the Tylenol anyway, forced himself to get up and shower, brush his teeth and make coffee and do his best to be a normally functioning human being.  Halfway into his first cup, he got a text from Ryan.

                It was Jasmines bottle of tequila. Shes so pissed. I owe her a new one soon as I can stand to go out in the sunshine.

                “Oh no,” Ben said in quiet commiseration.  Poor suffering creature of the night, he sent back to Ryan. 

                The next text read, Did I say anything embarrassing? :/

                Only when you assured me I wasn’t your Jocasta. 

                …good?

                GoodJ

               

***Oedipus: the focus of a famous Greek tragedy where the title character returned to the kingdom he'd been abandoned by as a baby, killed his father the king and married his mother Jocasta, the queen, all unawares.  Later he gouged his own eyes out as a result.  An Oedipal complex is where a boy subconsciously (or not so subconciously) wants to kill his father and marry his mother.  Thanks for that, Freud!

A Few Fun Things

This is just a quickie post because my serial got a new review this morning that's enough to make me squeal and clap my hands like a cliched caricature of a happy child!

Lisa T at Attention Is Arbitrary already reviewed the first episode and followed up today with a breakdown of the second, which was lovely and flattering and makes me breathe a sigh of relief.

4 Sexy Hot M/M PNR Stars
I’m totally hooked! Episode 2 clinched this serial for me. The slowly building relationship between Rio and Dev is wrapped with graphically gratifying, sexy treats and sweetness. So Hot! The great twisted, action-adventure/mystery going on is developing well too.
I love how the Cambion element erases all sense of “inappropriateness” for Devon…and me. Expecting him to refrain from sex would be like asking a dog to stop sniffing around. It’s just what he does, naturally. And he “does it”, naturally, very well.

If you've been riding the fence about checking out the serial, this might tip you over the edge.  You can find the rest of her review here: Cambion Episode 2: Black Magic Woman



Something else I have to plan for and look forward to this week: Joseph Dogbevi, a Togolese native and a friend of mine and my man's from our Peace Corps stint, is coming to visit us over Easter weekend.  He won the visa lottery a year ago and went from Togo to Madison, Wisconsin, and apart from freaking out over the weather (what the hell is all this SNOW!!!!)he's doing pretty well.  We haven't seen him since we left Togo, and are looking forward to the reunion.

He gets in on Wednesday, and will probably be a major distraction from writing (not a bad thing).  We're lucky I schedule the Love Letters posts for Tuesday, huh.

:)

Old adages that might be true...

Get ready for a rambly nonsense post.  What can I say, they happen.

Here's a fortune cookie saying:  If you want to get something done fast, give it to an already-busy person to do. 

For a long time (primarily in college, because I was something of a lazy bugger) I thought that this saying was pure lie.  Now that I'm actually trying to be a writer, though, I'm kind of starting to see the merit of it.

I'm reading a book on the craft of writing at the moment that posits that the most important thing about writing is to keep doing it.  Not just to write, but to set goals and meet them, to write often, and most of all to write fast.  Not to be shoddy, but to be consistent and to keep going.  Go, go, go.  This is what you want to do?  Then you should damn well do it, because life is short, baby.

Why am I even thinking about this?  Because I'm writing four different things at the moment, which should be exhausting, but it's working.  I don't have kids, my work is flexible, I'm not in grad school like my man--what should I be doing with myself, then?  I grew up in a family that pushed me to accomplish, continually, and while I'll never be the doctor my parents always wanted (they have two of those already, one a PhD, one an MD and neither has a lifestyle that appeals) I might just become the author that I want to be.  I feel like I need to take advantage of the luxury of time I'm given right now by using it productively (see the above gif--I would so do that!).

Writing is happening, but I can do more.  My website will see the first improvements, because the poor baby is languishing in May of last year, but I feel like the blog needs an energy infusion.  I don't know--reviews, art, links to articles that are interesting...what appeals to you as a reader?  Apart from more Love Letters, which is coming!

Anyway, happy Saturday, darlins:)

Love Letters Post #9

Notes: Just one thing, here: I mention MileHiCon in the story, which is a real con in Denver, but the name is the only thing I use appropriately.  Not the timing, not the exact theme, I just couldn’t come up with a good con name on my own.  My brain is fried, I’m writing so much.  Anyway!  Enjoy more of our boys.  Big things are coming soonJ

 

Title: Love Letters

 

Part Nine:  It's Not As Hard As You Make It

 

***

 

Ben had probably never used his phone so much in his life.  Not for its primary function, at least.  He regularly used it for texting and email, and formerly used it to feed a vicious Angry Birds addiction that had taken dropping his last phone in the sink and losing all of his high scores to quit.  He had never quite forgiven himself, but he had gotten a lot better about meeting his chapter deadlines after that.  But now, he was actually using the phone for talking.  For a lot of talking.

Ben, being kind of meticulous, had counted, and he’d actually spent almost eight hours of the past five days talking on the phone.  Thirty minutes of that was with Linda, fifteen minutes was with Michael, and all the rest of it was spent on Ryan.  The efforts that had formerly gone to writing letters and texting Brody were now focused solely on Ryan, and Ryan was a talker.  He could talk about anything at almost any time of day, and usually called without any specific reason in mind.  It was a good thing that they both had nontraditional jobs, because otherwise Ben would be in real trouble.

The morning after the fundraiser, Ryan called Ben a few minutes after he got home.  He spent about a minute teasing Ben for his hangover, then said happily, “I got the letters!”

“What letters?” Ben asked muzzily, trying and failing to put a fresh filter into his coffee machine.  Two cups at the hotel had not cut it.

“Your letters.  Mom finally packed them up and sent them to me.  I wanted to take them with me when I left, but Cheryl wouldn’t let anyone into Brody’s office.  I guess she thought there might be stuff in there that would embarrass her.  I know she wanted to just trash the letters, but Brody left them to me in his will, so she couldn’t.”

“He was that specific?” Ben asked, more than a little surprised.  He knew Brody had kept his letters, but… “I didn’t think they meant that much to him.”

“It looks like they did,” Ryan said calmly.  “And he knew how much they meant to me, so I’m happy he took the time to make sure I would get them.  I was wondering, though…do you mind if I reread them?”

“They’re your letters, and you’ve already read them once,” Ben pointed out.  “Why would I mind?”

“Well, because they’re your life,” Ryan replied, a little awkward but emphatic.  “They’re you as a child and as a teenager and all the way up to who you are now, and that’s an awful lot to offer someone who you barely know.  And when I last read them, I was just a kid myself.  I just don’t want to make things weird for us.”

That was surprisingly thoughtful, or maybe not so surprising considering that this was Ryan.  Ben took a moment to think about it.  It really didn’t bother him, Ben had nothing to hide, but on the other hand… “I don’t mind,” he said carefully, “but I think it might be better if you didn’t talk to me about them.  Or if you do, just bring up the lighter stuff.  They’re yours to read, but I don’t want who I was then to affect who we are right now.”  He recalled several letters which had been little more than angry rants, and winced at the thought of those coloring Ryan’s vision.  “Unless there’s something specific that you just have to get off your chest,” he amended. 

“Thanks.” 

 “And I think you actually know me pretty well,” Ben said after a moment’s silence.

“Nope, wrong,” Ryan disagreed immediately.  “I know who you used to be, and I have an idea of who you were to my brother, but present-day you, no, you’re still a mystery to me.”

“Well, let’s fix that.  What do you want to know?” Was he flirting?  Ben wasn’t sure.  He wanted to be, but he was so damn bad at it.

“Oh, so much!” Ryan laughed.  “I have to narrow it down?  I want to know…something that I couldn’t learn in those letters.  Something you haven’t told anyone else yet.”

“That’s a tall order.”  Ben didn’t even remember most of what he’d written at this point.  “Here, let’s do it like this: you can ask me a question about myself every time we talk, in person, and as long as I feel that I can, I’ll answer it.  I think you have a better idea of what you could ever want to know about me.  The only catch is, you have to let me ask you a question too.”

“I suppooose I could do that,” Ryan teased.  “Fine.  You ask first.”

There was so much he wanted to know, it was hard to pare his curiosity down to a single question.  “What’s your middle name?” he finally settled on.  It wasn’t very flirtatious, but names had always been an important part of Ben’s life, and he wanted a full one for Ryan.

“Jonnet.  It’s my mother’s maiden name,” Ryan said.  “Technically it should have been Brody who got it, that’s more in line with southern tradition, but instead Brody was named after our great-grandfather.”  Ryan snorted lightly into the phone.  “He’s lucky he didn’t end up Joseph Alan Kuzniar the Third, since our dad was Joseph Junior.  I know he and mom fought about it.  Anything to add to that man’s legacy.”

“Ryan Jonnet Kuzniar.”  Ben repeated it to get the feel of it on his tongue. “I like it.”

“I never did, it always sounded kind of fussy to me,” Ryan said deprecatingly.  “For a while after I moved away I thought about legally changing it, but I decided not to in the end.  Mom would have killed me if she’d found out, anyway.”

“What would you have changed it to?” Ben asked, but Ryan immediately made a negative sound.

“Nope, no more searching questions for you today.  My turn!”  He hummed thoughtfully into the phone.  “How about…who you most admire?  Wait, stop, that’s a gimme, isn’t it?  Of course it’s going to be Benjamin Franklin.”

“It’s not, actually,” Ben confessed.  “People always expect that, though.  When I was a kid I had to write an essay on who my hero was, and my third grade teacher told me that she expected me to write something great on Benjamin Franklin, because who else would I write about?”

“Oh.”  Ryan sounded a little subdued.  “No pigeon-holing, got it.  So who did you pick?”

“Honestly, in the third grade I would probably have picked Batman if I was really writing for myself, but I ended up going with Benjamin Franklin anyway.  I could recite his date of birth, how long he lived and who his children were at the age of five; writing an essay on him was a piece of cake.”  Ben had been so anxious to please as a child, and meeting clearly laid out expectations was the surest path to making the adults in his life happy that he’d been able to follow.

“Huh.  Well now I feel dumb for asking,” Ryan said, but Ben cut him off.

“It’s a fine question.  I just don’t have much experience answering it honestly; you’ve got to give me a second.”

“You’re still allowed to pick Batman, as far as I’m concerned,” Ryan told him.  “Some of my favorite people are make-believe, and he’s always had a good story.”

“Let me take a rain check on this one,” Ben said.  “I don’t want to come off as facetious.”

“You just have to be yourself with me, I can handle facetious if that’s the flavor of the day.”

But no, that wasn’t right.  You had to put your best foot forward with others; Ben knew that for sure.  You couldn’t really relax and be yourself until you’d already disappointed them.  That was why Ben and Michael got along so much better now than when they’d dated; neither had any reason to try and impress the other at this point.  Ben changed the subject instead of answering, and they finished the conversation on an easy, light-hearted note.

Over the next three days Ben and Ryan exchanged answers like little gifts, one for the other: his favorite color (the exact shade of blue of Ryan’s eyes, but he didn’t quite put it that way) for Ryan’s first word (“banana,” after the requisite “mama” of course); the longest he’s gone without sleep (fifty-seven hours in college while on speed) for Ryan’s earliest memory (lying on the bottom of the bathtub when he was three, waiting for the water to cover his face so he could practice holding his breath); and his first crush (Debbie Clark in second grade, because she shared her gummi bears with him) for Ryan’s strangest dream (which was long and detailed and sounded a little like being dragged through Hell, but without the explicitly overt torture).   Ben had the feeling that Ryan was going easy on him with the questions, but he was okay with that.  Personal revelation had never been a strength of his.

They were flirting, they were definitely flirting, but it was so easy compared to every other time Ben had ever flirted with someone he almost couldn’t believe they were doing it.  It was better, it was safer, to think of this as friendship without the possibility of something more.  So Ben kept it mild, and if he jerked off a few more times (a dozen more times) than he normally would, well, he could keep that to himself.

The fifth day into their game, Ryan’s graphic novel came in the mail.  Ben opened the package and sat down in his chair, looking over the cover of the book.  Janie and the Phantom showcased a young girl in a simple black dress, her long dark hair pulled over her face, hiding all but a sliver of her pale skin from the light.  She was staring straight forward, one hand holding a compass, the other clutching a scroll to her chest.  In the darkness surrounding her creatures reached out, trying to grab her and pull her in—claws and tentacles and sharp-toothed smiles all nipped at her edges, but she didn’t even seem to feel them.  Even though Ben could see next to nothing of her face, she still seemed to look…resolute.

He took a sip of his coffee and started to read.  After an hour his coffee was stone cold, but Ben couldn’t put the book down.  Janie was a girl trapped in a life she didn’t belong to, a girl with powers that she didn’t understand.  She was guided by a voice that no one else could hear, a voice that left her messages written in the steam on a mirror after she took a shower, or in the condensation left behind by a cold glass.  The voice directed her to the scroll, hidden away in a secret room at the back of a library no one ever visited, which sent her on a quest.  What the quest was for Janie hadn’t figured out yet, but she knew she had to go or her heart would shrivel and die, and she would become like the pale, cold people who surrounded her; living, but not truly alive.  The novel ended with her leaving behind the Stygian sanctuary of the life she’d always known, and heading out into the dangerous world beyond its gates.

Ben called Ryan as soon as he was done with it.  “I love your book,” he said without preamble.  “The story is fascinating, and the artwork is perfect.”  It was atmospheric, it was dark, it was intricate.  It was beautiful.  “This must have taken forever to put together.”

“About a year,” Ryan said, but he sounded pleased.  “You really like it?”

“I think it’s brilliant.”

“Thank you.  That means a lot, coming from you.”

Ben wanted to protest, he wanted to say that there was no way to compare them because what they wrote was so vastly, incredibly different.  Ben could write insightfully, he could draw comparisons and make connections, but he’d hardly call himself brilliant, only inspired by brilliance.  Instead he said, “I mean it.”

“Did you see where I signed it for you?”

“In sparkly purple pen, yes, I saw that,” Ben said with a smile.

“I use that pen for all my signings, it’s my lucky pen.”  Ryan cleared his throat.  “Speaking of lucky…something’s kind of come up.”

“What kind of something?”

“The kind where…well...here, okay, this is my question for you today.”  He took a deep breath, then blurted out, “How would you feel about me coming to Denver?”

“Are you coming to Denver?” Ben asked slowly, trying to tamp down on the sudden excitement that rose up in his chest.

“Probably.  I got invited to be a guest at MileHiCon, it’s a sci-fi and fantasy conference they have in Denver every year.  It was kind of a last minute invite since the con is happening next month but I thought it would be fun, and good exposure, and I’d get to see you.  If you wanted to come, I mean.  I get to invite a guest for free, you wouldn’t have to pay anything, and I know it’s not really your scene but—”

“I’d love to see you,” Ben said, interrupting Ryan’s nervous monologue.  Love it?  He felt like jumping into the air and running up and down the stairs a few times, he was so energized by the thought of seeing Ryan again.

“Good, that’s great,” Ryan breathed.  “Me too.  I’d love to see you too, I mean, not see myself.  I can see myself anytime.  I mean…wait, this is coming out all wrong.”  He laughed a little.  “I get so tongue-tied talking to you sometimes.  I’ll email you the information, okay?  I have to get to work on the new panels or Jasmine is going to flay me when she gets home.”

“We can’t have that,” Ben agreed.  “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Okay.  Talk to you later.”  Ryan hung up and Ben just stared at his phone for a moment, torn between grinning like an idiot and having a small, intimate freak out.  Ryan was coming to Denver.  Ryan was coming here.

Grinning won.