Work Text
Sunday, July 29th
Rey isn’t wearing pants.It’s 9:21 in the morning, and Rey isn’t wearing pants.Or a shirt.Or even socks.In retrospect, Ben—well, he doesn’t know why he’s surprised, exactly. He’s not stupid. They’re both here, together, on this trip. He knows what that entails. He’s thought about it all—logically, practically—so, really, he shouldn’t be surprised.He shouldn’t be surprised, and yet—A bikini.A small blue string bikini.Ben doesn’t think. Can’t think. Instead, his oafish left hand just sort of spasms around the brand new tube of Neutrogena SPF 100+ face sunscreen he’d been holding, squeezing hard enough that nearly half its thick white contents erupts—coating his palm, the mirror, and the floor—in one great big mortifying spurt.It’s a metaphor from the universe even he can’t ignore.And, oddly enough, it helps.It doesn’t fix anything, obviously. But it does help. Allows him to come to a much-needed realization he’s been deluding himself out of for weeks.Namely, how absolutely and irrevocably fucked he is.Because he is fucked. In ways he’s not remotely prepared to handle.Ears red and neck burning, Ben ducks his head and fumbles around for his beach towel, feeling like he might as well be reaching out for the last, fraying edges of his dignity.God, what a mess. He’s a mess.“Wait!” Rey calls, running over to him.Her bikini top is not supportive in the slightest, and Ben attempts to avert his eyes.Attempts to, but he can’t.Because Rey’s rushing over to him, breaching his personal space wearing next to nothing—nothing but those light blue scraps of polyester that are realigning his entire fucking worldview—and it’s not exactly like he can look away. From her tits, her tan, her smile.It’s terrible.She’s wonderful.Ben can’t breathe, and he also wants to throw up.Distracted as he is, when Rey’s slim fingers curl around his wrist, he’s almost forgotten about the thick layer of sunscreen coating his skin. Can’t even feel it, really. But then Rey dips into the white substance with the tip of two fingers, slopping it up in a way that nearly brings him to his knees.Attraction, it turns out, feels remarkably like panic.Rey hums as she spreads the cream over her face, not bothering to reference the splattered mirror over her shoulder. Her large brown eyes just look at him, twinkling, happy. “Waste not, want not,” she says, beaming.Ben nearly chokes.Despite the manufacturer’s claims of UltraSheer® and DRY-TOUCH, there are obvious trails of white across her face. On her forehead, her cheek, her lightly freckled nose.Ben swallows before nodding with a strained smile.He finally grabs the beach towel. He does not tell her about the sunscreen she’s missed.As Rey traipses out of the kitchen to join the others down by the beach, Ben drops the ruined tube of sunscreen to the floor. He lets out a long, shuddering breath, convinced that if he isn’t going to burn in the sun, he’s definitely going to burn in hell.It’s the second day of the trip.
Monday, April 30th
Three months prior
By the time Ben realizes Rey is a co-op student, it’s too late to get in his head about it.Well, to be fair, it’s never too late to get in his head about anything, but at this point at least he can’t get in his head about it much.They’re already friends.Rey is a force of nature, and she’d been seemingly everywhere during his first few weeks at Are Tech, when he’d been trying his damnedest to keep his head down, mouth shut, and performance up in the face of near-constant speculation and all-too-audible whispers.Asshole, they’d said when he asserted himself.Bootlicker, they’d said when he didn’t speak up.Nepotistic prick, they’d said, and often. There was no hiding or changing that bit of his background. He would know—he’d spent the majority of his twenties trying.But Rey... Rey’d been different. Genuine and nice.She’d been in the break room on his first day, when he’d arrived an hour early to work anxious over what was to come, offering him coffee and a smile.She’d sat in on his first major project, where she seemed to bounce off of his ideas almost intuitively, listening to him, understanding him—more so than anyone else in the room. Or in recent memory, really.She’d also been on the work league soccer team that Are Tech had put together and his therapist had encouraged him to join. She played striker, just like he did.That had been the kicker, really. What had pushed things past coincidental connection and into conscious choice.He likes Rey. He truly does.She’s a fucking pit viper on the field, all speed and skill and whip-smart intuition, and they work together so well, there when one needs the other, passing assists back and forth like they’re more valuable than goals. It’s an entirely new experience for Ben, and he’s been playing this sport competitively since he was five.Never, not once, does he hear anything approaching the whispers from Rey.It could’ve gone wrong at so many points. He usually fucks these kinds of things up, and royally.But he somehow doesn’t. And they’re somehow friends.And. Well.It’s pretty fucking great.Rey comes with her own little collection of people, most of whom also happen to be on the soccer team. And while they’re decidedly not as great as she is, they also aren’t exactly the worst people he’s ever met. They’re decent teammates, all told.Being a teammate with Rey, though. That’s something.Like right now. They’re both breathing hard, collapsed on the sidelines after the game, shin guards removed and faces shining with sweat. They had just, to put it in Rey’s words, thoroughly trounced the First Order 5-to-1, and the victory feels sweet. A little heady. Like they’d won something real, and they’d done it together. So even though it’s nearing 10pm, and even though he has an important conference call early the next morning, Ben makes no move to leave, because neither does Rey. With the high bay lights still on and burning, it’s not exactly like he’s overstaying his welcome.The lights hum, and the cicadas do, too. They sing, loud, long, without pause, as if they’re setting the scene, providing background music for the two of them. Their rhythm is gentle and familiar, something that hasn’t changed since his childhood.It’s nice.Ben would stay out here all night with Rey if he could.When he lifts the bottom of his jersey to wipe at his sweaty forehead, Rey lets out a small groan and splays back against the grass, throwing an arm over her eyes. She’s wearing that silly three-bunned hairstyle of hers that she insists on every game—for luck, he’d been told after he finally brought himself to ask, a matching uniform jersey that’s two sizes too big for her, and bright orange cleats that’re held together mostly by ducktape. He could not be more fond of her if he tried.He’s still watching her when she moves her arm half a minute later in order to stare up at the sky. She usually makes a comment or two about the stars after their night games. The city’s light pollution mutes them, and the current high bay lights make them almost impossible to see. Still, it has never stopped her from looking for them. From talking about them, imagining and wondering.“I’m really going to miss this,” Rey sighs. She sounds resigned, almost forlorn. Ben stills.It’s the middle of the season.“Are you going somewhere?” he asks, feeling the familiar thread of anxiety work its way down his throat. It coils, large and heavy, in the pit of his stomach.Rey turns to look at him, cheek pressed into the freshly cut grass. “Back to school,” she says, making a face he’d normally find cute.“School?” he parrots dumbly.Rey just scrunches her nose and stares back at the dark night sky. “Yeah, I’ve got one more semester left.” She shakes her head. “Well, two more credits, anyway. I’m knocking them out this summer in a six-week session. Co-oping has been great, but I can’t wait to finally graduate. To get my degree.” When Ben doesn’t say anything, she adds, “And, you know, since this is a work league, I can’t play on the team while I’m not technically working for Are Tech.”“You could,” he hears himself say. The part of him that is still functioning, capable of rational thought.Rey huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Sure. I could.”She won’t.Ben is silent after that. He feels bad about it, but he’s trying to play catch up and doing poorly. In the span of half a minute, he attempts to run through every conversation they’ve ever had, every lunch they’ve ever shared, every email they’ve ever exchanged.Fuck—emails. Her email signature. Did she even have one? Had he seen it?“Wait...” Rey says, rising up on her elbows and shooting him a funny look. “You knew I was a co-op, right?”Ben has to swallow his initial response.Rey is more competent, responsible, and intelligent than most of the managers he’s had in his life.Of course he hadn’t known.He doesn’t say that, though, obviously. Instead, he scoffs and rolls his eyes. “Yeah. I knew.”Then, because her intent, intelligent eyes are entirely too much for him at the moment, he reaches for his water and gulps the rest of it down. The plastic Dasani bottle crinkles loudly, as if on cue.A handful of grass flies at his face, and he makes a show of flinching. “Buy a reusable water bottle, damn it,” Rey practically growls at him, letting out a frustrated noise from deep in the back of her throat. “This is getting ridiculous, Ben.”“Sure,” he says, like he always does, and crushes the bottle until it’s nearly flat before screwing back on the tiny green lid. He mimes throwing it on the field, and Rey huffs, batting at his hand.“It’s not funny. You’re going to destroy the world, you know.”Ben shrugs. “Maybe.”“Ben.”“I’ll recycle it,” he says as he puts the plastic bottle in his drawstring soccer bag. He feels another overwhelming burst of fondness for Rey.Fondness. And something like fear.“You’re coming back, right?” he asks, just shy of offhand.Because that’s usually how it works when people co-op. They come back. They work for the same company. At least, that’s how it’d worked when he’d done it.But that had also been nearly a decade ago, and things change.If he knows anything, it’s that things change.In response to his inward spiraled panicking, Rey merely grins at him, flashing him that smile of hers that’s all teeth and dimples and genuine good will.“Got my offer last week,” she says, sounding thrilled. “I’ll be joining the machine learning team after Summer Session’s through. And, you know, I graduate. I’ll even have a two week break between graduation and my official start date. It’s so much free time—I won’t know what to do with myself.”Ben lets out a shaky breath.Thank fuck.“That’s cool,” he says, trying his level best to seem even-keeled. The small half-smile he sends her isn’t even fake. “Enough time for a vacation, yeah? The beach or something.”He hates the sand and the sun and the trashy tourists, but Rey looks like a beach person. Though, now that he thinks about it, she looks like a mountains person, too. Anything outdoors.Rey just snorts derisively, though, like he’s told a joke. “I’ll probably go into a Netflix coma. Cupcake Wars is calling, you know?”No, he does not know.But now she’s looking down at her hands, yanking up another handful of grass. The tiny bits of green slip through her fingers and fall back to the field. “I’ve never been to the beach before,” she says after a minute.“Never?” Ben asks before he can stop himself. “But we live in Georgia.”Rey shrugs a shoulder slowly. Carefully. With such control it makes Ben’s heart clench. “And I don’t have a car,” she says, like that’s the beginning and the end of it.And, for a while, it is. Because he hadn’t known Rey’d been a co-op student, but he had known she and Finn were foster siblings. He had known that she thrifted all the time, and brought her lunch to work every day, and always ordered the cheapest thing on draft when they went out to the bar after games.She’d grown up without money, and he... had not.He’d known it, but he hadn’t really gotten it. He probably still doesn’t.The silence between them grows in a way Ben can’t control and absolutely hates. A small part of him—a part he hates even more—almost lets it keep going. Keep going and growing, twisting and stratifying, because it’s bound to happen anyway, isn’t it? The dissolution of their friendship. The loss of her good will. It’s bound to happen because it always happens, so why not now?But that’s only a small part of him. A part that seems smaller every day.He opens his mouth, intent on changing the subject. To let the larger, flourishing part of him speak, but then—Finn and Poe materialize behind Rey.The team’s beaten up orange water cooler is in their hands. A determined expression is on their faces. The cooler sloshes noisily as they heft it high in the air. They’re sloppy, these two. Utterly transparent.But they’re also fast.“Hat trick!” Finn cries, grinning like an idiot. In the same breath, he flips the cooler over, upending a curtain of frigid water over Rey’s head.Some of it splashes on Ben, stinging his face and neck. It is cold.Rey sputters, then screeches incoherently, wiping her eyes with frantic movements. Her short dark hair is plastered to her face, and she’s wearing a look of stunned, disbelieving outrage, even though this is the second time the boys have done this to her this season.She looks like a drowned rat, just like last time. Ridiculous. Adorable.Ben bites back a smile.Rey just screeches again, and despite the fact she’d worked all day and run herself into the ground for the last ninety minutes, she’s sprinting across the field at a breakneck pace, tearing after Finn and Poe who, not being complete idiots, had both taken off as soon as they’d flipped the cooler.Rey zeros in on Finn, catching up with him so fast it’s frightening. She grabs his hand, yanks it, then tackles him with a flying leap and wordless cry, knocking him to the ground. She clings to him, shouting and screeching as she plasters her soaking wet jersey against his neck. His back. Finn shouts and shouts, but Rey doesn’t let up. Not until they’re both screaming. Both laughing.Ben thinks he might be laughing, too.It’s at that exact moment that he decides to call his mother.
Saturday, July 28th
Ben hesitates over his phone for so long that the screen fades to black.He’s such an idiot.A miserable, pathetic mess of an idiot.Cursing himself for overthinking a two-word text, Ben shakes his head, unlocks his phone, and presses send.
Updated ETA?
There. Sent.A normal question for a normal situation from a normal friend. Rey doesn’t respond right away like she usually does, though, which is... fine. Service on the back roads is spotty. Rey’s also on a pay-as-you-go plan with an inconsistent network. And in a car full of her other, actual friends, too. So he refrains from sending another text. They’ll all be here soon enough, anyway.To distract himself from his phone, he starts piling the groceries on the kitchen island. He desperately needs to bring himself back down to earth. To this state, city, county. Because, okay, yes , Rey’s coming here, and sure, maybe they’d texted almost every day, but he also hasn’t seen her in nearly two months, which is pathetically close to the amount of in-person time they’d even spent with each other to begin with.Just as their initial connection had felt fated, their separation feels similarly cosmically orchestrated.A work conference for him plus a heavy course load for her had meant no in-person contact. She hadn’t even been able to make it out to the team’s final game like she’d wanted to. The next day, he'd been so selfishly torn up about it that he nearly texted to ask if he could bring her coffee to the science library—or bring her lunch to the engineering building—or something, anything, but he’d thankfully refrained. How desperate would that have seemed?She’d had finals and her roommates and her own group of friends; she didn’t need him clogging up her limited free time.And, anyway, by that point, the trip had been right around the corner.And now, the trip is here.He feels stupidly, uncharacteristically excited about it. And maybe a little nervous. He’s hosting five people for a week, and he’s never hosted anything before, not even dinner.He’d taken a half-day on Friday so he could drive down in time to get the house ready for everyone. Of course, that was only to discover his mother had apparently already sent cleaners to open up the house and handle all the linens, which meant there hadn’t actually been much to do. Besides the grocery trip, that is, which he’d just gotten back from.He’s still putting up said groceries, unpacking fruits and vegetables and supplies for more guacamole than can reasonably be eaten in a week, when his phone flashes, dinging.It dings again.Again and again, incessantly, several times in a row.REY NIIMA, he reads. 15 Messages:
BEN
Poe wont let anyone touch the music and he only has queen and journey on his phone SEND HELP
Rose and I are planning a coup
Be prepared for a major shift in power dynamics when we get there
(I’m crowning rose as team captain. U must swear your fealty to her)
Coup failed
Poe caught on and threatened to leave me at the gas station
Now he’s playing we are the champions just to spite us I think
Wow, the service sucks out here. Idk if you’re getting these
I keep getting not delivered messages, but LOOK. My first real view of the OCEAN!!!
It’s so beautiful I cried
Almost there almost there almost there!
I think maps is confused, idk if we’re in the right neighborhood
can you resend your address?
He’s still reading her texts, phone gripped in one hand, Hass avocado held limply in another, when he hears the front door slam open.A half second later, Rey staggers into the living room, fully visible from the open kitchen. Her hair is in total disarray, more out of its half-ponytail than in it, her sneakers are only sort of tied, her t-shirt is rumpled, and she’s panting slightly, like she’d taken the stairs two at a time. She looks like an absolute mess.Holy hell, how he’s missed her.“Ben!” she cries feverishly. “What are you—what even—this house! It’s huge. And on the beach. You didn’t tell me we’d be on the beach.”It’s not at all how he’d imagined their reunion would go, but he can’t bring himself to mind.He leans against the kitchen island and puts down his phone. “It’s a beach house, Rey. What were you expecting?”“I don’t know. Not something all—” she flaps her hand around before finally saying, “—this,” as if that more than explains it.Ben just looks at her, barely able to keep the smile off his face, and shrugs. “It’s been all 'this’ all my life.”“Right. Okay.” Rey blinks, then shakes her head. “The beach, then. Tell me about the beach. It’s right out back, yeah? I could smell it. Well, I think I could, but—is that all from Whole Foods?” she says, suddenly staring at the kitchen island. She shakes her head again, roughly this time. “No. You know what, never mind. Beach. Now.”“Why, yes, Rey, it’s nice to see you, too.”Rey puts her hands on her hips and glares at him, zero percent chagrined. “Don’t give me that snark, Benjamin Solo. I’m running on 24 ounces of coffee and three hours of sleep. The beach, Ben. Where is it?”Bemused, charmed, and utterly at her whimsy, Ben raises his arm and points.Immediately, Rey makes for the back door. Which he... hadn’t anticipated.Stupid of him, really.“Are you going now?”“Obviously,” Rey says. She wrenches over the glass-plated back door. And runs.She’s a good runner, that Rey. Very fast.He trails after her, out the door, down the stairs, past the saltwater pool. She shows no sign of stopping. Not at the gate in the back, not at the beachgrass, not at the dunes.“You should put on sunscreen first,” he calls urgently, actually concerned.Rey only runs faster.He should put on sunscreen first too, but he doesn’t.He follows her. Of course he follows her.There’s not a world out there where he doesn’t.
No matter what else happens this trip, it’s already worth it.The time off work. The awkward phone calls with his mother. The impending hours upon hours of unavoidable group socializing. All of it—all of it—is worth it for the look on Rey’s face when she steps onto the beach for the first time.She staggers to a stop as soon as they exit the dunes and clutches his bicep with both hands. “Oh,” she says breathlessly, and then words appear to fail her entirely as she clings to him. Her grip on his arm tightens to the point of pain.If her regular smile is a beam, then now, hovering at the threshold of the beach, with the bright sun and the swirling salty air and that endless stretch of blue all laid out before her, fully within her reach—well, then now, she’s positively glowing.As Ben watches her, an answering light seems to bloom in his chest. Warm, bright, unfurling.He’s... happy.He doesn’t think he’s ever been made happy by someone else’s happiness before. Not like this.It feels inordinately precious. A moment he wishes he could pluck out of time and hold onto forever.Of course, as soon as he realizes this, Rey releases his arm and takes off like a shot.“Rey,”he says, reaching for her shadow. “Rey, wait—”But she’s gone, as if spurred into action by the desperate, clinging nature of his thoughts, kicking up sand as she runs. Runs grinning and laughing and utterly delighted, all the way to the tide. And, despite the fact that’s she’s fully clothed, tennis shoes included, she
keeps running, splashing her way ten feet over the shoreline, barreling into the Atlantic Ocean like she has plans to go on forever.The water sprays out around her feet, then her calves, then her thighs, and he’s dumbstruck. And she’s splashing. And laughing. Laughing so much, yelling over to him, shouting his name again and again, asking for him to come join her, to come in, to come swim.“Please, Ben,” she calls. Please.So, fuck it.He does.The next time Rey gets bowled over by a wave, Ben’s hands find their way under her arms, lifting her to her feet. Then they stay there, bracing her, as he looks down in concern.She spits out a mouthful of saltwater, wipes her hair out of her eyes, and, because it’s Rey, she laughs. She laughs right up at him, smiling in a way that makes his stomach flip. That makes him smile back at her.But then another wave hits, wrecking her small form. She’s pushed back into his chest, and they’re not in so deep that they have to tread water, but the waves are insistent, and Rey is jumping around happily, without pretension, but also in a way that makes Ben question how strong of a swimmer she is. He keeps a close eye on her when he can no longer get away with bracing her with his arms, but he also demonstrates how to dive into the oncoming waves so that she doesn’t keep getting knocked back, and—yeah.It’s nice to have a friend.When they finally get back to the house, soaked to the bone and covered in a layer of coarse sand that makes Ben feel like squirming, he asks Rey to wait while he grabs a couple of towels from the outdoor linen closet.“You have a closet just for towels?” Rey teases as he wraps her in the largest one of them he’d been able to find.It’s stripey red and fluffy. So big it’s practically a blanket, and Rey clutches it tightly, the dumb avocado that he hadn’t registered he’d brought with him—and that she’d adamantly refused to let him leave on the beach—still in her hands. It peeks out from where the towel is clenched at her neck like a dumb, sandy broach.Ben flicks a hand through his wet hair. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but we’ll go through a lot of them. Beach trips are nothing but salt and sand and endless loads of laundry.”He says it with his usual blustering confidence, but really, he hasn’t been to this house since he was fifteen.Nearly half his lifetime ago, now. What a thought.A thought he’d really rather not have right now, so he whips off his drenched shirt and throws it over a pool chair.When Rey inhales sharply at the loud, wet smacking noise it makes, Ben winces, grimacing. He’d used more force than he’d needed to, as usual.Abashed, he reaches into the outdoor closet and rummages around for a towel for himself. Rey merely hums at him, as if his dumb pronouncement about laundry had been the gospel truth, and stands there with her eyes fixed squarely on her shoes. She’s more towel than person at this point, hair dripping and sand coating her flushed, rosy cheeks. Her stare is unwavering.Ben follows her gaze, and his lips twitch in helpless amusement.He understands why she’d be looking at them, those shoes. They’re damn near waterlogged. Soaked and sandy, since she’d worn them into the water.They make ridiculous squelching noises when Ben and Rey finally march up the back steps to the house.When they get to the back door, Ben finds himself stalling. His hand hovers over the door handle, but it goes no further. Rey waits patiently, staring up at him with warm, questioning brown eyes.He doesn’t want to share her, he realizes. Doesn’t want to go inside.But she’s not his to share. Not his to keep.“Okay,” he says finally, taking a deep breath. “Let’s go shower.”Rey’s eyes widen comically. “W-what?” she sputters.It takes a second, but when his words register, Ben flushes before quickly elaborating. “The sand—it gets everywhere. There are showers upstairs in most of the bedrooms, and I have one downstairs, and—honestly, I think there’s probably one outside by the pool that I’ve forgotten about that we should’ve stopped by, but, yeah. We can just go—separately—and, uh, wash off.”Rey lets out a breath. “Oh,” she says quickly. “Okay, yeah. Makes sense. It’s a nice house. Gotta keep it clean.”Ben honestly couldn’t give one single, solitary fuck about keeping this house clean and is about to tell her exactly that as she kicks off her waterlogged shoes. She shimmies some as she does it and nudges them near the railing. Then, before he can get the words out, something smacks the deck with a fat, heavy plop.Athletic shorts.Rey’s dark, sodden athletic shorts.On the floor.As in, not on her body.They’re the kind with the built-in underwear, too.Ben’s eyes whip up to Rey, but she’s still wrapped in the fluffy beach towel like a serene, person-sized burrito. Covered in it, concealed from shoulder to mid-shin.Still, though. Underneath. Underneath is—His friend.Who he cares about. A lot.Rey toes her wet, crumpled navy shorts to the side near her shoes and clears her throat. “Okay,” she smiles politely. “I’ll go for a shower. But first—which room should I take?”
Rey does not take the room Ben recommends.She can’t.The others had swooped in while they’d been splashing around at the beach, leaving her with the painfully cramped twin bedroom downstairs. It used to be the nursery, so it’s right next to the master bedroom.Ben is trying not to think about it.“I can’t believe you took a room with a king-sized bed and refuse to share,” Rey grumps from the couch, a plastic cup of pinot grigio held loosely in her hand. She’d laughed in Ben’s face when he’d offered her a stemmed glass. Then she’d laughed even harder at whatever expression he’d made when she’d plopped a handful of ice cubes in her drink.Ben takes a sip of his own drink, scotch, and looks at her. Her hair is still damp, but the sand is gone. She’s got a line across her face from the hourlong “disco nap” she’d taken, and she’s in another, nearly identical pair of navy athletic shorts, plus a black one-piece bathing suit.“Well, I can’t believe you went to the beach without me,” Finn says. He slumps next to Rey, so casually breaching her personal space, like it’s nothing, the most casual thing in the world, and throws her a piercing look.“Don’t look at me like that. You’ve already been, and I couldn’t help it.” Rey takes another sip of wine. “Besides, we’re going back out as soon as the others get back from their beer run. Right, Ben?”He’d been running a hand through his newly clean hair, half-thinking about ways to separate Finn and Rey, half-thinking the deep conditioning treatments it’s going to need by the time the week is through. So, entirely distracted, he says, “Yeah, of course, Rey. Whatever you want.”It’s not like it’s untrue.Finn narrows his eyes.
Ben has been on beach trips before.Not to St. Simons, not for a long time, but he knows how this trip will go because they all go the same way.Everyone gets fucking trashed.Twilight obliges them. The evening is long and lazy, the kind that seems to stretch on forever in the summer, and they all take it as an excuse to drink and drink before a dinner that seems light-years away. The whole crew is out on the beach at this point. Poe’d single-handedly hefted a blue Coleman cooler across the dunes like he was delivering communion, and they’ve all done their best to empty it, more than a little liberal with how quickly they’re downing each drink.They should be switching off and on with water if they want to survive the sun tomorrow.They should be, but they’re not.“Goal!” Rey shouts, throwing her hands up and falling to her knees in an uncharacteristically dramatic move. “Gooooal!”He’d made the mistake of letting Paige guard her. The woman had decent aim but not an ounce of self-preservation.“Showboat,” Ben says. He punctuates the sentiment by kicking a very small amount of sand at Rey’s legs. Then, because he feels like it, he kicks again.Rey smirks at him, cheeks flushed and glassy-eyed. “Jealous I’m pulling a Solo better than you can?” she says, arching an eyebrow at him.
Pulling a Solo?
Ben is so affronted it takes him a moment to realize his mouth is hanging open.“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, snatching the ball from her.“No?”“No.”He does not puff out his chest. He does not stick his nose in the air.Rey lifts a skeptical brow. “So this isn’t familiar?” she asks, before flopping back on the sand dramatically. She clutches her shin and howls, rolling around in an impression that has Dameron laughing so hard Ben thinks the man might be crying.Ben just sniffs and leaves her there on the ground, collecting sand like a lint trap. He jogs over to the cooler and pops open another beer while the rest of them act like fools.It’s a loose game of 3v3 that they’re playing, and Rey is not on Ben’s team because, according to the others, it wouldn’t be fair
or something similarly stupid. But they’ve all had more than a few drinks by this point and he doesn’t want to be a complete buzzkill, so he hadn’t argued about it. He just does what he has to: he cheats.Dribbles out of bounds. Cherry picks. Slide tackles and fouls blatantly.Everyone else is doing it too, so he doesn’t feel bad about it.Everyone else is also treating it like the fun, drunken scrimmage game that it is, though, despite the cheating, which he and Rey are assuredly not. They’ve escalated things to the point of full body contact.Right now, for example, he’s got Rey cornered at the makeshift sidelines, and is crowding over her, pressing down against her in a way that should be smothering but that she seems to take in stride, trying to get at the ball she’s doing an excellent job of shielding.Her ponytail brushes against his chest, the wavy brown hairs only just skimming his clavicle, and he is suddenly, abruptly overwhelmed by just how much larger than her he is. He forgets that sometimes.Not that he’s large, of course. He never forgets that. Remembering that she’s smaller is what’s difficult. Staggering, even.She takes up such a substantial place in his thoughts that her relatively small size almost doesn’t make sense.Now, though, with Rey hunkered down over the ball, her body pressed so intently into his front, the knowledge is inescapable. He is acutely aware of her every last inch.And somehow, there’s still room for him to be surprised when she pushes back against him, inadvertently pressing several of those inches into his crotch.Her ass is tight and muscular and curved in a way that feels molded specifically for him.She pushes back again, and Ben flinches, inhaling sharply through his nose.Smells salt and sweat and her.He chases the smell, as if pulled, nose brushing the side of her head. Strands of Rey’s dark, sand-dusted hair graze his cheek, the side of his nose. He closes his eyes. Breathes in deep.And Rey throws an elbow, catching him in the gut.Because small may be one word for her, but vicious is another.“Shit, Rey.” He winces, rearing back slightly. “What the hell.”“Not sorry,” she says and pushes back with her shoulder.Ben snorts. “I know you’re not, you fucking hellion. But you will be.”In response, Rey only throws another elbow.As is only logical after having the wind knocked out of him twice, Ben moves to tug on Rey’s jersey.Or, it would be only logical, if Rey had been wearing a jersey. But Rey’s not wearing a jersey. She’s not even wearing a shirt. She’s wearing a bathing suit, and the solid black fabric is spandex-tight. A second skin.It’s smooth and warm. Taut where he touches.His hand clutches at the fabric. Presses against her stomach and sticks like glue.Rey breathes heavily, nearly panting, and Ben’s hand rises and falls with each of her ragged breaths. His grip relaxes, but his hand doesn’t leave. Instead, his fingers splay out further. Tentative, wondering.His hand nearly spans her entire abdomen. How?He pulls now instead of pushing, planting his feet and drawing her closer to his front. She comes willingly. Enthusiastically, almost. His hand draws her up, pressing her back against him, but she takes it further, moving close enough to him that his breath hitches, twitching hard enough that it must be intentional.His cock stirs, and his breath is gone.He pulls.And the ball slips through his spread legs, kicked through by a sharp tap from Rey’s heel.She spins out of his grip and moves around him in a smooth, almost choreographed motion. She shoots, and Ben doesn’t even have to look to know the ball has sailed between the two towels they’d set up as makeshift goalposts.He’s stuck. Struck. Dumb.He gapes, reeling.“You megged me,” he breathes out. Because that’s what his inebriated mind is going to focus on, apparently.Rey throws her hands in the air and spins. “I am the greatest footballer alive!"She looks painfully, stupidly cute, but Ben can’t focus on that right now.“You megged me.”Rey stops spinning on a dime. She drops her arms and tilts her head. “What, like it’s hard?”Ben charges.
The rest of the team huddles by the cooler, where they’ve been for the last five minutes. Paige pours Rose another cup of wine. Finn tosses Poe another beer.The Tecate cracks open with a familiar snap and froths out around the rim. Poe takes a sip, wipes an arm over his mouth, then winces at the sand. “So, is it too late to change my wager?”“Yup,” Rose says, popping the p. “I told you Friday was a nonsense guess.”Paige nods, slinging an arm around her sister’s shoulder. “Tuesday or bust. They are stupidly gone for each other.”“True,” Poe hums and takes another drink. “But they’re also just plain stupid. Never underestimate the power of stupid.”Finn shakes his head and opens another drink, pretending not to hear.
Ben, of course, doesn’t have to pretend at all.He’s halfway to the tide, a laughing, shrieking Rey slung over his shoulder.When he throws her in the water, she’s holding onto him so tightly, he comes tumbling right down with her.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sunday, July 29th
Day two is excruciating.It’s not because he’s hungover. It’s not because of the sun.It is one-hundred percent because of his goddamn traitor of a cock.Ben keeps catching boners. Fucking boners. Like being in this house is making him fifteen again, reverting him to a cataclysmic mess of testosterone and rash decisions, and he is losing his ever-loving mind.Because it’s not quite actually like he’s fifteen again, and that’s the unsettling part.When he’d been fifteen, his body hadn’t needed a reason to send blood rushing to his dick; it was all hormones settling and kinks that needed working out and a body that didn’t quite know how to function properly after growing fourteen inches in as many months or whatever the hell had happened to him during puberty. But it had been fine, ultimately. Normal. Natural. Something he’d been prepared for and hadn’t really cared much about.Now, though.Now there are very real, very Rey-shaped reasons.Desire, lust, sexual attraction—whatever it is, whatever it’s called—floods him like a dam that’s bursting, leaving him overwhelmed and desperate, scrambling just to keep his head above water. Navigating this terrain feels new. Uncertain. Dangerous, and utterly beyond him. Rey jumps to catch a frisbee, and her tits jump, too. In a way he has never noticed before. Or, at least, never appreciated.But he notices now.He appreciates now.Fuck.Fuck. They’re small and perfect and bounce as she lands. Ben imagines how they’d feel cupped in his hands; how Rey might gasp, how she might smile.He’s wearing swim trunks. New ones. Nice ones that he’d ordered online specifically for this trip. The kind with built-in underwear, which caused him to forgo putting on boxer briefs this morning in what is rapidly shaping up to be the crowning mistake of his life. This suit could not possibly be less equipped to conceal an erection; in fact, an increasingly tortured part of Ben begins to think it had been specifically designed to show them off. The suit fucking tents.He’d tried to tuck his dick up, under the waistband of his shorts, but no, they’d been far too small for that. Or he’d been far too hard for that. Either way, it hadn’t worked.So, really, he doesn’t have a choice. He has to stay seated and pray to some unnameable force that his body calms down, that this anatomical anomaly passes unnoticed. Has to hunker down in this beach chair, shift uncomfortably in front of the sole object of his affection, and wait out this erection with that overabundance of self-control he’s so well known for.Ben squeezes his eyes shut.He is so very, very fucked.At least it’s marginally cooler this far under the tent awning. Shaded. Somewhat secluded. He’s only sweating half of his body weight instead of all of it.The sweat collects at the back of his neck and pools near the small of his back. Pools near his balls, too. He squirms, and the head of his dick presses against his swimsuit. It throbs again, so hard and painful and real that it might as well possess its own heartbeat.After a brief furtive glance, Ben adjusts himself. Momentarily, there’s relief.Momentarily, because Rey jumps again. Reaches straight up, arm extended and stomach taut, to snag the frisbee out of the air in a spectacular catch. Her quads flex as she crouches, sun glinting off her lean muscles and unevenly tanned skin. She stands, whooping, triumphant, and her glutes flex, too.This bikini of hers is going to kill him. He might already be dead.“Something interesting there, Solo?”Ben nearly chokes.He whips his head around. “What?”Behind him, near the back right corner of the tent awning, Dameron shoots him a dangerous-looking grin. The short man bends and pulls another beer out of the cooler. Ice water drips off his hand. “Something interesting,” Dameron repeats pointedly, making Ben pale. He cracks his beer and gestures to Ben’s lap. To, thank god, the hardback book Ben had strategically placed there, opened past the prologue, and subsequently ignored. “You know,” Dameron elaborates, utterly straight-faced, “like the plot.”Panic sparks sharply in the pit of Ben’s stomach. It leaves him feeling frozen, and angry, and caught. But mostly, his teeth just clench.The man can be such an utter shithead when he wants to be.“Fine,” Ben answers stonily. “The book is fine.”“Would you recommend it?” Fuck right off, Ben thinks, neck heating and heart thumping wildly in his chest. “You probably wouldn’t like it,” he makes himself say. Dameron nods, as if acknowledging the point. “Well,” he asks, “do you like it?” “Yes,” Ben grits out, near snarling. He has to remind himself that he does not actually or actively dislike Poe Dameron. Most of the time he even likes the man. Respects him.“Any interesting characters? Maybe a strong female lead?”Ben exhales through his nose.Okay. Alright. Fine. Apparently, he’s been utterly transparent. Apparently, he’s some kind of joke. Or worse—some gross creep of a man who ogles his unsuspecting, uninterested female friends. Dameron would be well within his rights to push him into oncoming traffic, Ben knows, but that’s not what he’s doing. Instead, Dameron’s toying with him—having fun. “They’re just called female characters.”Ben wants more than anything to stand up, to storm off. But he can’t. He’s trapped. Stuck in this jail cell of a beach chair, where all he can do is immaturely and anticlimactically twist away from Poe. Twist away, just in time to get beaned in the head.The frisbee hits his forehead with a resounding thonk.Ben could scream.“Motherfuck,” he shouts, rubbing over the offending spot with his fingers. “Sorry!” Paige calls, not sounding very sorry at all. “It just—slipped.”“Sure it did,” Ben mutters under his breath, feeling close to hissing, like a cornered cat. He snatches the frisbee from his lap, knuckles white around the hard plastic as he winds back, fully intending to throw it as hard as he can, right into the goddamn ocean. But then—he looks up. And then—Rey’s there.Right there. Right in front of him.Or her tits are, anyway.From his seated position, Ben’s head is level with her chest. Her skin is smooth and bronze and shining.Fuck, it’s perfect.She’s perfect, even covered in sweat and lightly dusted with sand. Her tan lines are some of the more blatant he’s ever seen in his life, particularly around her shoulders. And her neckline. Very much around her neckline. It’s an actual, ridiculous farmer’s tan, and he has never felt so turned on in his life.At least until his recently awakened Neanderthal brain dials it up to eleven, honing in on the faint outline of Rey’s nipples through her bikini top. They’re pebbled slightly. Not quite stiff. She breathes deeply, trying to catch her breath, her chest—tits—nipples—rising and falling, and Ben completely loses the ability to form a coherent thought. For a moment, maybe, or perhaps forever.Regardless, it’s apparently long enough for Rey to impatiently kick his chair and ask him something. He blinks, thanking whatever karmic dregs he’d had left that he’d put on his sunglasses earlier today. They’re the reflective kind. The dignity-saving kind. Large lenses, a small mercy.Ben shakes his head and, with the strength of a much better man, looks up, past her razor-burnt bikini line and her taut stomach and her perfectly shaped tits, wrenching his gaze to something safer. Her eyes, maybe.“What was that?” he asks stupidly, left hand gripping the hard plastic arm of his beach chair so hard it bends, nearly cracking. “The frisbee,” Rey repeats slowly, tilting her head and smiling a little. She holds out her hand. “Can I have it back, or are you going to read it a story?”Her eyes are a bright, glinting hazel. Brown and beautiful with little flecks of green.And—no. This isn’t safer at all.Ben hands over the frisbee, feeling like he’s been kicked in the stomach. As soon as Rey takes it, he crosses his arms over the book in his lap like she might try to take that too, not caring as sweat from his forearm smears the splayed pages. This new proximity has helped his erection situation approximately not at all. He inhales deeply, waiting for Rey to leave. Instead of leaving, though, she hesitates. Lingers, cocking her hip and fiddling with the frisbee in her hand.She opens her mouth, then closes it, biting her bottom lip. “Do you—do you wanna come out and play with us, maybe? Just for a bit?”Ben could not think of anything more disastrous if he tried.“No thanks,” he says weakly, unable to breathe. “I’m good here.”“Oh.” Rey pauses. “Well, how about a quick dip in the water? Like yesterday?”And there it is. Something more disastrous.Ben imagines a rough wave knocking into Rey, imagines his hands coming under her shoulders to steady her. But now, there are strings around her neck. Strings that could untie. A top that might fall down. She’d laugh it off, maybe embarrassed, maybe a little shy, and as he thinks it, it’s like drowning. He would drown in her.So, no.He absolutely cannot.“Maybe later,” he hedges.“Please?” Rey asks, and there’s a slight whining edge to her voice, entirely uncharacteristic. The sound of it goes straight to his cock. “Come on, Ben. We’re at the beach. You can’t honestly intend to stay under the awning all day.”He can. He has to.It’s that or die. Ben laughs, and it’s mildly strangled. “Have you met me?” He raises a pasty arm and turns it. “I’ll burn alive.” “With all that sunscreen you put on this morning?” Rey rebuts, and remembering all that sunscreen has him flushing beet-red. “You’ve gotta be covered.” “It’s midday now,” he says, somewhat desperately. “I’d have to reapply.” Rey nods, smiling, like that’s a great idea. “Do that, then. I could—I could help, if you want.”His erection strains against the polyester-spandex blend of his swim trunks, as if reaching out for her. Help me, it’s saying. Want me, it pleads.“I will later,” Ben says, unable to keep from sounding pained. “Trying to stay out the sun for now.” Rey cocks her hip again, frowning in a way that makes her bottom lip stick out.Pouting, he realizes, eyes wide. She’s pouting at him.God, he didn’t know it could get worse. “Give the poor guy a break, Rey,” Dameron interjects calmly, breaking the moment. Ben whips his head around, having forgotten the man entirely. Dameron takes another sip of his beer, infinitely casual, as if he isn’t about to either offer Ben a spot on a liferaft or push him further under the water. “Can’t you see he’s already red in the face?”That little shit. Ben is sending him back to Atlanta tonight.“Oh,” Rey says, eyes widening. Then she holds her hand up to the sun and squints at Ben, seemingly taking Dameron seriously. Her nose crinkles in a way that is physically painful for him to look at. “Wow, you weren’t kidding.” Rey steps back, looking apologetic. “I forget you’re so white,” she says and turns to throw the frisbee back to Paige.Ben relaxes.And Rey turns back. “I’ll just sit here with you for a minute in the shade, and - ” “No.”It is vehement. Entirely too loud. “No,” he says again, in a normal register. “I—I just meant that you look like you’re having fun out there. Like you’re doing fun things. And I want you—to do that. There.”Rey freezes.She looks unsure. Maybe a little hurt. Ben hates this. He hates this.“There’ll be time for shade later, yeah?” he says softly, pleading.“Sure,” she says finally, as awkward as he’s ever seen her. “But if you decide to come out later... let me know? You know, if you want. Or don’t. That’s—that’s fine, too.” Rey leaves. Dameron crushes his beer.And it’s excruciating. Excruciating. Ben is going to die.
Ben does not die.He reads The Pillars of the Earth until his erection subsides, then runs back inside like the coward he is.As soon as he’s safely in his room, he yanks his swim trunks down to his ankles, leans his bare ass against the locked wooden door, and takes his rapidly re-hardening cock in hand.He intends to jerk off, and quickly. As fast as he can. He’s done it before, of course. It’s practical, this thing he sometimes does. Rote, not often referenced, but a problem he knows how to solve. The proper grip, the right pressure, an engaging rhythm, a consistent speed—he’ll take those components, add them together, and leave with a functional enough orgasm. One he’s chasing, right now.He tightens his grip. Sucks in a breath.Up. Down. Again. Again. Again and again.His eyes shut tightly. His thumb presses harder. His pace is punishing, a punishment.The door rattles, banging, and he bites his bottom lip, close to cresting in a matter of minutes. There. Right there. A pressure. A peak—one he reaches for, can almost see. Can see Rey. Can see her as if she’s standing right in front of him, a vision, a presence, a light slamming into his consciousness; her bright, buoyant smile; her warm, agile hands; her fingers in the sunscreen, on his back, over his chest, rubbing in, over, down—thoroughly and everywhere—and he is lost, lost and catapulted, careening over the edge.He comes so hard his legs shake.He crumples, bare ass sliding down the bedroom door until he collapses in a heap on the hardwood floor.
He sits, unmoving, for ten minutes.
Fuck.
Fuck.
When he finally heads back out to the beach, it’s with a sun shirt, two bottles of water, a small measure of relief, and a much larger measure of guilt. A ball cap, too. As a child, his mother had made him wear wide-brimmed floppy fishing hats at the beach. The dorky, khaki-colored kind. Like hell would he be wearing one of those this week.Still, it doesn’t matter.The sun shirt is apparently more than enough to set his teammates rolling.“You look like a fucking dork, Solo,” Dameron shouts, sounding both incredulous and deeply thrilled. Beside him, Finn sputters with laughter and only sort of attempts to hide it. Even the much nicer Tico sisters look amused.Ben raises his middle finger to them all without breaking his stride. He walks over to where Rey is sitting, plopped down on the shore in a rare moment of idleness. Her hair has come loose in the intervening hour and is thick, almost wavy from the saltwater. It fans out around her shoulders. A few of the dark brown strands glint bronze in the direct sunlight.She sighs, feet dangling, slightly kicking, as the tide rolls in.He stops just shy of the water and clears his throat.Rey starts, then turns and squints up at him. One hand leans back against the wet sand, the other comes up to shield her eyes from the sun. As she takes him in, her shoulders relax.And then her lips twitch.Ben sighs, long-suffering. “You too, Rey?”“Mm-mm,” she says, shaking her head back and forth, lips now a flat, expressionless line. But her eyes dance, practically sparking with ill-concealed amusement.Ben rolls his.“Go ahead, then. Let me have it.”Rey shakes her head again, insistently, stubbornly silent. Ben gives it another moment before he glances upward, unable to believe what he’s about to do.With a huff, he lifts his arms above his head and gives her a long, slow, graceful twirl.The laugh that tears forth from Rey is rough and loud, practically barked, like he’d stolen it from her. Which is only fair, seeing as she steals a smile from him.“You look so stupid,” Rey says, nearly choking on her amusement as she clambers to her feet. Ben throws her a halfhearted glare. “I look like I’m not going to get skin cancer.”“No, that’s not it.”“The hat, then?” He touches the brim self-consciously. “It’s Atlanta United.”She laughs again, patting her sternum as if she’d been coughing. “It’s not the shirt, Ben. Or the hat. It’s the color.”“What’s wrong with the color?” he asks, offended. And somewhat genuinely surprised.“You’re kidding, right?”He frowns.“Oh my god, Ben. You’re wearing black. All black. In the sun. At the beach.” She takes a step toward him, still laughing and suddenly very close. She tugs at the edge of his shirt and shakes her head. “I didn’t even know they made sun shirts this color.” “Black is respectable,” Ben says, defensive. “Black is ridiculous,” Rey answers, still holding onto his shirt. Her fingers twist in the dark fabric, and her other hand brushes along his thigh, leaving clumps of wet sand across his shorts. “It sucks up heat like a sponge.” She releases the hem of his shirt only to trail her hand up along his abdomen. Her delicate, nimble fingers splay out. Rest on his stomach. “See? You’re so warm.” Holy fuck, he’s glad he jerked off.Ben gulps, desperately trying to take control of his heart, which appears to have taken up residence in his throat. It beats wildly at Rey’s light touch. Loud. It’s so loud. In his head, his throat, his blood. Surely it’s audible. Surely she can hear it—the cacophony within him, the clumsy, desperate music she’s orchestrated just by existing in his general direction.Somehow, he keeps his expression level.Keeps his sunglass-covered eyes on hers. And—he needs to talk, doesn’t he?She’s said something, and now it’s his turn. That’s how interactions work.Momentarily, he thinks of bringing up the black one-piece bathing suit she’d worn the day before, but—well, that line of questioning would do him more harm than good, so he tries another tactic.He frowns down at her, mock-serious. “Keep this up, and I’m not going to give you your present.”Rey blinks, stepping back so suddenly his head spins. “Present?” she asks, confused. Her voice even does this funny little lilting uptake.“Your graduation present,” Ben elaborates.Rey looks oddly panicked, as if he’d reminded her about a work presentation she’d forgotten about.“It’s small,” he’s quick to add. “Just a small thing. Nothing to write home about. And you might hate it, anyway.” He reaches around for his drawstring soccer bag and pauses. “Come to think of it, you’ll probably definitely hate it. I’m kind of a notoriously bad gift-giver,” he admits, and when he says it, he realizes how true it is, and that this was a really stupid idea.A stupid idea, and a selfish one. One part of the gift isn’t even technically for her.Fucking hell, what had he been thinking?He hadn’t been thinking, that’s the problem. He’d been hoping. And imagining. And, he realizes, secretly pining.But it’s also too late to backstep now, so he straightens his shoulders, loosens the drawstring on his bag, and fishes out the 36-ounce YETI Ramblers.One black. One seafoam. Both, kind of, for her.“A thermos?” Her brows are pinched. She still sounds confused.“A water bottle, actually,” he says, wincing as he hands her the seafoam one. She accepts it without a word, staring at it with an intense expression on her face, as if seeing it and seeing past it simultaneously. His neck grows hot.“I went ahead and filled them up at the house. One’s for you, and one’s for me,” he says weakly. He shakes his black one lightly, and the ice water he’d filled it up with rattles around. And then, because she’s still looking at his hands and he’s still an idiot, he adds, “You know—so I don’t destroy the world.”It really had seemed like a much better gift in his head.But no, she graduates from one of the best tech schools in the country with Highest Honors, and he buys her a water bottle. A dumb, trendy fad of a water bottle. How stupid.“It’s insulated,” he says quickly. “And nearly indestructible. But I still have the gift receipt, if you want to—Oof.”He’s nearly knocked on his ass as Rey all but tackles him.Her arms wrap around his back, and her face burrows into his chest, and it’s so intense, so aggressive, that it takes him a second to recognize it as a hug.She’s hugging him.Ben can’t even remember the last time he was hugged, and now she’s hugging him. Grappling him. Holding him tightly, like she thinks he might leave. Like he’d have the strength to do something like that.His arms circle her, slowly at first, tentative and scared. Rey’s face has to smoosh into his shoulder before he can finally let himself exhale, sinking into her.His hands flatten over her back, fingers splayed out, spanning the warm, smooth length of her. She snuggles deeper in response.“I love it,” she says, her words partially muffled by the folds of his shirt. Her voice sounds rough. A little wet.“Yeah?” Ben whispers, heart lifting.“Yeah.” She nods so vigorously her face scrunches up his shirt. “I love it.”
I love you.
It’s not even a surprise, thinking it.The words are obvious, intentional and there, because, in a way, they’ve always been there. In his head and in his heart. There. True.Ben leans down until his cheek brushes the top of her head, and nuzzles into her wavy, sandy hair. He closes his eyes and takes a deep, steadying breath.Smells salt, sweat, her.It’s not a surprise, his love for her, but it is a revelation. His heart is full to bursting, and he’s feeling—god, he’s feeling so much at once. Comfort. Happiness. An aching fondness, and a profound sense of wonder. There’s longing, too. A longing so intense that it’s actually, physically painful.The closer he gets to her, the more intensely he wants. The more fiercely it hurts. He knows this is dangerous. Painful.But Ben can deal with pain. Has dealt with pain. Pain of all kinds, all his life.This feels different, though. Feels different because it is different. There’s nothing malicious about this feeling. Nothing possessive, or fearful, or cruel.It’s only want. Only yearning.Rey is perfect in his arms.And he knows, he knows, that even if this feeling wasn’t different, even if it was exactly the same kind of vulnerable closeness as before, he wouldn’t care. His pain tolerance is infamously high, after all, and with Rey involved, it’s probably higher than even he knows.He’d stay like this forever if it meant holding Rey.This brilliant, kind woman. His fierce, incredible friend.She nuzzles further into his shirt, right over his tender, pounding heart.Her grip on him tightens. A strong, quick burst.Then she lets go. And then she steps back.A small, hiccuping laugh escapes her as she does. Ben pretends not to notice as she hurriedly wipes at her eyes.She mumbles something, but she’s looking down, voice thick and hardly intelligible.“What’s that?” Ben asks softly enough he hardly even recognizes his own voice. He takes a small step closer to her, and wobbles, feet sinking into the porous sand.Rey ducks her head in the interim, shoulders shaking. A breeze swirls around them, fanning her hair out around her head like a halo. When she looks up, a stubborn lock of it cuts diagonally across her face, over her nose and mouth. The urge to reach out and tuck it behind her ear overwhelms him. Could he do that? Is that a thing friends could do?“Your water bottle,” Rey says, shoulders still shaking—but now it’s all too clear she’s laughing. Laughing, and seemingly oblivious to the hair swirling around her face. “It’s black,” she says. Ben drops his half-outstretched arm.
Oh my god.
“Shut up,” he says, blushing.But Rey doesn’t.She absolutely doesn’t.Ben can’t bring himself to mind.
By the time eight o’clock rolls around, Ben feels like he’s got this whole attraction thing mostly figured out.It had been alarming, initially. Experiencing it for the first time while at the beach feels fundamentally unfair. Cosmically orchestrated and cruel.But Ben’s an adult; he figures it out.He masturbates.A lot.Three times in one day, which is a personal record.It helps. Clears his head and takes the edge off so that he no longer feels like he’s about to fly straight into the sun whenever Rey so much as scratches her nose.The love thing, though.That...Well, that apparently can’t be masturbated away.“How do you not know how to cook?” Ben asks, mildly horrified.They’d come up with a paired schedule for making dinner each night of the trip. Paige and Rose. Poe and Finn. Rey and him. He hadn’t even picked.“I know how to cook just fine, thank you,” Rey says curtly, gesturing at him with a knife. A very large, very sharp knife. “I’ve managed to keep myself alive for twenty-three years, and cooking is a requisite part of that. You’re just all,” she flails the knife around, “fancy about it.”Ben very deliberately ignores the meat cleaver in her hands in favor of the words coming out of her mouth. “Rey, you told me to put you to work ‘Food Network-style’—your words, not mine—so I asked you to mince some garlic.” He takes a deep breath. “You didn’t take off the skin. You didn’t even separate out the cloves.”“My point stands. Fresh garlic is fancy. You know it comes in a powdered form, right?”Ben shakes his head in sheer disbelief.“Oh, you didn’t? Well, they sell it everywhere—even Whole Foods. It’s great. You should get some. It doesn’t go bad.”“There’s a jar of it on the spice rack,” Ben says, unsure if he’s amused or exasperated.“Wait—you have a spice rack here? Like, an actual rack? What’d you get the garlic for, then?”“Because it tastes better,” Ben says, then gestures to the cabinet by the refrigerator. “And it’s more like a drawer.”“It’s an entire drawer?”“Alright,” Ben says, now definitely amused. “I think we’ve lost the plot a bit here.”“That’s very British of you, Ben.”“Having a spice rack?”“No, the ‘lost the plot’ thing. That’s a British-ism. Been listening to BBC World Service on the way to work, have you?”Ben has been exposed to approximately one source of British idioms in the last six months.“I must have picked it up from a friend,” he says, in a way that’s entirely transparent.“Is that so?” Rey asks, sounding almost pleased. Her chin is tilted, and she’s looking at him with an expression he doesn’t quite know how to deal with—so he doesn’t. Deal with it, that is. He’ll likely spend a good portion of the night tossing and turning with his hand around his cock, trying to decipher the way she’s looking at him, but for now—the drowning feeling is back, and there’s only one way he knows how to swim.“Anyway,” he says, clearing his throat and trying his hardest not to blush. “Back to dinner, assuming we want to eat before ten o’clock.”“We do.” Rey nods in a way that seems mocking, might be from anyone else, but Ben knows how serious she is about food, despite how little she apparently knows about preparing it.Ben purses his lip and very carefully tosses her an onion. “Okay, that’s what I thought. Now, tell me if I’m being an asshole - ”“Gladly,” she snarks, flashing him a dangerous, dazzling smile.In response, he shoots her a stern look, trying (and failing) not to break his very serious glare. “Tell me if I’m being an asshole,” he repeats, “but this onion? You see it?”Rey’s lips twitch. “I’m holding it.”“Good. Then you can tell it has skin, too.” He pauses. “Skin you should remove.”Rey’s meat cleaver hits the bamboo cutting board with a resounding chop. “Next you’re gonna try to tell me that onions have layers. Well, ha ha—joke’s on you, Mr. Allez Cuisine. Shrek beat you to that one.”Ben shakes his head again and resumes sautéing the chicken cutlets.When he turns back to Rey, maybe five seconds later, she’s giving him an amused, secretive look, her eyes glinting.It’s exactly the kind of look he’s giving her.They smile at each other, as if on cue.Something in him swells at her smile. His cheeks flush an embarrassing shade of pink, and his heart rate speeds up.Rey’s chin ducks down and her smile turns kind of shy. Closed-lipped, private, and incredibly sweet.It’s a smile of hers he’s never seen before.It might be his favorite.He doesn’t look away from it. Can’t—not until oil from the pan pops and a speck of it flies out, scalding his forearm. He curses. Rey jumps.When he looks back up from his arm, Rey has turned back to the counter and is taking a large gulp from her wine glass, and—Well.Love, it seems, doesn’t give two shits about bikini tops.Doesn’t care that Rey’s wearing old yoga pants and an oversized Ramblin’ Wreck sweatshirt. Doesn’t care that she looks as if she hasn’t washed her hair since that first afternoon when he’d mentioned sand in the house. Doesn’t care that she doesn’t know a thing about fresh produce or that she’s trying to use a meat cleaver to chop an onion. Love just cares about Rey.And, as he leans his front against the kitchen cabinets, he discovers love also talks to his cock.Talks to his half-hard cock and his whirling head and his unversed heart. It’s a group message to his entire fucking body.Rey, it says.
Rey.
Rey.
Rey.
It’s a miracle he doesn’t burn down the house.
“Fuck me,” Finn says around a mouthful of food. Flashes of the man’s half-chewed taco appear between his words; it’s disgusting. “Fuck me yesterday, today, and tomorrow. These tacos are so good I want to eat them for breakfast and maybe also for the rest of my life.” Finn swallows, finally, and takes a deep breath. “Rey, you did not cook these.”“Did so,” she answers, smug and preening.“No way,” Finn scoffs, shaking his head even as he scoops a generous helping of sautéd peppers and onions onto his next corn tortilla. “I’ve had your cooking, and it does not taste like this.”“She helped,” Ben says, because she did.Well, she kind of did.She chopped, at least.Finn shoots him a disbelieving look that Ben in no way backs down from. He scowls, fully intending to lean into Rey’s account of things. But it seems this is beyond even his poker face abilities, because Finn just scoffs again, louder this time.“No. Way,” Finn repeats, adamant. “Rey ascribes to the hot sauce school of cooking, not the flavors and spices and properly prepared food school. I was looking up numbers to order us a pizza before you called us in here. See?” He holds up his phone for emphasis. A Google result for overpriced local pizza places displays prominently on the screen.“Finn,” Rey hisses, like he’s embarrassing her.“What’s that now?” Rose asks, obvious in her attempt to change the subject. “A hot sauce school?” She sounds genuinely interested, though. To be honest, Ben is too, but that’s not a surprise. He’s interested in everything when it comes to Rey.“Oh yeah,” Finn says as he uses the metal serving tongs to grab another chicken strip. “Its tenets are simple. If you can’t feel your mouth, your food can’t taste bad. You can eat anything that way. As such, Rey’s spice tolerance is melt-your-face-off high.”“Sound logic,” Dameron declares. “I like it.”“Yeah.” Rey huffs a laugh and looks down at her plate. Her tortilla has almost more jalapeño relish than chicken. It’s already her third. “Perks of living in a food desert for most of my life, I guess. I can eat food that would make most people cry. What rewards I have reaped.”Ben frowns slightly. He recognizes the sarcasm but still feels lost.Rey is sitting right next to him, though, so he turns his head and keeps his voice low. “I thought you said you’ve lived in Atlanta since you were six?”“I did,” Rey replies at a normal volume. “I have. I said food desert, not actual desert. You know what I’m talking about—no normal grocery stores, no affordable fresh food. Nothing but gas stations and chain restaurants for as far as the eye can see. The true American frontier.”Ben’s stomach sinks as he remembers how he’d been teasing her in the kitchen.Making fun of her for never buying a clove of garlic before. For not “knowing” how to cook.He feels like a total piece of shit.He is a total piece of shit.“I know all about that,” Rose says after an awkward moment of silence, saving Ben from having to reply. “Our parents practically raised us off the dollar menu before they passed. Their hours made it nearly impossible to cook.”Paige confirms Rose’s account with a nod. “I was about the chicken nuggets; Rose always went for the cheeseburger.”“Blasphemy,” Dameron says, cutting the tension further. And then, because they’re all grown adults, the table devolves into an incredibly heated chicken nugget versus cheeseburger debate, with Finn steadfastly claiming it was possible to count both as favorites. That any food was good food, thank you very much. Rey does not partake.She’s quiet. Not quite sad. Not really. She’s just not entirely present, either. It’s like Ben can feel her pulling farther away, back into herself, into a past she seems to spend so much time clawing herself out of.So he nudges her slightly. Just a brush of her leg with his foot, his toe dragging across the exposed skin between her socks and yoga pants, causing her to jerk and blink suddenly. She looks over at him, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear in a way that shouldn’t pull at him nearly as much as it does, giving him a questioning look.He wants to apologize. Wants to tell her he’s sorry for being such an ass earlier, despite how unintentional his words were, to let her know he’d never want to make fun of her, never dream of hurting her.But while he knows that would make him feel better, he doesn’t know if it would do anything at all for Rey. So he tries something different instead.Thank you for sharing that with me, he mouths.He doesn’t really know why he mouths it—it’s not like the other people at the table can’t see him, even as consumed in debate as they are. But then Rey gives him another small, sweet, close-lipped smile back, and he knows exactly why he’d done it. Knows he’d do it again, too.You’re welcome, she mouths back.I love you, he doesn’t say.Doesn’t say, and can’t look away.But then something hard and cool nudges his hand, where his fingers are limply curled around a sterling silver fork, and he looks down to find a small ceramic bowl. The jalapeño relish he’d made at her request. When he turns his attention back to her, she arcs a brow, giving him that challenging look of hers he’s never been able to back down from.So he lifts the serving spoon and scoops out the smallest amount he can while still maintaining some modicum of dignity, before carefully, carefully spreading it on his taco, right next to the sour cream.Rey rolls her eyes at him, then devours her third taco in two bites.As soon as it’s swallowed, she sits up in her chair, suddenly ramrod straight.Ben is about to pass her the sour cream, because surely her mouth is burned all to hell and back, when she stands abruptly, nearly knocking over her umpteenth glass of wine. “The guacamole!” Rey says to him urgently, as if genuinely upset. “We forgot the guacamole!”(He’d made that, too.)“It’s in the fridge,” he says.Finn looks stricken. “Oh my god, Peanut, go.”She hightails it to the kitchen, and Finn turns to the table, shaking his head. “It’s her favorite. I don’t know how she could have forgotten it.”Ben watches her leave while everyone else agrees that guacamole beats chicken and burgers, hands down. It’s not really a contest.
After dinner, they others fall to Netflix, too full and dehydrated and drained from the sun to do anything but crash in a lazy heap. Being around people is pretty much the last thing Ben wants when he’s tired, but it seems to be a non-issue for everyone else.They cuddle up together, snug and comfortable, sprawled around the large, obscenely plush u-shaped sectional his mother had apparently purchased at some point in the last fourteen years. It’s a mess of cushions, blankets, and—and friendship. People who seem to just fit together. Rose has her head in Paige’s lap, and Finn is sandwiched, quite happily, between a seated Rey and a sprawling Poe. Poe is, of course, stretched out so that his small form takes up one-third of the massive couch. His left hand is even crossed behind his head while a wine glass dangles in his right like he’s some modern-day variant of Dionysus.Ben stops. Hovers at the entrance of the living room, keenly aware of the lump forming in his throat.It doesn’t matter that it’s his mother’s house. The couch is... full.And they all seem... comfortable.Sleepy. Maybe also sloppy.Ben doesn’t let himself frown, but he can’t really bring himself to smile, either. Nor can he just keep standing there, stupid and awkward and apart.Before he can talk himself out of it, he turns around and walks back to the kitchen.This time, it’s not like he’s running away. He’s helping. He hasn’t had much to drink today, too consumed by recent developments and shit-scared about what he might say or do if alcohol got added to the mix. Plus, he’s an adult, goddamnit. Years of experience have taught him the importance of adequate hydration, a lesson everyone else seems to have forgotten entirely.Honestly, not one of them seems the least bit concerned about drinking water, so he’s able to tell himself he’s being useful as he fills up plastic Tervis tumblers one-by-one with water from the Brita filter, feeling more like a mother than a host.“This is perfect,” Rose says, overly effusive when he thrusts the first cup at her. She’s obviously more in need of the water than he’d thought. She takes a sip from the tumbler and hums, eyes closing. “Thanks so much, Ben. You’re actually very nice, aren’t you?”“Not really,” he says. “And don’t mention it.” By contrast, Paige is quiet. She grabs her tumbler with a stoic nod, which Ben is immensely thankful for. But then Ben moves to leave, and she ruins it by saying, “What about Rey? She’s the thirstiest of us all.”Ben scowls, feeling his ears heat.As if he would honestly forget about her.Behind him, he hears pillows shuffling and an indignant squawking sound. Ben is tempted to turn and look, but he keeps his eyes on Paige.“I’m getting to it. I only have so many hands.”“Oh, I bet you do,” Paige says in a way that makes no sense at all, so he turns, bewildered, and makes his way back to the kitchen.On the way, he picks up Rey’s water bottle from her seat at the dinner table. Fills it up along with nondescript Tervis tumblers for Finn and Poe.When he gets back into the living room, juggling the two tumblers and the much larger seafoam bottle, he hands the guys their glasses first, getting polite nods of acknowledgment from them both. Rey gives him a blinding smile, though. Effusive and appreciative, just like Rose, but in her own way.Their fingers brush as she grabs it from him. Immediately, she twists off the black lid and starts chugging the damn thing like it’s halftime at a soccer game.Ben averts his eyes to keep from staring.Nothing about her has changed. Everything about her has changed.It’s frankly stupid the things he’s noticing now. The increased potency of her everyday actions. She could probably fold laundry in front of him, and he’d find it captivating.After, Rey leans over to put the mostly empty glass on the coffee table, then pats the very small, very empty space next to her.He hesitates.She dimples at him.He sits.Of course he does.And, well -In some ways, it’s the worst thing he’s ever voluntarily done to himself. Great but also terrible. A punishment—and probably one he deserves. Because Rey, like most people, has vastly underestimated the amount of space he takes up, and while he had certainly known and knows, he also isn’t in the position to deny her anything.So he sits where she’d patted, hardly a cushion’s worth of space between her and the armrest, and somehow makes himself fit by sheer, stubborn willpower, slouching his shoulders and squishing his thighs together.It’s tight. Uncomfortable and awkward. His ass can’t even hit the cushions for a handful of seconds—practically forever.His shoulders are that broad.As are his thighs.As is, honestly, every last part of his body.That’s Benjamin Organa Solo for you, ladies and gentlemen. Broad. Oversized. Too big. Too much.At least, he feels like too much right now. Feels out of control with her so close. With his heart beating so fast.He’s touching her, and he’s going to fuck it up somehow. He knows it. Somehow, he is.God, he’s hyper-aware of every last part of their squished together bodies. Can feel her rucked up and wrinkly sweatshirt, her spandex-tight leggings. Her body. Perfect. Close. An eternity away.He attempts to get more comfortable, settling further back into the couch instead of perching right on the edge. After a moment of indecision, he twists and moves his arm behind Rey, praying she doesn’t read too much into it—he’s consumed enough media to recognize it as a move, even if he doesn’t mean it to be one, so god knows she must be familiar with it—but before he can follow that spiraling train of thought much further, Rey’s body seems to slope down. Down and toward his.It’s an effect of his weight on the couch, he realizes. If he sinks in any more, pushing the plush cushions, she’d likely tilt further. Maybe even fall. Gently, of course, and onto his lap.It could happen. She’s that close. Close enough that when he’s still, he can hear her breathing. Can’t hear anything else.It’s how he misses Rose’s last call for Netflix vetoes and ends up watching Queer Eye for the first time.He rises up, about to voice a post-vote veto, when Rey jerks up, too—only to pump her fist in celebration at the group’s decision. So Ben just awkwardly reaches for his water bottle and settles back down onto the couch.He expects to hate the show.He doesn’t.A lot of it is filmed in and around his hometown, which is sort of cool. And while he normally holds a strong dislike for the kind of people who gravitate toward showbusiness, this cast seems oddly genuine. Friendly and kind and on top of their shit. In particular, he focuses on Jonathan, who seems to know exactly what he’s talking about, sharing some hair care tips Ben had known and others he hadn’t. So, yeah. The show isn’t the worst thing he’s ever watched. He likes it fine, for the most part.Rey though? She loves it.Every time the intro plays, the entire couch sings along. The song’s catchy. Upbeat. And Rey is apparently tired enough and tipsy enough to keep humming it during slow parts of the show.About ninety minutes in, Rey sways briefly, and for one heart-stopping moment, Ben thinks she’s going to lean into him. Fall asleep on him. But then, just as he thinks it, and knows he couldn’t want anything more, she tips the other way, her head coming to rest against Finn’s shoulder. Her cheek presses against the man’s bare, toned arm, sleepy hazel eyes flickering open, then closed, then open again, like a trick candle.Jealousy flares in Ben’s chest.It’s swift. Insidious, compulsive, and ugly. He wants.Rey shuts her eyes again, for longer this time. “Things keep getting better,” she whispers to Finn. It’s said so quietly Ben wouldn’t have been able to hear it if he hadn’t been listening so intently, fixated so entirely on her.Finn leans his cheek against Rey’s forehead. He closes his eyes, too. “Yeah, Peanut, they really seem to be.”Rey sighs sleepily. She looks happy, lazy, content. “I’d choose you every time, Peanut.”“Not if I choose you first,” Finn answers—and what Ben’s feeling? Yes, it’s jealousy. There’s no doubt it’s jealousy. It’s there, and it’s strong, and it’s his first immediate thought.But he can choose not to make it his second. Choose not to let it consume him.Because he loves Rey, but he doesn’t know her like Finn does. And that’s okay. It really, honestly is. Rey is allowed to have other people in her life. People that are there for her. People that provide her comfort and make her happy. Finn is that for her, and she is that for him.Ben can’t claim to understand what a relationship like that is like, but he imagines it must be nice.Rey deserves nice.So he gives them what privacy he can with Rey’s thighs still pressed so firmly along the length of his, and turns back to the TV just in time to catch Tan France extolling the virtues of the French tuck.Ben continues watching the show for longer than he expects to."... being vulnerable is not a sign of weakness,” Karamo says. “It is a sign of strength. It shows that you are in tune with yourself, which is the sexiest thing to men or women."At this point, Rey is dozing. And Ben? He watches the Fab Five, their own little team, until he falls asleep, too.
Monday, July 30th
Rey’s head is in his lap, and it’s not a dream.His neck is tilted at a terrible angle, his tree trunk thighs are mostly off the couch, his calves sprawled out and heels on the floor, and Rey’s head is in his lap.In. His. Lap.He stops breathing.A frantic scan of the room assures him that he and Rey are, thankfully, the only ones still here, but he still can’t tamp down the sudden rush of embarrassment he feels. Or convince his body to start behaving normally.This feels like a trick. A trap.The room itself is dark with the exception of the lamp to Ben’s left. Someone had either turned the TV off, or it had turned itself off. Careful not to jostle Rey, Ben slowly frees his phone from his pocket, wincing as his too-bright phone screen tells him that it’s just after three in the morning.Somewhere in the time since Finn left, Rey had apparently turned around in search of another person-sized pillow.Turned around so that her head is in his lap.Turned around so that the side of her face is nuzzled against the dark grey cotton of his sweats.Turned around so that her small, perfectly shaped mouth is gaping, actually drooling, on his fucking crotch.It’s unbelievable, but it’s not a dream.Because, yes, he had been asleep. Now, though... now he is not. There’s gunk in his eyes and a crick in his neck and fire shooting through his entire body. He’s never felt so awake. So alive. So goddamned fucking panicked.Rey, for her part, is asleep. And, after realizing that Rey isn’t going to wake unprompted and that his dick is—for now, at least—blessedly flaccid, Ben gives himself permission to breathe again.Breathe again, and linger.Linger longer, and look at her.Just for a minute, he tells himself. A moment. He needs to.Doing anything else would be utterly beyond him, because at this second, in this strange witching hour, Rey is transformed and transformative. Sleep softens her. Loosens the strong, fierce lines of her. She looks calm, at peace, and so painfully, achingly lovely. Ben feels his own face soften, just from looking at her. I love you, he practices thinking. I love you more than I thought possible. Perhaps it’s because of the lamplight, perhaps it’s because of today’s time in the sun, but her freckles have never been so pronounced. His finger hovers over her. Careful to keep from actually touching her, he traces each light brown fleck, cataloging them, traveling from her cheekbone to the tip of her nose. He wants to count each and every one. He’s still looking at her—marveling over her, really—when Rey murmurs something, startling him into absolute stillness.The tendons in his neck go taut, and his legs lock up even as his heart lurches. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize she’d been talking in her sleep.He is a fool.A panicked, besotted, distracted fool, but even he can’t ignore the drool that pools at the corner of her mouth, before dripping a wet, messy line over and onto his lap. Ben watches slack-jawed as his cotton sweatpants soak up her saliva. As the wet stain begins to spread.He runs a hand over his eyes.Okay. Okay then.He shifts, slowly and carefully maneuvering so that he’s finally sitting on the couch like a normal human person. Knowing his time is up, he tries to summon the courage to wake her.It’s harder than it should be.“Rey,” he says, gently shaking her shoulder. “It’s time to wake up.”Rey grumbles and doesn’t stir.He sighs. As if it would be that easy.“Rey,” he tries again, voice marginally louder but still carefully modulated so as not to wake anyone upstairs up.Her brows knit. A small frown forms on her face as she inches away from the sound of his voice. Her messy hair spills out of her hair tie, and her lips part as she snuffles, muttering something about file paths and peanut butter sandwiches.Ben closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.“Rey... love, come on. You need to get up,” he whispers firmly, torn between wanting to wake her slowly and quaking in fear at what might happen if she moves any closer to his crotch.The fear wins out, as it often does.He shakes her shoulder again, just this side of rough. “It’s late, Rey. You need to go to bed.” “I’m up!” Rey says abruptly. It sounds like she’s been up for hours. One glance at her, however, tells Ben she’s definitely still half-asleep. “I’m watching the show,” she insists, eyes shut.“The show’s over, Rey. The TV’s off. It’s time to go to bed.” In the face of that logic, Rey makes a noise of protest, turns her head and burrows into his stomach. He sucks in a breath and flinches, flexing his abs.“Hard,” Rey grumbles, moving away from his stomach and down. Down and onto his crotch. “Just leave me here,” she whines.Ben is finding it very difficult to breathe.Every muscle in his body coils tight from her movements, every piece and part of him hungry, and wanting, and scared.This isn’t happening. Not to him.Except—it is.So Ben blinks, inwardly slaps himself across the face, and exhales.“I’m not going to leave you, Rey,” he says gently, his hand coming to rest softly, safely, on her shoulder. “You’re not?” she mumbles, still a bizarre mix of intelligible and asleep.He tucks a thick, salt-dried strand of hair behind her ear and swallows, throat dry and oddly thick. “No, love. I’m going to help you get to bed, and then I’ll see you in the morning.”“Promise?”“Promise,” Ben says, resisting a near-overwhelming urge to kiss her forehead.Rey nods sleepily. “Okay,” she yawns. Then she scrunches her eyes and stretches. Arches her back and points her toes and extends her arms out, as cute as a kitten. The movement lifts her sweatshirt, exposing a tantalizing strip of skin at her midriff.Her stomach is flat and muscular and, Ben discovers with a suddenly pinched brow, sunburnt.She’s sunburnt.Not terribly, according to his brief glance, but enough that he knows it must be uncomfortable, especially with how tight the waistband of her yoga pants looks.Ben feels a sudden burst of something at the sight. Several somethings, if he’s honest. But the thing he recognizes, the thing he latches onto, is a deep, encompassing sense of frustration.Frustration that he hadn’t known, frustration that he should’ve. Frustration that he hadn’t offered her sunscreen again later in the afternoon when he’d only worried over himself, frustration that it’s too late to do anything about it. For now, at least. Ben stands, half-lifting Rey as he does. He’s tempted to just carry her, but he wants her to walk—to know how she got back to her room.It takes another few minutes, and Rey is mostly a zombie as he coaxes her across the living room, but she smiles at him when he gets her to her bedroom, and smiles at him as she crawls under the covers, and smiles at him as she keeps hold of his arm for a long, belligerent moment, like she plans to pull him down into the bed the same as she had into the surf. A flash of ingenuity has Ben snatching a random throw pillow and thrusting it at Rey; she grabs it, latching onto it and pulling it, cradled, to her chest.Before he leaves, he sets out a glass of water, two tablets of ibuprofen, and a bottle of aloe vera on her bedside table. It’s hours before he can fall back asleep.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Monday, July 30th
It’s raining when Ben wakes up.It’s supposed to rain all day, according to the app on his phone.Great.Ben lingers in bed for another thirty minutes, listening to the rain come down, staring up at the ceiling, and decidedly not looking at the thin grey wall that separates his room from Rey’s. Soon enough, though, the smell of freshly brewed coffee overwhelms him, dragging his sorry ass out of bed and into the kitchen.A smiling Rose greets him. A hungover Paige slouches on a stool at the kitchen island, grunting at him. Ben spares them both a gruff nod and heads straight for the coffee, manners be damned. After a quick glance confirming the Tico sisters have their own cups, he pours himself the last dregs of the French press. It’s burnt. Oversteeped, too, and nearing lukewarm, but it’s coffee. Or resembles coffee, anyway.As he goes to grab creamer out of the fridge, still mostly bleary-eyed, he comes face-to-face with a stark white sheet of computer paper magnetted to the otherwise empty stainless steel refrigerator. IF YOU’RE CAUGHT CHECKING YOUR WORK EMAIL, YOU HAVE TO TAKE A SHOT.The block letters look like Poe’s handwriting.Ben wrenches open the fridge and extracts an open container of half-and-half.Fat fucking chance. Finn, Poe, Paige, and Rose splay out on the couch, absently scrolling on their phones and half-watching that British cooking show Netflix has been pushing at him for months. Ben has a book in his lap, but he’s not faring much better than the rest of them.And that’s fine, he supposes. It’s raining, and they’re on vacation. They can have a do-nothing day. They can laze about, marathoning Netflix and—enjoying each other’s company.That’s a thing people do. A thing he can act like he does.When Rey enters the room an eternity later, an hour shy of lunch, Ben feels ready for a third cup of coffee, exhausted from the act of acting casual.And Rey, while a welcome sight—a beautiful sight—only makes it worse.Her hair is clean and damp, pulled back in a sloppily gathered half-ponytail. She’s wearing something of hers he’s never seen before: an off-white linen jumpsuit that cinches at her waist. It’s a far cry from her normal default of t-shirts and soccer shorts, of dark jeans and button-down blouses, and part of Ben wonders if it’s irritating her sunburn even as a louder part of him fixates on how impossibly small it makes her waist seem.He closes his mouth and swallows.Rey looks beautiful. Of course she does. But she also looks perfectly fine—like she’d slept a full night in a king-sized bed, definitely applied sunscreen the day before, and had never heard of the word ‘hangover,’ let alone experienced one.It’s yet another reminder of their respective ages. Of the miles of difference between a twenty-something-year-old body and a thirty-year-old one. And there are lot of differences. Ben isn’t the only one who notices, either.“Damn, Niima!” Dameron says, looking up from his stupid Instagram feed. “You look good, girl. Who’re you dressin’ up for?”Ben’s hands tighten around his book, but Rey only rolls her eyes, seemingly unbothered as she plops down on the sectional next to Finn. “I don’t dress up for anyone but myself.” She pauses, then reaches out to pinch her friend’s cheeks. “And maybe Finn-y.”Finn swats her hand away. “Don’t call me that.”Rey makes a face at him, quickly bops him on the nose, then turns to everyone else. Her linen-clad legs start to bounce up and down, like she’s ready to go, struggling to sit still.Staying inside all day is going to be miserable for her. Possibly even worse than it will be for him.“So what’s the move, y’all?” she asks. Her face is open. Expectant.No one replies.Rey leans forward, hands closing around her bouncing knees. Her knuckles whiten. The shaking stops. “Come on, guys, what’s the plan?”“Well,” Finn grumbles, still apparently put out at the nickname, “we were waiting for your lazy butt to get out of bed.”Rey jostles him with her elbow. “And now I’m up. So what’re we doing?” Bizarrely, she turns to Ben. “Any ideas?”Ben, who frequently forgets he’s a part of this group and therefore its conversations, just blinks at her. “It’s supposed to rain all day,” he says after all eyes in the room turn to him. “Thunderstorm, too, in the afternoon. It should clear up around nine tonight.”It’s a weather report, not in any way an answer to her question, but Rey doesn’t seem to notice. She just nods her head and smiles at him, like he’s contributed something important. Something valuable.He hasn’t, of course, but he wishes he had.If he had, then maybe he wouldn’t have to spend the next two hours playing some game from hell called The Resistance. “I don’t know,” Dameron says. “There’s just something about his face. I don’t like it.”“Agreed,” Paige says, nodding along solemnly. “Terrible face.”“The face of a traitor.”“A definite traitor.”“A treasonous traitor. A treasonous, traitorous spy.”“You guys aren’t cute.” Rey shakes her finger at the two of them. “That’s not funny or fair.”“No,” Dameron says, and shrugs. “But it is right. Just look at him.”“You can’t know who’s a spy just by looking at someone!”“Uh, actually you can,” Finn says. “It’s called body language, Peanut. Also, Solo has been a spy for three games in a row. Their accusations aren’t exactly unfounded.”Rey shakes her head. “But that’s just it, don’t you see? Those games are in the past! You can’t hold them against him. It’s a new round with new cards now. Be logical about this, Finn.”“Hey! I am the height of logic.”“Oh, are you? Because there’s just something about your face that makes me think otherwise.”From across the table, Rose holds up both hands. “Alright, children, let’s calm down.” She leans forward, entirely too perceptive. “Ben, you’ve been awfully quiet over there. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”Ben takes a long, slow sip of his scotch, before returning his glass to its coaster. He nudges the crystal with his finger until it’s sitting precisely in the center.“This is a stupid game.”Rose narrows her eyes at him. “Something that will help your case, I mean.”“Okay.” He blinks at her. “I’m not the spy.”He is the spy. And this game is stupid.But the whole group apparently loves it, so that’s what they’ve been playing.Rose crosses her arms. “Try a little harder there, Ben.”He sighs. “Look, there’s nothing I can say or do that will get you to trust me if you decide not to. You’re either bringing assumptions with you from previous games, or you’re not. If I protest, you’ll think I’m lying. If I’m quiet, you’ll think I’m admitting guilt. I’ve done what I can, and I’ve told you what I’ve told you. There’s nothing more I can do.”“See?” Rey flings her arm out. “That’s exactly what I’ve been saying! Y’all just aren’t listening!”Finn, Dameron, and Rose all start talking at once, but Rey doesn’t back down.Her defense of him is vehement. Unwavering. It would make Ben’s stomach eat itself with guilt if he didn’t know she was a spy like him. And a damn good one, too.As if to sell her role further, Rey pats his hand in what is ostensibly a reassuring gesture. Her fingers skim over the back of his palm, then close around his hand. She squeezes tightly once, twice.He has to keep himself from looking at her. From blowing their cover. From blowing his cover and—everything else.God, he’s pathetic.The group continues arguing. Rey continues holding his hand. And, through it all, Ben can’t help thinking, like he often does, that he and Rey make a pretty good team.“Alright, alright,” Finn spits out in a fit of pique. “You know what? This doesn’t matter, because it’s my turn to pick who goes on the Mission, and I’m not picking Ben.” Almost reluctantly, like it's an afterthought, he adds, “No offense.”“None taken,” Ben says.“Some taken,” Rey argues.Finn rolls his eyes and divvies out the Mission cards. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Rose, Rey, Paige—you’re up.” “The Resistance is a hard game to play with only six players.”When Ben doesn’t respond, Rey drops down on the couch next to him. She sits cross-legged and close to him, holding a peanut butter sandwich in her left hand. Her right elbow brushes his bicep. “And we usually don’t play that many rounds in a row.”They’d played the game two more times. Ben had been a spy in all but the last game. By then, it hadn’t mattered—the Resistance players didn’t even pretend to include him in their conversations.But, whatever. It’s not like he cares.“It says it’s for 5-10 players on the box,” he finds himself saying, instead of changing the subject, as had been his plan.Rey leans a little closer, now fully in his personal space.His shoulders rise up to his ears. His mental alarms start blaring like sirens.“Yes, well. It’s really fun most of the time.” She pauses, and Ben can hear a frown in her voice. “I think Poe might have been stacking the deck.”Ben glares at his phone, lips pursed. “No, you think? Whatever gave you that idea?”In his head, it had sounded teasing. Maybe a little sarcastic.In reality, it just sounds mean.Rey leans back, and he drops his phone in his haste to look over to her.“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. You’re right. I can—I can see how it could be a fun game. With the right people.”With your group, he thinks. Without me.“Yeah,” Rey replies a little too quickly. “And, uh. Yeah. No apology necessary.”She turns to the window and stares at it as if suddenly taken by the steady, unending rainfall.Ben opens his mouth, then shuts it.Seconds pool between them like minutes.Almost absently, still staring out the window, Rey lifts her sandwich and takes a large bite. There’s an odd hint of citrus coming from it. Lime, maybe. Ben’s nose crinkles as he catches it.He must make some sort of noise, too, because Rey peels her eyes from the rain. She struggles to swallow a large, sticky mouthful of peanut butter, but when she does, she sends him a disbelieving look. “Are you seriously judging my sandwich right now?”Ben’s eyes return to his phone. The screen is black.He punches in the wrong code.“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”“You are, aren’t you? You’re such a snob, Ben.”“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeats and fiddles with his phone screen again. Still, the wrong code.Rey thrusts her half-eaten sandwich under his nose. She waves it like a flag. “Peanut butter sriracha sandwich. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it, bud.”Ben makes a face.Rey rises up onto her knees and leans forward. She braces one hand on his shoulder. The other hand continues to dangle the sandwich in front of his face, like a challenge, or maybe a dare.She raises a steady brow, and he doesn’t know what comes over him. He really doesn’t. One second he’s rolling his eyes, the next, he’s leaning forward, eyes locked on hers, and taking a substantial bite. It tastes terrible.Like far too spicy Thai peanut sauce. With crunchy peanut butter to boot.“Delicious,” he says after he swallows.Rey swallows, too. “Um,” she says. She tears her eyes away from his mouth and blinks up at him.Her eyes are dark now. So dark, and deep, and brown.Ben leans forward.“Oh my god!” he hears Finn call from the kitchen. “I can’t believe you ate that! Are you still alive, dude? Do you need a glass of milk, or maybe an ambulance?”Rey practically flings herself off the couch and runs into the kitchen, like she can’t get away from him fast enough. She shouts something at Finn, but he can’t decipher it. Couldn’t hear it even if he tried.Ben covers his eyes with his hand.He can’t believe it either.Any of it. They eat. (Not just sandwiches.) They drink. (Not just scotch.) They play a whole host of games.The Resistance is followed by Sequence, which is followed by Dominion, which is followed by Codenames.They drink some more.They drink a lot more.By the time they’re playing Codenames, Ben is actually having an okay time. Or maybe he’s just tipsy.Probably it’s both.Staying inside all day, sitting around with everyone—it’s messed with him. Exhausted him, but also given him a false sense of security. Made him relax his guard enough to drink, absently and frequently, as if his arousal problems were only caused by the beach and by bathing suits, even as the social pressure has distracted him, even as the proximity to Rey has keyed him up.The whole thing is a mistake.“Nutella 3.”“What the hell?” Paige asks. She turns to Ben with a bewildered expression on her face, but he has no clue, either.“Nutella 3,” Rey repeats from the hot seat, giving more inflection to the word than is strictly permissible in the Codenames rule book. Her eyes lock on Ben, widening meaningfully. “Nu-tell-a,” she enunciates again, like a crazy person.Strands of her hair have somehow managed to come loose from her half-ponytail and float about her head helter-skelter, supporting the crazy person aesthetic. Her eyes are wide. Emphatic. She looks like she’s trying to shove her thoughts into his head through sheer, stubborn willpower, and believes she’s capable of doing it.But then her reference clicks, and he guesses she’s right, entirely capable.Laughter bursts from him.It’s uncontrollable. And—loud.Loud enough that the everyone goes quiet. Still and quiet, like he’s shattered glass. Still and quiet, as if he’d done something wrong.Everyone but Rey, whose eyes crinkle and lips quirk up. She sends him a soft, fond look.Ben’s ears heat. He averts his eyes.He touches VACATION, PHYSICS, and BERRY in quick succession.When he brings himself to glance up again, Rey is smiling at him in a way that makes him uncomfortable. In a way he doesn’t deserve.“Perfect,” she says quietly. “I knew you’d get it.” Paige is the one who ruins it all. Imagine that.“Okay, Solo, shoot me straight,” she says as they both go to the kitchen to grab more food. “What kind of Nutella secrets have you and Rey been sharing?”His shoulders tense.The rest of him nearly freezes, too.For a moment, he considers walking back into the living room empty handed, then out the door, down the driveway, and into oncoming traffic, but Rey’d said she was hungry, and he’d hidden some leftover guacamole in the back of the fridge.He shrugs, though it takes considerable effort. “It’s an inside joke, I guess.” He stops in front of the fridge. “And BERRY was obvious.”“True,” Paige acknowledges. “The other two were impressive, though. That was some next level sibling shit.”Ben remembers the consuming rush of arousal he’d felt when Rey had leaned forward to lay out her round of prompt cards and he’d realized that he could see right down the top of her jumpsuit—that she wasn’t wearing a bra.Sibling shit, he thinks. Right.“Yeah. Only child here,” he says, awkwardly pointing to himself with his thumb.“Right.” Paige smiles. “Of course. Poor choice of words, but you know what I mean.” She grabs some Flaimin’ Hot Cheetos and a bag of Skinny Pop. “Y’all’ve got a real connection, don’t you think?”Ben just kind of stares at her for a moment, because surely she is not trying to have the conversation he thinks she’s trying to have with him. This friend of Rey’s that he knows the least well. This woman he’s pretty sure is only here because her sister was coming and it’s a rent-free vacation spot.“It’s whatever.”“No,” Paige says seriously, stopping beside him. “It’s nice. Y’all have a good thing. I don’t know what that thing is exactly, but it’s good, you know. You’re sweet with her.”Ben’s stomach drops.She knows. About his feelings.She knows and Dameron knows and - and everyone knows, don’t they?Is he that obvious?“No, really,” she insists. “It’s cute.”Ben closes his eyes. He is, isn’t he? Obvious.Obviously pathetic. Obviously obvious. Obvious, and everyone can see.Everyone, including - ?Can she - ?Does she - ?His stomach sinks.He’s got to get out of here. Get out of this house.He snatches the guacamole and a half-empty bag of tortilla chips and turns to leave the kitchen. “Thanks,” he tosses out on the way by her, not to be rude.“Sure thing.” She pats him on the shoulder as he leaves. “Any time.” The problem with having the master bedroom on the first floor of the house is that it’s on the first floor of the house.Where everyone else is, so he can’t use it to hide. Not effectively, anyway.But there are other places he can go.After he gives the chips and dip to Rey, he begs off the game, lying about having to make a call.Grabbing his phone as a prop, he goes outside and nearly sprints down the stairs to hide out in the empty two-car garage. As soon as he gets there, though, guilt floods him. He’s trying not to lie anymore. Trying to be better.But he can’t go back inside, either, so he actually does make a call. To his mother, because she’s the first non-telemarketer call on his recent contacts list. And maybe also because he wants to hear the sound of her voice.The service at the beach isn’t what he’d call great by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s even worse in the garage. He has to stand near the side door, only just under the awning, to get any kind of reception.It’s like standing at the edge of a waterfall. The mist, humidity, and rain splatter add up. He’s drenched in minutes.When he goes back upstairs an hour later, he’s soaking wet and almost sober.Everyone else is dry and decidedly not. Sober, that is. They’re playing beer pong, of all things—and on his mother’s dining room table.Well, Dameron, Paige, Finn, and Rose are playing beer pong. Rey is sitting over to the side on a dining room chair, hugging her ankles, head resting on her knees.Her head lifts up when Ben comes inside.“Hey,” she says, and smiles at him.His heart thumps wildly in his chest, returning right back to where it had been, his mother’s patient hour-long conversation obliterated by one absent, toothy grin. It hurts to look at her.He gives her a strained, close-lipped smile back, then turns his head and sprints for the bathroom, making like he’s trying not to trail water across the floor.He really could use a shower, despite having taken one that morning. To clear his head. To finish sobering up. Definitely not to do anything else that might involve Rey’s bent over cleavage and sweet, soft smile.He steps in the shower, presses his forehead against the cool, white subway tiles, and sighs.After, he dithers about getting dressed. He hangs up his clothes in the closet. He gathers his dirty towels and starts a pile for laundry.He checks his texts. He checks his email. Then he checks his work email, too, because fuck you, Poe.Three email replies later, and he’s furious enough at the general incompetence of his coworkers that he’s almost distracted. Definitely sober. Finally.He decides to go for a drive, nevermind that it’s still raining, and harder than before.He needs to go to the store, anyway—the good one, across the bridge, two towns away.His phone lights up, dinging as he drives through the near-torrential rain. When he pulls into a CVS parking lot thirty minutes later, windshield wipers set to their highest speed, he relaxes his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel and checks his messages.
Hey, whered you disappear to?
Your car’s gone, what’s up?
Finn cooked. do you want me to save you any dinner? it’s spaghetti; no mushrooms, i promise.
The rain is really coming down—Ben, are you ok?
Ben?
He closes his eyes. The windshield wiper blades screech on the glass as they whip back and forth. He grimaces.
I’m fine.
I’ll eat when I get back.
Thanks, talk soon.
He’s not avoiding her, he tells himself. He’s avoiding them.He can almost make himself believe it. It’s late when he returns. A quarter past ten, and it hasn’t rained for nearly forty-five minutes. The sky is clear, cloudless as if it had never rained at all.As soon as he gets out of his car, there’s an audible splash from the backyard. A shout from Finn. Raucous laughter from Rose. Another loud splash.They probably waited all of two seconds after it stopped raining to jump in the pool.Ben shakes his head as he unlocks the front door. He hangs up his rain jacket and bites the inside of his cheek. He’ll go out back to say hello to everyone in a second. Maybe even stick his feet in the pool. He just needs to eat something. He just needs—more time.“Did I do something to you?”Ben nearly jumps out of his skin. He certainly drops his keys.“Fuck!” His keys jingle as they hit the floor. The sound reverberates through the room. “Rey, is that—what are you doing here?”She’s sitting on the couch, shoulders stiff, posture straight, fingers tightened over the lid of her water bottle. She’s wearing old soccer shorts and an oversized t-shirt. Her face is flushed a mottled red like she might have been crying.“Good question,” she answers tightly.“What happened?” He stutter-steps forward. “Are you okay?”“Me?” Rey says, and there’s a heat to her words that makes him pause. “Oh, I’m fine. Great, even. Peachy goddamn keen.”“Are you - ” Ben starts, then stops, still frozen at the door. “Did something happen?”Rey sends him a skewering glare like he’s the biggest idiot alive. “No, nothing much. My friend only swanned off into a tropical storm, then ignored any and all attempts to contact him for four hours straight.”Ben winces, flinching back some.But—he did text her. At least twice.As he opens his mouth, to either defend himself or beg for forgiveness, Rey’s phone lights up. It’s silent, but he catches the bright flash out of the corner of his eye.The screen flashes once. Twice. A third time.“I texted you,” he says weakly and gestures to the coffee table. “Promise.”Mouth tight, Rey picks up her brick of a phone and checks it. She stares at it for a long moment, lips tightening even further, before her rigid stance breaks, crumpling in on itself. She sighs. “Glad to know you’re fine and that you’ll talk to me later.”Ben winces again.His replies were... abrupt.“I’m sorry, Rey.” Cautiously, he moves to sit next to her on the couch. Well, a full cushion’s length away on the couch. “I didn’t mean to be rude,” he says, unsure how to proceed, sure he’s going to get something else wrong. “Today, inside the house—it was just—it was just a lot for me. I don’t know how to talk to people on my best days, and I felt... stuck, I guess. Trapped. I needed to get out.”Rey nods. She takes a deep breath and looks down at her lap.“I get that,” she says, voice strained. “I was just—worried about you. I have - I have a thing about people leaving unexpectedly. About leaving me.” She scrunches up her face and blinks furiously, like she’s struggling not to cry and deeply annoyed about it.It’s devastating to watch.She exhales through her nose, still staring at her lap. Glaring at it, like this is hard for her. “And I guess—well, I guess I got my feelings hurt that you were - that I thought you were ignoring me. And that we haven’t really been spending as much time together as I’d hoped we might.”Ben sucks in a breath.This feeling, it’s like being kicked in the chest.Rey gives a minute shake of her head and continues, straightening her shoulders. “That’s my problem, though, and not really an excuse. Or it’s a bad one, anyway. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you, and I shouldn’t have been so nasty just now. I’m sorry.” She moves her eyes for the first time, looking over to her cell. “I think I should probably use my first paycheck to get a new phone. Or, at least, a new-to-me phone.”Awful. He feels awful.Rey looks so small and sad, sitting there. Not the least bit like the friend he knows.Ben hates it. He hates himself.God, he wants to hug her again. Just reach out and take her in his arms.“It’s the island’s shitty excuse for reception, not your phone,” he says, running his hands through his hair to keep them from closing around Rey. “And your apology’s unnecessary. I would’ve been worried, too, if you’d been driving out in that weather and didn’t pick up your phone.”Rey glances up at him through her lashes. “Is that because I don’t have my drivers license?” she asks, trying for a humorous tone and not quite getting there.“Partly,” Ben says softly. And because he’s tired, emotionally compromised by her teary-eyed look, and blown slightly sideways by this whole situation, he nudges her shoulder and says, “That’s something we’ll have to fix eventually, you know.”Rey tries out a smile. It’s a fraction of her normal wattage, but it helps Ben’s heart to see it. “Okay,” she says and pulls her knees up, hugging her ankles. “That’s a verbal contract, you know. You can’t back out now.”“I wouldn’t dream of it.”She rests her chin on her knees. “Can we start today?”Ben shakes his head. “It’s dark outside.”“Tomorrow?”He considers it, trying to remember the next day’s weather report, but when he looks at her, he knows she’s teasing him. “How about we wait ‘til we get back to Atlanta?”“Deal.”“Great,” Ben says. “We can make a day of it. I’ll send you a calendar invite and everything.” It makes Rey swat at his shoulder and smile at him genuinely, just like he’d hoped.They lapse into silence after that. It’s kind of nice, the quiet. Nice if he can share it with Rey.It’s quiet enough that they can hear a crash, then Finn scream.“I’M GOING TO KILL YOU, POE DAMERON!”“What?” Poe yells back. “What’s that you said? You’re going to KISS me?”After, there’s another loud crash and a tumbling splash. Like a cannonball, or two flailing male bodies.Rey lets out a long sigh. Her knees drop, feet sinking to the floor.Everyone else is out there having fun, and she’s stuck in here with him.“Sorry,” Ben says, hands tightening at his sides.Rey cocks her head. “I thought we got the apologies out of the way. What are you sorry for?”He wants to laugh. What wasn’t he sorry for?“That you’re not out there—with your friends,” he says, gesturing out back. “That you were stuck in here, waiting for me.”“Oh.” Rey looks down at her feet. “Those aren’t my friends. They’re Finn’s.” She pauses. Fiddles with the water bottle at her side. “Sometimes I don't even think they really like me.”Ben gapes at her.
What?
“How can you say that?”“Because I’m hungover, and it’s only ten o’clock,” she says. “Because I’m a hopeless idiot, and I’m feeling sorry for myself.” Her lips quirk ruefully. “Because it’s true.” She gives a small shrug of her shoulders. “Besides, I’m used to being alone.”Ben closes his mouth.She can’t really believe what she’s saying, can she?Not with how much of a joy she is to be around. Not with how much she lights up every room she enters, charms every person she meets.He looks at her, and—no. It’s all too clear that she does.“Well, I like you,” he says. It’s forceful. Firm.Surprise flickers across her face. There are telltale signs—ones that even he can see.“You do?”“Yes,” he says, and it’s still forceful. Vehement, like a command. Like there’s no shadow of a doubt. “And you’re not alone. Not—not with me.”Rey inhales, staring at him. Her eyes scan his face, searching, finding something.“I like you, too, Ben.”Her teeth close over her bottom lip. Her eyes are warm and brown. Brave and uncertain. She leans forward, staring up into his eyes.And Ben—does what he does best.He panics.He stands up and rushes over to snatch his keys from the floor, his heart pounding out of his chest.He considers resting his forehead against the door, and almost does.When he turns around, Rey is still on the couch. She’s staring up at the ceiling, only her eyes are scrunched closed.Ben exhales shakily, feeling like a fool.But maybe...Maybe he can be a brave fool. For her.For himself.“Can I -” He stops, then starts again. “Can I take you somewhere?” They go the long way round.Down the lengthy, curving driveway and along the main road to the public access ramp so they don’t pass the others at the pool. Ben doesn’t know what he’d do if the others joined them now. Yell at them, probably. Tell them to go away. Because, right or wrong or somewhere in between, he doesn’t want to share Rey for this next part. He can’t.The asphalt is cool under his bare feet. Rough, hard, and solid. A guiding line.The street lamps provide them only partial illumination, and it’s an odd kind of glow. Because of the sea turtles, the town uses red bulbs instead of white ones, and the casted crimson light distorts everything—the houses, the street, their bodies. It’s like they’re walking in another world. It’s bright enough to see, but beyond that, still dark. Definitely strange.Perhaps it’s the color that emboldens him. The strangeness. Because as soon as they lose sight of the house, he holds out his hand to Rey.And, even stranger still, she takes it.She threads her fingers through his and squeezes tight.His heart flips.He attempts to swallow his smile and can’t.They keep walking.They’re almost there. Ben can smell the salt. Can hear the crashing waves, but... with all the red around, reminding him, he can’t help it. He opens his mouth, voicing something he’s been worried about all day.“How are you feeling?”Rey starts, before looking back at her feet. “Um, fine. A little hungry. A little stupid. Nothing too unusual for me nowadays.”“No. I, uh - ” Ben blushes a little, immensely grateful for the camouflaging red light. “I meant your sunburn.”“Oh.” Her free hand goes to her abdomen. “How did you...?”Ben scratches the back of his neck. “Last night you kind of... stretched. It looked—not great.”“Ouch,” Rey says and laughs self-consciously. Ben nearly trips, stubbing his toe.“No—I mean the sunburn. The sunburn didn’t look great. You—you, of course, looked great. You always do. You’re - ” He snaps his mouth shut before he can do any additional damage.“Yeah?” Rey asks, small hand tightening around his much larger one. “What am I?”Ben’s heart flutters wildly.This is his life now. He’s almost used to it.“You’re—almost there,” he says. “Close your eyes.” “Okay,” he says, hand still firmly grasping hers. “You can open them now.”This is it. What he’s been imagining from that night game so long ago.He knows he should look elsewhere. Give her privacy. Allow her to experience this on her own. But as she’s looking up, he’s looking at her. And he can’t look away.She sucks in a deep breath, and doesn’t exhale.“Rey?”She says nothing. Her eyes are wide. Her expression intent and far away.He squeezes her hand.“Holy shit,” she whispers finally. It’s not an inappropriate sentiment. Not in the face of all this.The stars are out in force, after all. An entire galaxy of stars. Here before her, plainly visible. And bright. So painfully, dazzlingly bright.“Fuck me. This is...” Rey’s eyes widen. “Ben, this is...”Yeah. It is.And experiencing it through her eyes—he feels connected in a way he never quite has before. Like he’s a part of something.She stares, mouth open.Under him, the white sand sticks to his arms and legs and everything it touches. Porous and cool, not quite wet.Around him, the tide crashes, swells, steady, loud.And the stars—the stars are out above, shining bright, so bright, and only brighter as the night goes on. Yet, Rey is all he can think about. All he can see.She is still holding onto his hand.He shifts, unsteady as he looks at her.“Do you like it?” he asks, voice trembling nervously. Stupidly. So goddamn stupidly, because it’s not like he has anything at all to do with the stars in the sky. Not like he’s responsible. Not like he hung them his fucking self.Only, Rey turns to him, her cheek pressing into the cool, coarse sand, and looks at him like he had.“No, Ben,” she says, her eyes watery and shining. “I love it.”I love you, he thinks.It’s no less true a day later.It’ll be no less true tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that.“It’s so beautiful out here,” Rey says, still turned to look at him. Her thumb grazes over his hand.He turns his head, too, voluntarily pressing his own cheek into the sand, mirroring her pose. Rey’s eyes crinkle at the corners. She tightens her grip on his hand.He smiles, cheeks hurting with the strength of it. People shouldn’t be allowed to feel this happy.“I used to come out here at night when I was a kid, you know.”Rey blinks, then dimples at him. “What—all by yourself?”Ben snorts, still smiling, imagining the alternative.“Definitely all by myself. That was most of the appeal. Why I loved it so much. I’d sneak outside after my parents went to sleep and creep my way through the dunes with a blanket and my beat up old iPod. I had this terrible Beach At Night playlist I’d painstakingly curated, and I’d spend hours out here listening to it, looking up at the stars.”“That sounds wonderful, Ben.” Then, far too casually, she lowers her voice and asks, “What was on it? Your playlist, I mean.”He laughs. “Oh, no,” he says. “No way. I can’t hand you that kind of ammunition. Say what you will about me, but I’m not that much of a masochist.”“Good Charlotte?” she asks, the picture of innocence. “My Chemical Romance?”“Not a chance, Rey.”“Evanescence? Taking Back Sunday?”“Not happening.”“Paramore? What about Yellowcard? There’s a place on Ocean avenue, right? Get it?”“Yeah. No.”“Oh!” Her eyes widen with excitement. Her voice raises an octave. “Green Day! Definitely Green Day!”He takes too long to protest.“I knew it!” Rey shouts, then cackles, sounding far too delighted. Truly, deeply thrilled. “American Idiot has teenage Ben Solo written all over it.”“Okay, fine,” Ben huffs. He nudges closer to her in the sand. “You got me. But in my defense, Billie Joe Armstrong is actually far more talented than - ”Rey kisses him.Just shuts him up, and kisses him.Well. Okay. It’s not his first kiss. It’s not his second kiss either.He can’t imagine that would matter, though. What he’s experiencing now is in a realm all its own. Because it’s not about the kiss. Not at all.It’s about the person. About the feeling.The lightness in his chest. The electric spark of her touch.This feeling—this feeling is magic. He’s convinced.The whole thing is overwhelming, at least initially. Aggressive. Demanding. Deeply physical, in a way he responds to. A way he needs.Her lips smother his. Bruise his. Leave no doubt to her intentions, her desires.She’s kissing him. She wants him.She’s still holding onto his hand.When she pulls back, five seconds or an hour later, he half chases her, but mostly he blinks at her slowly, feeling foggy with lust, almost drugged.Her pupils are blown out. A mangled mess of black, arousal and night perception.His must be blown out too because he can see her so clearly. Her bruised lips, wild hair, and—rapidly widening eyes.She snatches her hand away from him.“God,” she starts. “God, I’m so sorry, Ben.”“What?” he says dumbly, still foggy with desire.He feels confused, concerned. But Rey—Rey seems to be working herself up into an actual panic.She tugs at her hair. “You invite us out here, share this with me, and I—I just fucking jump you. I’m sorry, Ben. I can’t believe I – After all your signals—you so clearly - ”“You,” he says. It’s enough to make Rey pause.“Huh?”“You,” he says again, reaching for her hand and pulling it lightly from her hair. He can’t not reach for her. “You have to know that I invited you, Rey. That I planned everything for you.”“I—what?” In a smaller voice, “You did?”He licks his still-bruised lips. How could he have not?“Of course,” he says, like it’s simple. Because it is. And she deserves to know.He lifts his other hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. His hand lingers, cupping her face. “I love you, Rey.”Her answering smile is the brightest he’s ever seen. Brighter than the moon, the stars, and the light in his heart.This time, he kisses her. He cradles the sides of her head, thumbs grazing her cheekbones. Granules of sand, strands of dark hair, and Rey—his Rey—in hands. It’s everything he’s ever wanted.His lips press more firmly against hers.His nose smashes into her cheek. His teeth clank with hers.You don’t know what you’re doing, he thinks. You’re messing this up.The thought barrels into him out of nowhere, even as he’s holding her, even as he’s kissing her.Ben fights it. Hates it.He kisses her. Kisses her and kisses her.It’s probably a terrible kiss.All power, no finesse. He's a hulking brute of a man, after all.He doesn’t know what to do with his tongue. Is his tongue supposed to be involved? Does it matter? Does he?He wants to not care. He wishes he could not care. Wishes he could get out of his head, for once in his goddamn life. To just be here, present, with Rey. For Rey.Fuck, if he can’t enjoy this, can’t swallow his panic now, then when would he be able to? Would he be able to?He wants to.He can’t.He swipes his thumbs over her cheekbones one last time, ready to pull back. But then, as he does, the most amazing thing happens. Rey smiles into his kiss.He feels her do it. Smile as he kisses her. Smile into his kiss. Into him. It’s life-altering. The sensation almost indescribable, and more comforting than he could imagine. It’s like she’s transferring her happiness to him. Magnifying it.He melts.This is Rey, and she’s kissing him.She pulls back later, still smiling. His eyes lock on the curve of her lips, staggered by the power they hold.A second passes, and impossibly, devastatingly, a note of insecurity steals over her face.“Are you—are you sure, Ben? Do you really want—this? Because if you don’t, that’s fine, of course it’s fine, I don’t want to pressure you into - ”“I’ve never been surer,” he says, immediately and earnestly. “I’m sure about you, Rey. I like you—more than I thought it was possible to like another person. I want you.”It’s nothing at all like I love you. Nothing at all like the unique, non-clichéd declarations Rey deserves.Rey doesn’t seem concerned with that, though.She laughs, like she believes him. Her laugh is delighted. Genuine. The most wonderful sound in the world.She reaches for him, and he lets her.Strong, nimble fingers tighten around his shoulders. Hold onto his thin cotton shirt. Tugging, then—pushing. Hard.He falls. Falls straight on his back, falls back to the sand.Without missing a beat, Rey climbs on top of him, straddling him, with a day’s worth of pent-up energy, an argument’s misplaced adrenaline, and who knows what else.Her shorts ruck up her legs. Her bare thighs tighten around his waist. Her ass settles against his crotch.At the contact, he lets out a breath.Dazed, he looks up and sees Rey.Rey and stars. Stars and Rey.Light.He wants to pinch himself.It gets better.“God, I’m crazy about you,” Rey says. Her hands fall back to his shirt, somewhere above his heart. Her thighs squeeze him tightly. She pauses. “Ben—are you sure don’t want to change your mind? About this? Me? Because you can, you know. At any time. I don’t want to push you.” She shakes her head as if exasperated with herself. “I mean, I know just did—push you, that is—but I don’t want to rush anything. You’re - you’re really important to me.”Like he could stop now.Ben sputters out something nonsensical, torn by the beautiful women above him, the impossible words coming out of her mouth, and the frankly staggering amount of blood rushing to his cock.Rey draws back, frowning.A coherent response, then.He takes a deep breath and leans up on an elbow. “Rey, I’ve—I’ve never done this before. I’ve never felt this, or wanted to, or questioned it. And I don’t—I can’t apologize for that. I am who I am.” His free hand ghosts over her arms. Rubs up and down. He makes the contact reassuring. Purposeful. “And who I am is a person who loves you. Loves you, likes you, and wants you. That isn’t going to change.”Her answering smile is everything. That said, her following actions are pretty great too.Rey has always been aggressive. Decisive and take charge. This is no exception. She whips off her shirt before he knows what she’s doing, before he can get another word in.And he realizes pretty quickly that this whole time she hasn't been talking about kissing. Not at all. She’s been talking about sex.He—he can get behind that.Now’s as good a time as any, right?Right.Okay.He stares at her, trying to burn this moment, this exact moment—Rey shirtless, straddling him, lit by passion and lust and starlight—in his mind, but time keeps moving, and so does Rey. She twists her hips, grinding down mercilessly against his now fully erect cock.He pants, helpless to stop the rush of air that escapes him.She bends down to kiss him. Kiss his lips, his cheek, his neck.Fuck, his neck.He bucks at that, quivering. His hands settle over her back, reactive. He pulls her closer to him, into him.It’s a mess of limbs. Lips. A tight sports bra.Her hand palms him through his shorts, and she’s the one who gasps.He trails his hand over her back, around to her stomach. Her skin is hot under his fingers, her sunburn pink and flaking in parts, and he’s careful, so careful with her. His fingertips just barely graze over her. Only just touch her.In contrast, she finds a pulse point on his neck and bites.His lips part.Her lips stay rooted to his neck.She sucks.His toes curl, and on instinct, he pulls her closer to him, one hand tangled in her hair, the other grabbing onto her ass. Squeezing it. His hand pushes her ass down and over, against his cock again, and she moans against his neck, hot breath panting against his wrecked skin.“Fuck. You’re going to ruin me, Rey, aren’t you?”“I hope so,” she says. She presses a small, chaste kiss against his neck and rocks back against him. “If you’ll let me.”His hand digs into the meat of her ass.She’s warm. Soft. Perfect. “Anything. I’ll let you do anything to me.”Rey tucks her head down, almost shyly. The movement charms him, disarms him. While it does, her hand finds his nipple.Head still tucked into his neck, she rolls a thumb over it. Hardens it, tweaks it. Ben nearly shouts. He hadn’t even known they were sensitive.He twitches, grinding up, grinding into her. He could probably come just from this. This friction. This heat.He’s so keyed up.He’s never felt this keyed up.He grinds again, firmly, with more confidence, and Rey gasps. It’s a small, breathy sound.Her lips leave his neck and trail up, licking and kissing until they ghost over the shell of his ear. “Can I go down on you, Ben?” she whispers. Her voice is low-pitched. Desparate and husky. He hardly even recognizes it. “You said I could do anything, and please,” she asks. “I want this.”Ben doesn’t trust himself to speak.He nods. Vigorously.His hands close around Rey’s waist, careful of her sunburn, and lift her up, placing her higher on his stomach. She lets out a breath, and he inclines his hips, rising up high enough to shove his shorts and boxer briefs down. They get caught at his massive, insistent erection, then catch again at his ankles. He kicks at them, stirring up sand, but they stay there, stubbornly, stupidly, and he decides—fuck, it’s really not that important.“Can you - ” he starts. His hand trails over Rey’s chest, stopping along the skin-tight fabric of her sports bra. He’d likely hurt her if he tried to remove it. “Can you take off your...?”Rey grins. She pulls it over her head like it’s nothing, not the end of him, not the most beautiful thing he’s ever witnessed. Then she stands, hooks her thumbs into elastic of her shorts, and tugs them down.His jaw drops.Rey kicks her shorts and underwear away, then sits down next to him, crouching on her knees.Ben can’t pull his eyes from the sight of her. Can’t begin to process it all.Her hard pink nipples. Her taut pink stomach. Her dark patch of curls.“You’re—so beautiful,” he lets out finally. It’s a wrecked and whispered thing.Rey shrugs like she’s ignoring him, but he can see the way her cheeks darken. The way her lips twitch up, as if pleased at what he’s told her.That pleasure—her pleasure—he likes it. A lot.“You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, Rey,” he babbles on insistently, trying to please her again. “Yesterday, at the beach—seeing you in that bikini, I thought I was going to die.” Rey’s lips twitch higher. Her hand trails across his stomach, and down, making his breath catch, his abs flex. “You’re gorgeous. Beautiful. I can’t believe we’re here right now. Can’t believe - ”Rey bends to kiss him, just above his hip bone.His cock jumps at the contact, straining. She sucks on the skin there, and he forgets how to breathe.“Mmm,” Rey says. Her hand skims over the line of his pale hip, the fine, soft hair there. “I’ve wanted to kiss that mole for ages now.”Ben lets his head fall back to the sand.She really is going to ruin him.She kisses him again, tongue darting out over his hip bone, over the mole he apparently has there.He’s never been this hard in his life. Not once in his miserable, pathetic life, and she still hasn’t touched him.She kisses one side of his hip, then the other, then his thigh. She ghosts over him, teasing.He can feel her above him. Can feel her hot, wet breath as she hovers over the head of his cock. As she skims along the veins of his shaft, the tight skin of his balls. Skims over him, over him, again and once more, always teasing, never touching.Ben whines. Actually whines, from deep in his throat.At the noise, Rey bends over his leg, burrowing her head right at the apex of his thigh, right over the pulse point there, as if she has a way of finding his heart wherever she goes. She digs her nose into the crevasse there and breathes him in.He exhales.She bites him. Kisses him. Sucks.Sand slips through his fingers as his hands convulse, clawing at the ground, desperately grasping for a purchase that won’t come.He’s wrecked. Ruined.It’s not even the sensation. Not how much she’s teasing him, not how much his heart is pounding, not how much his cock is leaking.It’s that it’s Rey. Rey’s touch, Rey’s smile—Rey’s mouth.Her full, perfect mouth closing around the head of his cock.Ben gasps.God.Fuck.It’s hot. Wet.Bliss.She moans around him, tongue darting out to flick the underside of his cock, licking him in a way that makes his toes curl and ass clench.Her fingers wrap around the base of his shaft. Her saliva drips over him. Messy. Slick.He looks up in time to see the fat head of his cock emerge from between her plush, perfect lips, then push back in, slowly, impossibly, until it hits the back of her throat.She hollows her cheeks, maintains eye contact with him, and sucks.He comes immediately.He doesn’t even have the wherewithal to warn her. He just—ejaculates, spurting into her mouth. Rey gives a surprised sound and chokes around him. Eyes wide, she pulls back, coughing, but his balls aren’t done. They stay tight. He keeps coming. Another spurt of jizz hits her square on the cheek, narrowly avoiding her shocked brown eyes.It’s a dizzying mix of mind-bending pleasure and bone-deep mortification.Confusing. Overwhelming.He’s fucked up fucking.“Fuck! God—fuck. Fuck! I’m so sorry, Rey!”Ben reaches for her face, not realizing until it’s too late that because he’d been bracing himself in the sand, his hands are completely covered in it. The granules transfer to her face, mixing with the trail of semen dripping down her cheek, sticking to it. Ben is so embarrassed he thinks he might die.Rey laughs.For the first time since he’s met her, the sound does not make him feel any less like dying.“No—oh, Ben,” she says, reaching up to wipe her face with her own hand. It’s only marginally better. “Oh, Ben, no, I’m not laughing at you.”Face flushed, Ben takes a deep breath. It helps. Not as much as he’d like, but it helps.“I know,” he says. “I know. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you that I was about to come.”“That’s okay,” Rey says and leans over to kiss him. “I’ve wanted to do that for a while now.”"You have?""Absolutely." She pecks his lips. "It's been painful, not." She kisses him again. Kisses one check and then the other, before coming back to his mouth again, nipping his bottom lip, teasing it between her teeth.After a minute, he relaxes. But she keeps kissing him.And he may be an idiot, but he realizes one thing for certain: he had come, and she had assuredly not.Even as inexperienced as he is, even as embarrassed as he is, he knows that just because he came that doesn’t mean they have to be done.So, for once in his life, instead of thinking, he decides to do.In one fluid motion, he flips them over, turning Rey onto her back. Or, he tries for one fluid motion, but he forgets his underwear and shorts are still hanging loosely around his ankles. They tangle him up, causing him to jerk and kick and sort of collapse on top of Rey.She gasps, letting out a breath as his clothed chest hits her, pressing into her bare tits. He’s sure he’s crushing her, but before he can pull back, she hooks her arms around his neck and tugs him further down.Her lips find his, and his find hers, and it’s nowhere near as sweet as before. She nips him, bites him. He groans.She bites again, a bit too roughly, causing him to suck in a surprised breath.“Sorry,” she murmurs, pulling back some.He takes the opportunity to kiss along the line of her jaw. He noses behind her ear. “It’s okay.” His tongue darts over the soft, smooth skin there. “But if you keep biting me, sooner or later I’m going to bite you back.” He sucks the skin there, hard.A small moan escapes Rey, and it sets a fire in him, pushing him on. He bites and sucks and trails his mouth over the skin of her throat, that long line of it. He’s sure to mark her. He’s sure he wants to.“Bruise me,” Rey says. “Bite me. Touch me, I’m yours.”Fuck.He bites her throat, gently, not too hard, and follows up his teeth with his tongue. His hand—sandy, yes, but what can be done about it—trails up Rey’s taut stomach until he finds her chest. It’s as he thought—his palm covers her breast entirely. Perfectly. Her nipples are hard. Amazing, and sensitive. He rolls one under his thumb, between his fingers, as she’d done to him.Rey gasps. She lets out a small, keening sound.She’s beautiful, so beautiful, and Ben has no idea what he’s done in life to deserve her.“Can I go down on you?” He plants a kiss between her breasts. “Please?”Immediately, Rey nods. “Yes,” she says. “God yes. Fuck yes.” She moves to tug off her underwear, before realizing they’re already off.Ben kisses the blush right off her face.Then he pulls back and drops down until he reaches her calf. He could kiss her forever. Could kiss every last inch of her, and he thinks he just might. His lips trail up her leg. Her toned, lean, impossibly long leg. She seems to like it, based on how much she’s squirming, but the longer it takes, the closer up the smooth skin of her inner thigh he gets, the more he worries about fucking this up, too.His head is, frankly, spinning. She’s warm and close and here. Maybe his. Maybe. For now. But what if he’s—bad?His nose skims the juncture of her thighs, and her hands find their way into his hair, pulling. Harder than he anticipated. He hisses.“Sorry,” Rey says, panting. She sounds eager, embarrassed.It’s astounding to him. Ridiculous.He plants a firm, close-lipped kiss on her monds. Tiny granules of sand stick to her dark curls, transfer to his lips. “There’s nothing for you to apologize for.” He takes a deep breath, shoulders shaking. “I might not know what I’m doing.”Rey’s hand combs through his hair, fingers scratching along his scalp. She smiles at him.“Who the fuck does?” There’s sand everywhere.On his hands. In his mouth. In her cunt.He concentrates on her clit. He licks it, then sucks, referring back to his vast wealth of experience—her mouth on him not even five minutes ago.He tries to replicate what she did. The way she touched him, kissed him, ruined him, but it’s apparently way too much. She bucks, and not in a good way. Hissing through her teeth, she says, “Maybe not that hard.”“Sorry,” Ben whispers into her folds. He kisses her clit, just the barest touch of his lips.“No apologies - ” he kisses it again, laving it with flat of his tongue, “ - ah - remember?”He nods against her, mouth still rooted to her cunt. She lets out another broken noise, and he jumps on it. Catalogs it. Notes every time her breath hitches. Every time she quivers beneath his hands. Every time she curses and hums and tightens.He develops a rhythm. It’s steady, sure. And—His tongue tires so much faster than he expects it to.After a pathetically short time, his pace starts to slow.Rey whines, bucking needily, breathlessly, against his face. “Is this-? Can I - ?”He nods into her. “Yes.”Her hips move again so that she’s writhing against him, moving and moving and moving at the same insistent pace until she—stops.“Fuck,” she breathes.Her legs tremble.“Fuck,” she breathes again.Pride surges through him. His hands close around her shaking thighs, bracing her, waiting for her, pulling her back down to earth.Half a minute later, she tugs on his hair, and he rises up to meet her.She’s languid. Loose-limbed and blissed out, spread naked on his childhood beach. Ben’s chest swells as he discovers another way he loves her.Hair spread around her head, she smiles up at him. “That was something.”“You’re something,” he says.Rey looks pleased. “Come here,” she says, reaching for his neck. “I want to kiss you.”And, well. Who is he to object?He leans down, making it easy for her. Her arm loops around the nape of his neck, tugging at him. As if out of her control, she spreads her legs wide and he falls between them, a perfect fit. For the first time, his dick—his more than half-hard, semen-spent dick—comes in contact with her warm curls, her perfect cunt, and Ben experiences a surge of pure rightness at the position before he bucks away blindly.“Condom!”His painfully awkward seventh-grade Sex Ed class comes at him in a flash. It doesn’t take much to get someone pregnant; the remains of ejaculate would certainly do it.Rey puts a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Birth control,” she says reassuringly. “IUD.”“Still,” he says. It’s only one method of birth control, and he’s always told himself he’d be more careful. His parents had only used one method of birth control, and look what had happened to them.“I’m clean,” she says. “I probably should have asked you before, but after what you said earlier, I figured...”“That’s not what I meant,” Ben says, feeling a rush of embarrassment. “But, God. You figured right.” His head drops down to her sternum. “Yes, I’m clean. Crystal clean. You’re pretty much pulling off the plastic wrap here; I’ve, uh, never been touched.”Rey snorts. Brazen, she reaches down and pats his dick. Her touch is confident, familiar in a way he finds he likes. He’s sensitive, yes, but somehow getting hard again in her hands. He didn’t expect a refractory period this short.He kisses her chest. “But, no, I meant the, uh, semen.”He can tell by the amused rumbling noise Rey makes that she knows exactly what he’s talking about. Hand still on his cock, she swipes her thumb through his spend, then over the head of his far too sensitive dick. He bites his tongue to keep from yelping, even as he feels his dick harden further.“IUD,” Rey says again. “It’s amazing.”“No, I trust you,” Ben says quickly. He looks up. “I just always told myself that someday, if I ever had sex, I’d use two methods of birth control. At least to start. At least until I — ”Rey leans over to kiss his bicep. It’s an incredibly sweet gesture. “I get it.” She releases his dick. “I don’t want to pressure you, Ben. This is new.”“You’re not,” he says, and means it. “You’re not pressuring me. I want this. I want this with you.”He couldn’t imagine a more perfect night. Her with him here, on this quiet beach, all on their own. It doesn’t feel like he’s being pressured. It doesn’t feel too soon. One day he hadn’t known, and the next day he had—but either way, it’s still Rey.She bites her bottom lip, looking up at him in a way that will apparently never fail to set his heart racing. “You could pull out? That’s technically a method of birth control, right?”“A bad one,” he snorts, and her face starts to fall. “But, uh, yeah. That could work. Still,” he gestures at the semen splatter on his dick.Rey frowns. Then looks over his shoulder, and her eyes light up. “I have an idea.” His balls shrink, retracting like they’re trying to climb back into his skin.He charges forward anyway, strong legs cutting through the tide, and lets out a curse as the water bites into him.It’s not that it’s cold, exactly, because it’s not. It’s pretty much an ideal temperature for a midnight swim. It’s just that it’s—bracing.Another wave smacks into his chest.And his legs.And his still-hard cock.His shaft bobs in the water as the wave continues on toward the shore.Ben drops to his knees. He sticks his hands under the water, scrubs them clean, then carefully washes his cock. Once that’s done, he rubs his hands across the submerged parts of his body, doing his best to slough off all of the accumulated sand. It’s on his hands, in his leg hair, up his butt crack. Fucking everywhere. He wipes off as much as he can, and quickly, eager to get back to the main event.Unlike Rey, who is apparently not at all in a rush. And also apparently joining him here.She dives into the water and comes up next to him, wet hair plastered to her face, laughing loudly into the surf.Even though this neighborhood is largely comprised of unoccupied vacation homes, a part of him is convinced they’re going to get caught. By who, he doesn’t know, doesn’t care. But he feels almost like a kid, skinny dipping out here with her. There’s something about it that sets him thrumming. Added adrenaline, maybe. Adrenaline his body surely doesn’t need with everything else coursing through him, but—what can be done?Beside him, Rey flops into another wave and comes up sputtering.He shakes his head in amused exasperation and unbearable fondness. It’s just like the other day—only...Not. Before he can second guess himself, he reaches for her. His hands slip around her narrow waist and lift her up and over to him. With the buoyancy of the water, it’s all too easy. Like she weighs nothing at all.He pulls her flush against his chest and holds her there with one firm arm.She laughs. It’s startled, delighted, and wonderful. “What are you doing?”He smiles down at her. The moonlight glints off the water, her shoulders, her sparkling eyes.“Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” he says, and kisses her, just because he can.It’s different this time. Better, maybe. More comfortable. Still exciting. Entirely, blissfully theirs.She smiles into his kiss again, as is becoming a habit. Her arms circle around his neck. Her legs wrap around his waist.If he thought she was flush against him before, it’s nothing to how they are now.Her skin is so warm. He can feel her heart beating in her chest. It’s strong and loud, like his.Rey pulls back from the kiss and rests her forehead against his.“God, you feel so good,” Rey breathes out. She seems to be struggling to catch her breath. “This is real, right? I’m not going to wake up on the couch and have this all be a dream?”Ben presses his forehead more firmly against hers. Their noses touch. “You don’t wake up when you’re on the couch. I have to drag you to bed.”Rey lets out a shocked, indignant noise. She pulls back. “Ben!”He bends forward and kisses her cheek. “Rey!” he says in the exact same tone, lips touching her skin. He leans up and nips at her earlobe. It tastes like saltwater. It tastes like her.She laughs, splashing at him, squirming in his arms, not really trying to leave.He burrows his face in her neck. Strands of her dark, heavy, waterlogged hair cling to her—and him.“I really do love you, you know.”He can’t see her, can’t feel it, but he can tell she’s smiling. “I’m beginning to, yeah.”Her nimble fingers comb through his hair until they reach the wet curling hairs along the nape of his neck. She cradles his head, like she’s the one holding him aloft, and brings his face up toward hers.Their kiss is gentle. Slow and delicate, in a way he didn’t know kisses could be.They float in the water, touching, worshipping, melding together.The waves come and go, and they bob along in time. Connected and unhurried.Eventually, though, a large enough wave comes that it knocks him back to reality. He jerks, turning just in time to press Rey into his chest and shield her from its spray.Or, at least, that’s his plan. His immediate instinct and desire. But apparently, he just makes it harder for her to keep out of the water’s path. She sputters and coughs into his collarbone, hacking up seawater and what sounds like half a lung.He stiffens. “Shit. Sorry.”“Bah.” Rey coughs and wipes at her face. “That really stings.”“Sorry,” he says again softer, watching her wipe at the snot under her nose.“Oh, hush.” Rey braces her arms around his neck and leans up, thighs closing around his waist, lower half dragging against his. “I’m fine, and it’s not like you meant anything by it, right?”Ben swallows, shaking his head.“Right?”He nods. “Right,” he murmurs.Rey smiles. “Then we’re fine.” She bends down and nips at his bottom lip. “Better than.”His arms close around her.Maybe he will fuck some things up. Maybe he definitely will. And maybe, with Rey, that’s okay.“Better than,” he repeats, and kisses her back.He scoops his arm up under her ass. She tenses in delighted surprise, her cheeks clenching against his forearm. He pulls her up, closer to him, always closer to him.Her damp tits press into his chest. Her hot center drags across the hard line of his dick.They’re naked.They’re naked here. Together.“Ah,” Rey says. “Hello.”Ben feels himself blush. He pushes past it. “Hi.”Rey grins, expression turning coy. She shifts, hips twisting. “What were we doing here again?”His shaft is pressed tight against his stomach, against her center. He pulls her against him, and her folds part around him. He slides over her. “You tell me.”Her lips open, but no sound comes out.Interesting.He drags her again, effortlessly, experimenting.She lets out another breath. “Ben,” she says. He can hardly even hear her.“What was that, Rey?” He gives her another teasing drag. This time, the head of his cock slides over her clit. She twitches and grinds down against it like a wild thing.“Ben,” she breathes, mouth still parted. His name has never sounded so good.“I can’t hear you, sweetheart.” Another drag, slower this time. “You’ll have to speak up.”She makes a tortured sound. He doesn’t stop.Her hands grab his face, fingers digging into his cheekbones hard enough to bruise. “Ben. Ben Solo. If you don’t get me out of this water and fuck me, I am going to combust. Do you understand?”He grins. “Yes, ma’am.” He lifts her higher, so he can stand. “You only had to ask.”He probably should have her walk. He probably definitely should have her walk, especially with how purposefully difficult Rey is making it for him, squirming, grinding, and sucking at the other side of his neck, but he can’t bring himself to put her down. To let go of her.He still can’t, even when he gets to the shore. He collapses on his ass, Rey wrapped in his arms.She pushes against his shoulders again, gently this time, but just as eager. Her agile hand snakes down between them. Pumps over his shaft. “With how big you are, I want to be on top. Is that - is that okay?”He appreciates her asking, but it’s not like he’s going to say no.“Yes. Of course.”Big, he thinks. He’s big. Rey bites her lip and crouches over him. She guides herself over his stiff, straining cock and hovers there. “I - okay. Okay.” She lets out a shaky breath. She doesn’t move.His hands glide over her thighs, his fingers slide up and down her smooth skin. He squeezes once. “I love you, Rey.”Her face turns soft. She looks at him, and he knows. She doesn’t have to say anything.Resolutely, she starts to move. Starts to rub along the head of his cock, coating him, lubricating him. Over and over, and then—she sinks down. And then—he’s inside her.Just an inch. Just enough.He’d thought he’d been wet before. By the ocean, by her mouth. He’d had no idea.She sinks onto him another inch. Then another. Torturous, sliding.Rey’s bottom lip turns white between her teeth. Her thighs tremble as she rises up minutely, then sinks another careful inch. She’s doing nearly all of the work, but he’s never felt more exhausted. The effort not to move, not to touch her—it’s substantial. Overwhelming. He keeps completely, absolutely still, not trusting himself to even breathe. There’s a want in him that quivers, yearning and unsure. He couldn’t have prepared for this.Rey sinks down again, taking in the rest of him with one sudden drop. He couldn’t have prepared for that.“Fuck,” she breathes out, giddy, almost laughing. “I didn’t think you’d fit.”Ben allows himself a cautious, shaky breath. Rey is warm. Searing. Wrapped around him like a sheath.“Ben, are you okay?”She looks down at him, concerned, and her fingers come to rest on top of his chest. The slight movement is enough to set his head spinning.“Yes,” he lets out, fighting through the dizzying pleasure. “You’re—so good, Rey. Perfect.”A fond expression takes over her face, transforming it. She bends to kiss him, as if overwhelmed by his words, but then she stops, freezing up as if caught, surprised by the sensation. “Oh,” she says, and bends again tentatively. “Oh.”Her next movements are fractious. Fractious and finding, like she’s searching for something. Discovering this, him, them.Her cunt is merciless and heaven-sent. Tight around him. Warm. She moves slightly, hardly at all. Up, down, again.He breaks. Surges up to kiss her. To pull her to him.She breathes against his mouth, breath hot and stuttering. She kisses at him sloppily, still moving. Grinding just against him. Legs trembling. Lips trembling.Ben doesn’t know how much more he can take. He doesn't. He can't.He tells her.“Rey, I - ” she lets out a noise and stops breathing, moving desperately against him. “ - I’m not going to last much longer.”She plants a wet, open-mouthed kiss along his jaw. “You better fuck me, then.”He groans.Groans and lifts her, so he can sink into her with one long thrust.Groans and kisses along her throat.Groans and presses into her. Harder, faster, longer. Again.“Yes, Ben,” she grunts into his neck. “Like that. Exactly like that. I want you. I can take it.”He fucks into her again. Slides out of and into her wet heat. Her perfect cunt.“I love you,” he cries out, babbling into her hair. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”Her walls clench, fluttering around him, and he pulls out just in time.His cock spurts, coating him, coating her, covering her stomach. He drops her hips, unable to hold her up, and she falls, splayed out onto his stomach.God. Fuck. Rey.He can hardly breathe. She peppers him with kisses, chest rising and falling heavily, just like his. Her skin is sweat-slicked, perfect. He struggles to catch his breath.“Ben,” she whispers, a minute or an hour later, from her place on his chest. She’s curled up and content, face pressed into the side of his neck, like she never wants to leave. She never has to.“Yes?” he exhales, fingers combing through her damp, tangled hair. He can do this now. Can touch her now. She burrows her face into him. “I love you, too.”His hand tightens around her head, cradling her to him.“I know,” he says, smiling into her hair.And he does.