Carmen
I was on my knees, working away at a stain on the bottom edge of the oven that refused to yield an inch to my furious scrubbing. I heard the door squawk open and slam shut, followed by heavy, booted footsteps thumping into the room. Only men walked like that, as if they needed the whole world to hear them before they were seen. Men like Ben—full of enough testosterone and bravado to make a whole high school’s worth of teenage boys swoon in jealousy—were the worst offenders.
I was so close to peeling away the stubborn top layer of whatever vile substance had managed to cake itself on the stainless steel when I heard the footsteps come to a stop behind me. I set the sponge down with a sigh, rocked back onto my heels, and blew away the hair that had fallen over my face. Turning around, I saw Ben was standing and staring at me with his mouth agape.
“If you don’t close your mouth, something’s gonna fly in there,” I remarked.
He blinked hard and came to his senses. “What are you doing?” he asked dumbly.
“Well, what does it look like, Einstein?” I teased. “It’s not like I’m composing a symphony or doing brain surgery over here.”
“You’re cleaning.”
“I thought it was my job to state the obvious around here.”
He closed his mouth, opened it again as if he were going to say something, then stopped and frowned.
“You look way more confused than I would have expected,” I said.
“It’s just…I don’t even know. I never clean.”
“You didn’t have to tell me that. This apartment is a pigsty. How long did you say you’ve had this place?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” I exclaimed. “Good God, do men just secrete disgusting messes and empty boxes of takeout Chinese, or did you buy all that pre-fab?” He looked even more confused and upset. I laughed. Who would have thought that it’d be so easy to get the infamously cool under pressure Ben Killmore to fluster? “Never mind,” I said, rescuing him from the need to come up with any kind of reasonable response to such a commonplace domestic activity. “I’m almost done anyway.”
“Okay.” He turned to walk away, but paused. “What’s that smell?” he asked, sniffing the air.
“That would be dinner,” I deadpanned. “Jay took me to a cooking supplies store today, so I bought a crock pot. I’m not that great of a cook, but those things make it easy for anyone. I bet even you could make something halfway decent.”
He was slowly coming back down to earth after the surprise and confusion I’d apparently inflicted upon him in droves. “That would be a losing bet, I’m afraid. My best dish is cereal.”
“Cereal? That’s it?”
“Well, I make a mean piece of toast, too.”
“Very impressive, Chef Killmore.”
“That’s Mister Chef Killmore to you.”
“Is that how those titles go?”
“My kitchen, my titles.” He smirked.
I giggled. “Yes, sir. Anything in particular I should know about your highness’s palate?”
“Yes,” he said with utmost seriousness, suppressing a playful grin beneath his scowl. “All meats must be hunted and killed by hand. Vegetables are to be home grown and skinned with a straight razor, none of this vegetable peeler nonsense.”
“Do you even know what a vegetable peeler looks like?”
“I wouldn’t be able to point one out if you stabbed me in the face with it.”
I laughed again. “I didn’t think so.” My knees were starting to ache from being pressed against the tile floor of the kitchen. I reached up and planted a hand on the counter to steady myself as I started to rise to my feet, groaning. I’d been crouched over for so long that my right leg was completely numb, and the second I tried to put weight on it, it nearly gave out under me.
Ben saw me beginning to tumble and rushed over immediately, catching me by the crook of my elbow and keeping me upright. “Easy, tiger,” he said. “That first step’s a doozy.”
I blushed. It was fun bantering with him, but I didn’t like to look like such a weakling in his presence, as if I couldn’t even stand up without his assistance. I needed to prove to him that I was perfectly capable of handling my own business, that I wasn’t some whimpering little girl who required doors to be opened and seats to be pulled out for me. My daddy may have been a bastard, but he hadn’t raised a weak daughter, and I was determined to show that to Ben.
Still, it was hard to complain about the gentle pressure of his hand on the bare skin of my arm. He’d hardly touched me since the wedding, but the simplest flesh-on-flesh contact sent a weird mix of heat and shivers racing through me. I smiled uneasily. “I’m okay,” I said. “Besides, none of this would have happened if you didn’t seem so determined to spill what looks like duck sauce all over the front of your oven.”
“It’s soy, I think, but point taken.” He let his hand drop away.
I bit my lip and tried not to miss it too much. I pulled off my gloves one at a time, flexing the cramps out of my hands as they emerged from the sweaty rubber. Stacking them one on top of the other, I slapped both across his chest. “Now, go wash up,” I demanded. “You’re all sweaty and gross.”
“That’s man scent, baby.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Definitely gross.”
He chuckled as he turned and headed for the bedroom. Just before he crossed the threshold, he paused once more and craned his neck back into the living room to look at me incredulously. “Is that a plant I see?”
“Yes, and you’re going to be in charge of watering it.”
“That’s an awful lot of responsibility.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the president or something?” I retorted.
“Yeah, but that was an accident,” he called jokingly over his shoulder as he peeled off his shirt and walked through the door into the bedroom. “The reason I got the job was because I was the only bastard dumb enough to take it.”
I stared longingly at the taut muscles of his back before he disappeared. The way the ink roiled with every little motion he made, the confident slope of his shoulders…I shivered again. I could still see the tiny imprints of his fingertips on my arm. I didn’t want to admit it, but Ben Killmore was chipping away at my defenses. I gulped. Stay strong, Carmen, I ordered myself. You’re here, but you’re not his.
Not yet, at least.
I felt myself blushing again. I needed to do something, move something. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” was one of the things I remembered people in church saying all the time. I hadn’t realized how true that was until right this second. Every tick of the clock that passed while I stood in the kitchen and focused on the lingering smell of leather and musk that Ben had left behind was another nail in the coffin of my ability to resist doing what I wanted to do, which was namely to grab a fistful of Ben’s hair in each hand and devour those perfect lips of his.
Shaking my head to jolt myself into motion, I slid around the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on dinner. I poked around at the pot roast stewing in the crockpot and pulled a tray of sliced potatoes from the oven where they’d been roasting. They were sizzling and golden brown. Their salty smell filled the kitchen, wiping away Ben’s scent, for which I was both grateful and a little disappointed. I set them on top of the stove to cool while I tossed all the cleaning supplies I’d been using into a bucket and scurried over to the storage closet to put them away.
I dropped the bucket and gloves inside, stripped off the apron I’d bought today, and hung that on a hook on the back of the door. Then I closed it behind me and looked around the living room to survey the day’s handiwork.
I had to admit, I’d made a pretty good dent in the monstrous pile of work that had been facing me when I’d first arrived here. A few framed pictures hung on the wall, vases of flowers were dotted along new end tables, and the coffee table, which was once barren, now had an attractive spread of glossy photography books and a cute little Zen garden I’d found tucked away in the back of a knick-knacks shop at the mall. Between the new decorations and the filth I’d scrubbed away, it didn’t feel so much like a cross between a landfill and a monastery. Now, it almost felt like a home. My home. Or rather, our home.
That was a bizarre thought. I pushed it away immediately and got to work setting the table.
When the plates and silverware were arranged and the food was plated and ready to be served, I walked over to the bedroom to tell Ben it was time to eat. He was stepping out of the bathroom as I stuck my head in. His hair was sopping wet, droplets flying everywhere as he toweled it vigorously. The motion made his biceps bulge. My eyes traced the path of one thick vein as it wandered from his elbow up to the edge of his chest. Before I could stop myself, my gaze fell, tracking down his mountainous abdomen and coming to rest for the briefest pause between his legs.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I said. I turned beet red as I ducked back into the living room to shield my eyes. “I didn’t mean to walk in on you.” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or die of embarrassment. It looked like it was my turn to be on the opposite end of the walking-in-on-someone-naked encounter, just like Jay had done to me earlier. I was positive astronauts could see how hard I was blushing from space.
I couldn’t quite explain why I felt so mortified. After all, I’d seen him naked before, hadn’t I? That was the cause of this whole mess—the thing growing inside me, the baby he’d put there. But it felt different now. That was a lifetime ago, it seemed like, back when I was a different person with a different path. So much had changed since then. I wasn’t ready to cross that particular bridge for a second time, and I didn’t know if I would ever be ready.
Ben chuckled. “It’s okay. You can come in; I’ve got a towel on.”
I pivoted slowly back into the doorway, not daring to cross the threshold and unwilling to raise my eyes above knee level. “I was just coming to tell you that dinner is ready,” I said in a strangled voice.
“Thanks, Carmen. I’ll be there in one sec. I just gotta get dressed.”
“Okay,” I whispered. I spun back and walked over to the table to take my seat.
The flush in my face had barely started to die down when Ben came sauntering into the room wearing a fresh white t-shirt and jeans. The shirt was straining to cover his glistening skin, and little beads of water were still embedded in his beard and hair. He opened his eyes wide as he took in the spread of food I’d laid out across the table.
“Holy shit,” he said, “this looks unreal. I don’t even know where to start. I think I’ll have…everything.”
I giggled despite how awkward I felt as he started to grab one serving bowl at a time and dole out massive scoops of green beans, pot roast, and potatoes onto his plate. I watched him, hands in my lap. He picked up his fork, took an alarmingly large swipe through the whole mess, and shoveled into his mouth.
Halfway through chewing, he paused and looked at me. He forced the food down with a big gulp and said in a deadly serious voice, “This is hands down the best food I’ve ever had.”
“You’re just being nice,” I demurred.
“Carmen. Look at me.” I raised my eyes to his cautiously. “I don’t screw around with stuff like that. When I say something, I mean it. This is incredible. You didn’t have to do all this. Although,” he added, “I’m sure as hell glad you did.”
“Thanks,” I said shyly. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
Satisfied that I’d begrudgingly accepted his compliment, he turned back to eating. “Where’d you learned to cook like this?” he asked between bites.
“I used to cook with my mom every now and then. She was way better than me. She could make anything taste delicious. I swear, even cereal was better when she made it.”
“Not better than when I make cereal, though,” he teased.
“Well, of course not, Chef Killmore. Mister Chef Killmore.”
He looked up and grinned, but frowned again when he saw that my plate was empty. “Are you not going to eat?”
“No, it’s okay, I’m really not hungry.”
“Bullshit,” he fired back. “You need to eat. I’d bet a million bucks that you haven’t had a bite today. Am I right?”
I paused. “Well, you wouldn’t lose your money,” I finally admitted.
“That’s what I thought. I’m not going to stand for any of the bullshit excuses you might have as to why. I don’t care if you think you’re going to get fat, or you think you’ll embarrass yourself in front of me eating, or whatever. Doesn’t matter. You’re a human, you need food, so you eat.”
“I, uh—”
“No,” he said, waving his fork in the air as he cut me off. “I don’t give a damn if you think this marriage is legit or not. You’re in my house. You eat. Now, go on,” he instructed, gesturing towards the food. “Dig in. I’m a big son of a bitch, but I’m still not gonna be able to tackle all this alone.”
I gave in. He clearly wasn’t going to stop until I put some food on my plate. And he was right, I hadn’t eaten all day, and I was starving. I wasn’t quite sure why I was so hesitant to eat. The things he’d said were at least partially true. Just like every other girl my age, I’d had that “beauty is pain” mentality drilled into my head practically from the day I was born. Every celebrity interview I’d ever read boasted about how today’s hottest starlets got by on a diet of seltzer water, two leaves of lettuce, and a healthy gulp of air every now and then. I guessed I’d just internalized that, learned to equate starvation with looking good. The other thing wasn’t far off the mark either. After the debacle of barging in on Ben naked that I’d just experienced, the last thing I wanted to do was give him a big, Sparky smile with a piece of beef wedged between my front chompers. I’d have dinner without the side of embarrassment, thank you very much.
Ben was staring at me, fork hovering in his fist. I reached out and started spooning a little heap of each dish onto my plate. But when I’d served myself, he was still watching me.
“I’m not a baby, you know. You don’t have to watch me chew and swallow.”
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Jeez, what a stubborn ass he was! I was eighteen years old, married, and, thanks to the man across the table from me, pregnant. I was fully capable of putting food in my mouth without his unyielding attention. But despite my glare, he didn’t blink or look away. I gave an exasperated, melodramatic sigh, collected a forkful of food, and deposited it in my mouth. I chewed, swallowed, and set the fork down with a clink.
“There,” I said. “Satisfied?”
“It’s a start. Do that a hundred more times and we’ll be a-okay.” He went back to eating.
“Anyone ever tell you that you can be a real asshole?” I said.
“If I had a penny for every time someone told me that, I’d hire someone just to follow me around and tell those people, ‘I know.’”
In spite of my irritation, I couldn’t help but snicker. He smiled as he kept eating.
“Anyway,” he said after a minute of quiet chewing, “you were telling me about your mom.”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, I don’t know what there is to tell. We just used to cook and stuff, that’s all.”
“Did she look like you?”
I thought back. It had been a while since I’d seen a picture of her. When she died, my father had gotten rid of every single photograph with her in it. I’d asked him about it, and he’d just shrugged and told me we couldn’t hold onto the past. All I had to go on were my memories. “Yeah, she did,” I answered. “I mean, I looked like her, I guess. Since, you know, she came first.”
“That is how these things work, yes.”
“Thanks, smartass. But yeah, she’s where I got my hair. She had this beautiful blonde hair, all the way down to her waist. She used to sit on the edge of her bed every morning and take forever to comb it all out. I remember she used to let me help her when I was little.”
“That’s nice.”
“It was. We used to do a lot of little things like that together. Church, the hair thing. Just mother-daughter stuff, you know.”
“Yeah, same,” he said with a straight face.
“Oh, I’m sure. You must look great with pigtails.”
“You don’t even know the half of it.”
I laughed again, then fell silent, staring down at my plate. I felt Ben’s eyes on me.
“You’re chewing your nails,” he commented.
“Dammit,” I cursed as I dropped my hand into my lap. I hated having such a bad tell. He barely knew me and yet it was already obvious to him when I had something on my mind. I couldn’t get over my conversation with Jay today, both the part where he’d said Ben was the best man he knew, and his refusal to tell me anything about the hatred between my father and my now-husband.
Ben tilted his head to the side and gave me a questioning look, waiting for me to ask him about what I was thinking.
I hesitated, but there was no time like the present. Might as well see how far this rabbit hole goes. “I was talking to Jay today…”
“Always a dangerous activity.”
“…and I asked him something, but he told me it wasn’t something I should be concerned with, and that if I really wanted to pry, I needed to ask you instead. He didn’t want to talk about it.”
Ben set his fork down on the edge of his plate. He leaned back, crossed his arms, and a shadow passed over his eyes. “Go on,” he said quietly.
“What is it that caused so much bad blood between you and my dad? I mean, I don’t know a single detail, but it’s so obvious that you hate each other. What happened?”
He stewed for a moment. “Jay was right. You shouldn’t be concerned with that.”
“But it’s my father! It’s the whole reason I’m in this situation! Right?”
“I have no idea what your father’s reasoning was. I just know he gave me a choice, and I did what I had to do.”
“There’s more to it; I know there is. I’m not stupid.”
“No,” he said, “clearly not. But I’m not talking about it. It doesn’t matter right now.”
“Is it about my mother?” I asked eagerly, leaning forward.
“I said I’m not talking about it, Carmen. That’s the end of it.”
“But—”
“No.” He slammed a fist onto the table, making all the plates jitter.
I wilted immediately, shrinking back in my seat. The joking twinkle had disappeared from his eyes. He looked stormy, furious. I understood immediately why he was a leader of the men he rode with. There was not a chance in hell that anyone could stare him in the face and cross him. I didn’t know what to make of him. He was part warrior, part caveman, part ferocious, snarling beast. Any thought I had of pressing further evaporated instantly when he hit the table.
“Okay,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
The clouds slowly drained away from his face. A moment later, they were gone, and I wasn’t even sure what I’d seen in the first place. He looked like the same man he had been when we’d first sat down to eat, all calm and languid. But my heart was still pounding fast in my chest.
We ate silently, but I wasn’t doing much more than chewing tiny bits of food to death before unwillingly swallowing. I waited with my hands folded in my lap until Ben had finished. Then I stood up, chair scraping against the floor, and began gathering dishes to take to the kitchen for washing.
Ben sat rock still while I cleared the table. His arms were still crossed over his chest and he was staring into empty space with a blank expression. When I came to take his plate, he jolted back to life and looked up at me.
“I can take that,” he said. His hand closed over mine. I paused for a moment, not meeting his eyes, then relinquished it to him. He stood, stacked the remaining dishes on top of his, and brought them over to the sink.
Neither of us said a word as I flipped the faucet on to rinse over the piled dirty dishes. I turned to grab a plastic container from a bottom drawer to my left. Finding the right size, I started to straighten back up, but as I did, a huge rush of blood to the head threw me off balance. Dizziness overwhelmed me; colors ran fluid across my vision. I felt myself collapsing to the left.
I was sure I was going to collide with the ground. If I were especially unlucky, I’d clip my head or neck against the counter edge on my way down. But just before I really lost it, I felt Ben’s strong hands grab me once more. He snatched me out of the air and pulled me into him.
My breath came rushing back into my lungs as the world righted itself around me. I took a deep, staggering inhale and closed my eyes for a second. When I let them flutter back open, he was staring at me with intense concern on his face.
“That’s twice,” he murmured. His voice rumbled in his chest. I could feel his vibrations in my palms, which were planted flat on either side of his torso.
“It’s a good thing I keep you around,” I said. The dizzy spell had passed as suddenly as it had come, but a whole new kind of disorientation was coming over me. We hadn’t been in this close proximity since the wedding ceremony, when he had almost-but-not-quite kissed me for the first time since our first night together. Up close and personal like this, his scent was overpowering, his breath came in gentle plumes across my face, and I could feel the strength of his arms holding me upright.
“Good for which one of us?”
“Neither. Both. I’m still deciding.”
His face was so close to mine. Just a few inches away. I could just crane my neck a little bit and my lips would meet his. They looked so plump and soft. Kissable. Bitable. Delicious. His arms were the most solid thing I’d felt in a long time. Realer than real, almost. The ink was finely detailed where it was etched into his skin. He was soft and hard, dark and light, all at the same time. He was so close. He was so close.
“What’s the make or break factor?” His voice was barely a whisper, and yet it filled my eardrums, filled my senses.
I felt numb and tingly all over, alternately hot then cold. My whole system was going bonkers in Ben’s presence. “I’m not sure of that yet either.” I couldn’t read his eyes. Was he feeling what I was feeling? Did he want me the way I wanted him? The urge was so powerful and so immediate that I was having trouble forcing words around it. All I wanted in this world was to taste Ben’s lips, to feel his hands teasing my clothes off of me one more time. I felt so hollow and there was only one thing I could think of that would be suitable enough to fill me up. It was right in front of me.
He leaned in. There, it was coming, confirmation that the same thoughts running through my brain were going through his, too. His lips were a millimeter away, just a cell’s breadth apart from actually touching mine. My eyes were half-lidded. I felt like desire incarnate, like every single inch of me was on fire with desperate need for more of Ben, as much of him as he could possibly offer and then a little more.
Just a little more. Just a little more. I closed my eyes and waited for his kiss.
But it never came. I felt his hands loosen and slide off of me. He backed away as I opened my eyes. He looked confused, more lost than I had ever seen him before. The confidence that normally rolled off of him in waves was ebbing rapidly. I could almost see him retreat inside his head as he took two steps away from me.
“I, um…I need to, to, um, to not.”
It looked like his tongue refused to cooperate with him. Mine wouldn’t either. It was all I could manage to force out a barely audible, “Okay.”
He whirled away and disappeared into the bedroom, leaving me standing by myself in the kitchen as the stream from the faucet quietly splashed across the plates in the sink.
I cleaned up in numb silence. I couldn’t form proper thoughts or even begin to process what had just happened. It had felt like an electric moment, and I knew without thinking that Ben had felt what I had felt. But he’d backed away. Damn near run away, actually, looking back on it. What was he so afraid of? What was I so afraid of?
Every time I thought I’d reached a resolution about this incomprehensible turn of events that my life had taken, something new got thrown into the mix. I knew of course that I’d been attracted to Ben from the very beginning. That was the start of everything, obviously, that first night at the party. But I had been so certain that I would be able to ignore that attraction. He was just a man, after all, no different from any other. I didn’t need his affection.
At least, that’s what I’d told myself going into it, before the wedding, before the move to this apartment with him. But just now, when I was clasped in his arms and his mouth was right there, so close to taking me and making me his, I’d felt not the tiniest shred of ability to resist. He could have had me without a second thought. Hell, I’d thrown myself at him almost literally. But he hadn’t done anything. He’d backed away. Left me alone.
He emerged from the bedroom an hour later. Pacing up to the kitchen counter, he laid his hands to rest softly on the marble. He didn’t look at me as he spoke.
“I made up the bed for you. Clean sheets and everything. I’m going to sleep on the couch tonight. Bedroom’s all yours.”
“Okay,” I squeaked out quietly.
Without another word, he turned, walked over to the couch, and lay down with his back facing the kitchen.
I put the last of the dishes away before heading for the bedroom in timid, uncertain steps. Was this really what he wanted? To be so far away from me? Did I disgust him? All I had were questions and the man on the couch was quiet and still enough to be a corpse. He wasn’t offering me anything resembling an answer.
An hour later, I was in his bed, freshly showered and ready to sleep. But sleep wasn’t coming, not by a long shot. I felt as wide awake as if I’d just pounded back-to-back espressos. I didn’t understand the way the evening had gone. He was funny, then he was serious. He was charming, then he was distant. There was just not placing him, no comprehending what wild, pinwheeling thoughts were taking place behind that gorgeous face of his. I didn’t know whether to scream or cry or punch the pillows in frustration. Half of me wanted to march out to him right now and demand he explain himself.
But I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I stayed under the covers, staring up at the ceiling while the same repetitive thoughts circled around and around, unsatisfied, like a flock of birds in search of food that just didn’t seem to be coming.