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“Do you play?”
It takes a lot to startle Benji Ovich, but that question -- aimed at him, now, in this city -- does it. “What?”
“Piano,” the girl beside him at the bar says. “You have piano hands. Do you play?”
Benji looks down at his hand, which is currently wrapped around a pint glass instead of a hockey stick. “No,” he says. If you’re from Beartown you don’t learn how to love anything else.
“Too bad,” she says. “You look like you’d be good at it.”
Benji downs the rest of his beer, as if to show her what he is good at, because he is still a boy who can’t stop proving people wrong, especially the ones who think the best of him. She’s not the first girl to see music in him -- he still has the lyrics Maya Andersson wrote for him tucked safely in his wallet -- but she’s the first to look at his hands and see the potential for something delicate. Something gentle. The hammers in a piano are not for violence.
He catches the bartender’s eye, orders another beer with a simple squaring of his jaw, and looks down at his hands again.
His knuckles have healed. They’ve never done that before. There are scars, of course. But they aren’t raw or bleeding or even scabbed; they don’t hurt, the bones don’t ache, it isn’t painful to make a fist. He makes one now, just to try it out.
It still feels right. But there’s nothing here to hurt, except for himself, and he’s trying to stop that.
“Thanks,” he tells her, and means it. “But I doubt it.”
The girl smiles. “I like your accent,” she says. “Where are you from?”
He smiles back. “You’ve never heard of it.”
Benji is a boy from Beartown and he has beautiful hands. Nobody has ever asked him if he plays anything but hockey. He is a boy from Beartown, but he is not in Beartown. Not anymore. Here, he can just be a boy with beautiful hands.
“Here to stay?” she asks.
He shrugs. Benji never gives much away, unless he’s in a bar and looking for trouble. He’s both, but she’s not his kind of trouble.
She tries again. There’s something about Benji that makes girls keep trying -- maybe it was the way he played, or maybe it was because Benji Ovich was a step closer to Kevin Erdahl. Benji has never known or cared. If you asked William Lyt back home, he’d say it’s because Benji doesn’t pay them any attention and it drives them fucking nuts (Lyt can relate), but if you asked Ana, once upon a time she might’ve said it’s the way he sneaks up on you. Suddenly you turn and he’s there and you know he’s dangerous, know he can hurt you, but you want him to catch you anyway.
(His mother’s the only one who can explain it: we keep trying because this handsome, heartbreaking thing is a wild animal looking for a place to call home. We want to rescue him. She knows, because she still loves his father.)
Even this far from home, this girl — who has never seen him play, never seen him next to Kevin, never seen him run free in the forest — keeps trying.
She knocks a shot back and wipes her mouth, trying to draw attention to her lips. She catches him watching her and mistakes his concern for desire, and asks, “You wanna get out of here?”
Benji smiles. “Sorry.”
“Worth a shot,” she laughs, and he laughs back. He can appreciate that.
She grabs her drink and slides down from her barstool, and doesn’t quite nail the landing, but Benji catches her by the elbow and saves some of her grace. He can tell by the look on her face and the slur in her voice that if someone doesn’t keep an eye on her, she might find some trouble of her own.
“Not your type?”
Benji turns to the bartender, who’s placing a new beer in front of him. “I’m not hers.”
That doesn’t stop Benji from keeping that eye on her. He nurses his beer as he watches the hockey game on TV and checks in on her every now and then. The sound of blades scraping the ice makes his legs ache. Number 23 rams a forward twice his size into the boards, clearing the way for Number 9 to take his shot, which he does, deftly flicking the puck over the goalie’s shoulder. 9 raises his arms in victory. 23 skates over, puts a hand on the back of 9’s neck, and presses their helmets together. Benji remembers. The equipment made it hard to get close. But there was nothing more intimate than that moment.
He aches.
“Do you play?”
Benji snaps a look at the bartender -- not startled this time, just haunted. His heart is on his sleeve and knows it.
The bartender shrugs. “You look like you could do some damage.”
Benji smiles, not happily. “I can,” he says, and hops down from his barstool.
The thing about Benji is he doesn’t miss anything. His father didn’t raise him; hockey didn’t raise him. Women raised him. His sisters were the ones who taught him how to hunt, and as a result, he’s better spotting predators and prey than most.
He’s across the bar and in front of the girl in three seconds flat. He’d seen the man in blue from the corner of his eye, but that’s all Benji ever needs. This girl isn’t sober enough to say no, but she doesn’t need to. Benji saw that, too.
The man finds out what the blow of a bear paw must feel like as Benji’s punch lands perfectly and blood sprays from his mouth, but to Benji, it’s little more than a warning swat. All the man did was kiss her and then kiss her again when she tried to push him away -- there are no blouse buttons on the floor, no towns destroyed -- but Benji sees the blood drip down and stain the collar of his shirt, and he’s glad. The pain in his fist is glorious. The throb in his bones swell like a crescendo. This is the only music he knows how to make. He’s very good at it.
The man protests through mouthfuls of blood (“we were joking around; she wanted it”) but Benji doesn’t hear it. He hears the crowd go wild on TV -- another goal for #9 -- and he hears his heart thundering, his nerves singing, Beartown roaring back in his skull and in his heart. He needs to leave. This isn’t his lawless fucking hometown. He’s nobody’s insurance policy here. It’s not even Hed, where the tattoo on his arm would start a war. This is just some pub in some town where no one knows him and he’s just some wild card who’s thrown a punch that’s going to get him kicked out if he doesn’t leave on his own.
So he does. But he doesn’t forget the girl. He was raised by women.
“You have to go home,” Benji tells her, and distantly wishes someone would tell him the same thing. “You’re going to get hurt.”
“Fuck you,” the girl says, just like he would to anyone else who’d gotten between him and trouble, but she’s too stunned and too drunk to disagree. She stoops to pick up her purse but nearly capsizes in the process, and Benji has to catch her for a second time.
Without a word, he leads her outside with an arm around her waist, trying to do the right thing, and it makes him think of the night he carried Ana’s father home from the Bearskin. (What Ana did to him after does not stop him from trying again.) He helps her into a taxi and smiles when he sees his bloody knuckles.
He turns back to the bar and he sees the smoke before anything else. It climbs towards the sky like broken fingers and fades away without a fight. Benji’s footsteps skid to a halt, and the smoker looks at him with eyes the colour of wilted charcoal.
“Jesus Christ,” says the smoker.
“Problem?” Benji demands.
“Plenty,” the smoker chuckles. “That’s why I’m out here chain smoking. Which, for once, turns out to be a wise decision considering I was able to watch from a safe distance as you rearranged my bandmate’s face with your fist.”
Benji wouldn’t mind a cigarette. “Can I bum a smoke?”
“Nope.”
Benji laughs, startled. “All right. See you around.”
“Look, I’m out,” the smoker explains, irritated and gentle, with an accent that tells Benji he’s far from home too. “You can finish this one if you want.”
Benji looks at the cigarette in the boy’s outstretched hand, nearly smoked down to the cherry. He shakes his head. “Thanks anyway.”
“You’re not gonna punch me in the face, are you? Because that looked like it hurt.”
“No. He deserved it.”
“I don’t care about him, I mean you,” the smoker says. “It looked like it hurt you.”
Benji looks down at his knuckles. Pinpricks of blood have smeared, making it look worse than it is. “It’s been awhile.”
“What, since you punched someone?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like being mysterious?” the smoker grins. “Like you think maybe someone’s gonna think you’re Bruce Wayne or some shit and want to fuck you?”
Benji blinks, and then grins back. “Bruce Wayne? Fuck you.”
“Don’t tell me you think you’re someone cooler than Bruce Wayne.”
Benji’s smile is as bright as the blood on his knuckles. “You’re not afraid of me.”
The smoker shrugs. “You just punched a scumbag in the face,” he says. “Not because you wanted that girl for yourself — I just watched you put her in a cab — but because he deserved it.”
“Didn’t you say he was your friend?”
“I said he was my bandmate.”
“Call me old-fashioned,” Benji says, “but I believe people should be friends before they start a band together.”
The smoker smiles. “Long story,” he replies. “I’m just saying, I’m not afraid of you.”
That’s the second nicest thing Benji’s heard tonight (the first being that he has piano hands). Now this chainsmoker sees the blood and isn’t scared of him. This is the only time Benji hasn’t felt homesick since the day he left Beartown.
“Thanks,” he says.
The smoker studies him. “People back home were, though?”
“People back home were a lot of things,” Benji replies.
“You gonna go back?”
Benji quirks a smile at him. “Are you?”
The smoker takes one last deep drag, exhaling smoke from his nose and mouth as he says, “We’ll see how much more of this fucking tour I can take before I punch him in the face myself.”
Benji laughs out loud. He doesn’t often do that. “Bet you guys make some beautiful music together.”
“We used to,” the smoker says, the first thing he’s said without a smile on his face.
“What’s your name?” Benji asks. He doesn’t often do that, either.
“Thomas.”
The second most wonderful thing about the name Thomas is that it doesn’t share one single letter in common with Kevin. The first most wonderful thing is the way it sounds when Benji says it.
“Hello, Thomas,” Benji smiles, and here’s another thing about Benji: he’s a flirt. (He also has a type.)
“Hello,” Thomas says, his own smile growing with every second Benji doesn’t offer up his own name, like Benji is a song he might put on to warm up the crowd. He smiles like he can’t wait to get clobbered with the chorus. “And what do they call you?”
“Long story,” Benji teases.
Laughing, Thomas flicks his cigarette and grinds it into the sidewalk with the toe of his scuffed sneaker. “Wanna go somewhere and tell it to me?”
Benji’s smile becomes a grin. “Got a place in mind?”
“Sure.”
“All right, then,” Benji says. “Guess I’ll follow you.”
Yes, Benji plays.
+
Benji’s a flirt, yes, and he knows exactly who he is and what he likes, but he’s also a little shy. It’s hard to believe, a boy like him shy, considering both the beauty and violence he’s capable of, but Beartown taught him how to fight and it taught him how to hide, too.
So when they get to Thomas’ hotel room, Benji keeps his hands in his pockets. They talked the entire walk over here about Thomas’ band and his hometown, and for once, despite his nerves, Benji doesn’t wish he was drunker or higher, because he doesn’t want to miss anything. Doesn’t want to forget the details. Doesn’t want to wake up in the morning and have any of this be fuzzy. His hands are in his pockets, but he’s listening.
Thomas is a little older than him in years, the way Benji likes it, because then he doesn’t feel so bad about how much older he is by the rings around his heart. Thomas doesn’t have those same rings, or at least not nearly as many, but he knows what it’s like to keep your hands in his pockets.
He grew up in a city that wasn’t afraid to wave rainbow flags, a city that accepted him for who he was and who he loved, but the house he grew up in was another world entirely. He looks at Benji and remembers what it was like to hide. He remembers how scary it was to step out into the open, like prey deciding not just to make a run for it, but to leap and bound and play.
Thomas has long since learned how to fly, and he’s happy to be a hawk for this boy.
“Come on,” Thomas says, with watchful eyes that promise Benji the coast is clear. “Outside.”
Benji follows Thomas onto the balcony, where they break into the pack of cigarettes they’d bought on the walk from the bar to the hotel. For a little while, it’s enough to just look out at the city. For now, Benji is not a bear from Beartown. He can be anyone from anywhere.
“It’s Benji,” he finally says.
Thomas smiles. “Benji,” he says, trying it out. “You really do get off on being mysterious, don’t you, Benji?”
“Worked on you, didn’t it?” Benji says with a sly, slightly sheepish smirk.
“Maybe a little,” Thomas admits.
Benji watches him light a cigarette, and puts his hands in his pocket.
“So Benjamin,” Thomas says, passing the cigarette to him. “Have you always been a shameless flirt?”
Benji laughs. “No one but my mother calls me that.”
“What, a fucking flirt?”
“No,” he laughs again, ears red over his mistake. “Fuck off. Benjamin. The only person who calls me Benjamin is my mother.”
“Benji suits you better,” Thomas says. “It’s cuter.”
Benji makes a face that might be involuntary. It’s disgust and distrust. One for him, one for Thomas.
“What?” Thomas asks, teasing but gentler now. “No one calls you that either?”
“No,” Benji says.
“Well, you are,” Thomas tells him, because he doesn’t know Benji well enough to know not to poke him. “Under all the mysterious Bruce Wayne bullshit and bar fights and bloody knuckles, you are.”
Benji shakes his head. Doesn’t know what to say. Settles for “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“No one talks to me like that.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Yes.”
Thomas studies him. “What else did they call you?”
Benji thinks about it. Number 16. A goon. Rebel. Crazy, violent. Kevin’s best friend, his brother. That vicious three-letter word he finds so easy to call himself because it feels like putting weight on a broken foot. The heart of the team. Kevin’s. Traitor.
“Sledge,” Benji says.
“Why?”
“My parents didn’t drive me to hockey like everyone else’s did,” Benji explains. “I would ride my bike and pull my hockey bag on a sledge behind it. So they used to call me sledge.”
“Used to,” Thomas notices.
“Yeah,” Benji chuckles. “Until I picked it up and hit one of them across the face with it.”
“I don’t know if that scares me or turns me on,” Thomas laughs. “But I think it’s both.”
Benji raises an eyebrow at him, but chooses not to show his hand yet. Takes a drag instead. “The funny thing is,” he says, “the guy I hit always wanted to hang out with us. Even after that. He always followed us around, always tried to walk between us. For years. He loved us, I guess. I don’t know why.”
“Who’s us?”
Benji blanches, not realizing until it’s too late that here, when he says us, no one knows he means him and Kevin. Outside of Beartown, he needs to say Kevin’s name if he wants anyone to understand. Here, he is not Kevin’s. He’s not an us.
But Thomas seems to understand anyway. Maybe for the same reason he didn’t seem to mind that Benji punched his bandmate in the face.
“Did he ever get between you?” Thomas asks.
“No,” Benji replies.
“What did, then?”
Benji glares at him.
“Obviously something did,” Thomas says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
Benji takes a moment, weighs his words. “A girl.”
Thomas looks surprised. “A girl?”
“Not like that,” Benji says, a little too quickly for someone who doesn’t want to show his hand. “He hurt someone and I -- I mean, that’s it. He hurt her. That’s all you need to know about someone to find out you don’t know them at all. That you wish you’d never met them in the first place.”
Thomas takes the cigarette away from Benji before he lets it burn too close to his fingers. “Jesus,” he says.
“I’ve hurt people,” Benji says in a bluster. “I go looking for fights. So maybe I sound like a hypocrite. I think about that a lot.”
“The girl he hurt wasn’t looking for a fight,” Thomas says. “Neither was that girl at the bar tonight. It’s not the same thing.”
Benji leans against the railing. They’re a long way up, he thinks for once, instead of how far he’d fall. “Thanks.”
“Did he ever know?” Thomas asks. “How you felt about him, I mean?”
“I never told him,” Benji says. “But I think he did.”
Thomas nods. “My bandmate knew,” he says. “Turns out he felt the same, or at least he did for one stupid fucking drunken night. Now he feels like he needs to fuck a new girl in every city we go to on this tour so he can prove it didn’t matter.”
“Prove to you or prove to himself?” Benji asks.
“What’s the difference?”
Benji shrugs. He doesn’t know how to explain the difference between what you know you are and what other people think you are, and how important that difference is. There’s a difference, though, he knows that much. He found that out the hard way.
“You love him,” he says instead.
Now it’s Thomas’ turn to shrug.
“So now you’re thinking about leaving.”
“Yeah,” Thomas admits. “But tonight I’m here.”
Benji smiles. “Well, hey,” he says. “So am I.”
“What are the odds,” Thomas smiles back.
“Bad,” Benji grins, happy to have beaten them.
They smoke a couple more cigarettes before they duck back inside and raid the minibar. Benji hasn’t laughed like this in months -- maybe not since the night of Kevin’s party, before Maya walked in -- and it feels good.
They’re playing Never Have I Ever and it occurs to him as Thomas yells at him to take a shot and then nearly falls off the bed in laughter when Benji mostly misses his mouth that maybe this is what he could’ve been like if he’d grown up in a different town. If he’d picked up an instrument instead of a hockey stick. If he’d flirted with who he wanted to flirt with instead of hiding. Maybe he would’ve been himself all along. And then, who knows. Maybe a million things.
It’s Thomas’ turn, and he’s drunk as hell because he’s done almost everything Benji hasn’t. Benji isn’t used to feeling innocent, but it’s kind of nice. “Never have I ever come out to my dad,” Thomas says, with a wince that suggests he knows his tongue’s moving faster than his brain.
Benji picks at the label on the bottle of whiskey. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he says. “He’s dead.”
Thomas winces again. “Sorry,” he says. “How long ago?”
“Long time,” Benji replies. He shrugs. “I think I would’ve told him, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says, not as drunk as Thomas, and therefore not drunk enough to say what he’s thinking. He’s not going to tell Thomas the way his father killed himself makes Benji wonder if he knew what it was like to hide, and maybe he would’ve understood. “Think you’ll ever tell yours?”
“He doesn’t deserve to know who I am,” Thomas says. “When did you know? Who you are, I mean.”
No one besides his sisters have ever asked him that before. The bass player in Hed had been so afraid of scaring him away, and the teacher hadn’t wanted to talk, unless it was about books. The boys before them were no more interested in stopping to ask why Benji wanted them than his opponents on the other teams were in stopping the game to ask why he wanted to play.
He’d told his sisters he didn’t know, but he tells Thomas the truth: “I always knew,” he says. “When you spend all your time in locker rooms and buses with other hockey players, you find out quickly you’re not like everyone else.”
“God,” Thomas laughs. “That sounds like a nightmare.”
“You learn how to tune it out,” Benji says, then wonders if he should tell him this next part. Decides to go for it, because when else is he ever going to talk about this? “My best friend and I found this island no one else knew about when we were kids. The summer we were 13, we started staying out there until fall. It was just us, and that was the whole world, and it was good. So I mean, yeah, I always knew who I was, but that first summer...”
“That’s when you knew who you loved,” Thomas says gently.
Benji clears his throat. He gives Thomas a rare look, one that asks for mercy.
Thomas understands, nods. “Your turn.”
Benji looks relieved for the subject change, though his brain is still too stuck in summertime to come up with anything too groundbreaking. “Never have I ever cheated on a test,” he says.
“Fucking,” Thomas enunciates, “Bullshit.”
“Fuck you. I haven’t.”
“Everyone has cheated on a test,” Thomas cries. “Even Jesus.”
“Which test did Jesus cheat on, Thomas?”
“Get fucked, you’re cheating right now,” Thomas says. “You’ve never even peeked at someone’s spelling test in primary school?”
“No.”
“Spell refrigerator.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I always fuck it up.”
“R-e-f-r-i-g-e-r-a-t-o-r.”
“Whoa.” Thomas takes a drink. “I believe you.”
“Because I can spell refrigerator? That’s what convinced you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re an idiot,” Benji says fondly. “Your turn.”
Thomas ponders for a moment. “Ugh. This game is hard.”
Benji rolls his eyes, but wants to smile.
Thomas bites his lip while he thinks. Benji watches. Thomas tries not to notice, or bite harder as a result. “Uh, I’ve never died?”
Benji laughs. “You’ve done everything in the world except been dead.”
“Nothing else really comes to mind.”
“Well, coincidentally, I’ve never died either,” Benji says. “So we both drink.”
“Says who?”
“Says me,” Benji says. "Those are the rules."
“You’re making shit up.” Thomas dutifully takes a swig of the whiskey they’re sharing. “Cheating, if you will.”
“Shut up,” Benji laughs. “Never have I ever touched a monkey.”
“Benji, do I look like a guy who’s never touched a monkey?” Thomas asks, and then drinks. “Uh… I’ve never… oh! Never have I ever slept with a teacher.”
Benji raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. He takes a drink.
Shock takes the place of Thomas’ laughing expression. “You have?”
Benji takes another drink instead of replying.
Thomas doesn’t like the look on Benji’s face. “How old were you?”
“Old enough.”
Thomas shakes his head. No, he wasn’t. But he at least knows better than to tell Benji that.
“What?” Benji asks, skittish under Thomas’ silence.
“I’m sorry I said it like a joke,” Thomas says. “Man or woman, it’s not okay that someone did that to you.”
“To me?” Benji laughs. “No one does anything to me. That’s not what happened.”
“I don’t care what happened. Or how old you were.” Thomas looks at him. “It was an abuse of power.”
“You think he had power over me?” Benji asks, trying to curl his lip, but he’s shaking. “He didn’t. He was reading Nietzche, for Christ's sake. He wore polo shirts. I could’ve snapped him in half. He didn’t have any fucking power over me."
“Benji.”
“What? Fuck you. No one does.”
“Benji,” Thomas says again.
“What?”
Thomas looks at him, this messy-haired wildcard in front of him. When he was a child, someone called him a name so he picked that name up off the ground and hit him across the face with it. Where did that child go? He grew up to become a young man who would walk away from the boy he was in love with because he hurt a girl. He punched a stranger in the face for kissing someone who didn’t want to be kissed. Now he’s protecting a man who had no right to touch him.
“I hope one day you fight for yourself the way you fight for everyone else.”
Benji blinks at him.
Thomas holds his gaze. “You deserve it, Benji.”
The breath Benji takes is sharp. His chest hurts. “I should go.”
“Should you?”
Benji’s brow furrows. He’s used to being challenged, but not by someone being gentle to him. Protective. “I -- don’t know.”
“Then don’t.” Thomas shrugs. “Stay.”
Benji gets up. Thomas watches him. Doesn’t try to stop him. Knows he can’t.
But Benji wants him to. Benji wants him to very much.
“Your fucking bandmate,” Benji snaps, grasping at straws and looking at the door as he rakes his fingers through his hair and stays. “What a goddamn idiot.”
“Yeah,” Thomas says, eyes never leaving him. Just marvels at the way Benji paces, a tiger who doesn’t trust the open door of its cage. “I should’ve punched him myself a long time ago.”
“I shouldn’t have stopped,” Benji says. “Not after what that prick did to you.”
This is why. This is why we love him. Thomas is learning. You want to heal him, you want to tame him, but you want to keep him wild enough that you know he’ll kill for you. Anyone who loves Benji Ovich experiences a moment of guilt for loving the damage you could inspire him to do. God knows he’d never do it for himself. God knows Benji could be a gentle boy. If only he could turn his heart off. But he can’t, and we love him so much.
“I’m glad you did,” Thomas tells him. “I wouldn’t have met you if you’d murdered him with all those witnesses around.”
Benji smirks.
“Besides, he’s our lead singer,” Thomas goes on. “The rest of us can’t carry a tune to save our lives. As much as I hate to admit it, it’s probably best you didn’t murder him tonight.”
“What do you do?” Benji asks.
“In the band?” Thomas twinkles his fingers. “Keyboards.”
Benji nearly laughs. “You’re kidding.”
“I know, you were picturing something way sexier,” Thomas says with a self-deprecating roll of his eyes. “It’s a good thing I’m gay as the day is long, otherwise I’d be offended by how little interest the groupies seem to have in guys on keyboards. I guess it’s not as cool to say you fucked the pianist.”
“No, I just --” Benji flounders. “That’s really cool. I like that.”
Thomas smiles. “I bet you say that to all the pianists.”
Benji smiles back. “You’re irritating.”
“You like it.”
“I do.”
“You wanna play?”
Benji freezes. “Play what?”
“The piano,” Thomas says. “I can teach you a song.”
“Oh.” Benji looks at the door again, then back at Thomas. “Yes.”
Thomas hops off the bed -- or, more accurately, flops off, courtesy of the whiskey -- and walks across the room, where he throws some clothes on the floor to reveal a keyboard underneath. He carries it over to the bed, settling down with it in front of him, looking perfectly at home. When he smiles up at Benji, it’s the warmest thing he’s ever seen.
“Come here,” Thomas says.
So Benji goes. Unroots himself from his spot by the door, crosses the room, climbs up on the bed, lets their knees touch. He looks at the white and black keys in front of him, still not ready to show his hand. His hands have done many things, but this is not one of them.
“Something tells me you’re not the ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’ type,” Thomas teases, knocking his shoulder against Benji’s. “Fingers on the keys. I’ve got just the song for you.”
Benji’s hands form fists, his fingernails digging into his skin. His right hand is still throbbing.
“Honestly, Benji,” Thomas sighs, a smile in it, just like the smile in the kiss he presses to Benji’s lips. He holds Benji’s face in his hands, calm and certain, which is exactly what this kiss is. Gentle and steadying. Thomas lets him go, the smile in his eyes now, and then snaps his fingers and points to the keyboard. “Hands. Keys. Now.”
Benji’s good at taking direction, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. With a smile on his face, he listens quietly while Thomas tells him the name of each key, only a little distracted by his pulse fluttering wildly out of time. He follows Thomas’ lead as he teaches a simple song -- “Heart and Souls,” he calls it, “everyone knows it,” but Benji doesn’t -- though he can’t make himself press the keys hard enough. Thomas has to tell him not to be afraid of it, which makes Benji laugh. If only everyone at home could see him now, their guard dog unleashed, fingers too timid to make a sound.
“Okay, I think you got it,” Thomas says. “I’ll do the accompaniment. Wanna give it a go?”
Benij gets the first three notes right (C, C, C) and then the next four (C, B, A, B), and then everything goes to shit from there, but it makes them laugh. Thomas keeps up his end of the song, and Benji keeps trying to get his part right, both of them laughing, Benji swearing, Thomas cheering, neither caring if they ever get it.
But then Benji does get it. The feeling that explodes in his chest is familiar, like something he’s felt before. On the ice. It’s flying. His victory holler is pure joy, and that’s when he finally shows his hand. It’s all hearts.
Thomas isn’t surprised by what he sees -- he’s a boy who always has a few cards up his sleeve himself. He knows it when he sees it. This Benji, the real Benji, is the fucking jackpot.
Thomas reaches over, takes Benji’s hand, and kisses his knuckles.
Benji lets him.
“Again.”