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The plan had never been to have a big, fancy wedding at all. Rose had been perfectly happy to have a little wedding with just friends and family around, without it becoming some kind of great big dramatic, expensive affair. But then, when your fiance is flush with his late (asshole) father’s money and wants to throw it at a wedding the man never would have approved of just to spite him, well, how was she to argue?
So it turned from being “Well, you’ve got a nice camera and Doph said he’d be willing to take pictures, plus we can do that cute disposable camera thing” into “this photographer has an extremely professional-looking website and he comes highly recommended.”
Which was how Rose met Ben Solo.
When they met up to discuss her potentially hiring him for the wedding, she had almost walked right past him at first, simply because he didn’t look like the type. He looked like a lumberjack, all broad and tall and dressed in flannel, leaned over a laptop that despite having a pretty big display still seemed to be dwarfed by him. But then he’d looked up and there was a flash of recognition in his eyes as he got to his feet and offered her a smile. “Rose Tico?” he asked. “I - I recognized you from the picture attached to your email, I didn’t stalk you.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said with a laugh. “Though, that denial actually makes me a little bit more suspicious.”
He looked caught off guard by her words, and worried for just a moment before he realized that she was joking. “So, I’m really nailing it so far, huh?” he said. And then, “Ben Solo. Call me Ben.”
Immediately, she had to admit, she found him charming. Not ‘cheat on my fiance’ charming, but definitely ‘fun to be around, maybe see if he’s single for one of my friends’ charming. “It’s good to meet you, Ben,” she said, and she genuinely meant it.
Over the course of the next two hours (she truly hadn’t meant to stay and talk with him that long, but he was just so interesting, and really, it took him at least half an hour to get comfortable enough to open up to her, so really the clock should have started then), she got to know him pretty well as well as seeing plenty of his previous work, and she was decided on having him capture their wedding.
Ben, as it turned out, had accidentally stumbled into being a wedding photographer. “I liked photography as an art, but it turns out, unless you get particularly lucky, it’s not exactly easy to get people to pay you for that art, no matter how well-composed they are,” he’d explained.
In order to get some cash during college, he had decided to get into taking senior photos. It started as a favor for a couple of his classmates who had seen him around with his camera and asked, and then somehow he had ended up with a portfolio and he found that he was surprisingly good at posing people for a man who always felt a little awkward and just generally too big for most situations. She’d literally laughed out loud when he told her, “Even if photographing people was never my intention, at least the camera serves as a nice barrier between me and other people. Then I get to spend hours behind a computer editing, far away from other people at all.”
“Do you really not like people? You seemed a little shy at first, sure, but you’re not… I don’t know. You don’t strike me as the hermit type,” she’d asked him.
“I don’t hate people or anything, I just prefer to be home by myself if I can help it,” he told her.
And then, because this man was adorable and attractive and she would not be doing her duty to her friends - maybe even Paige, Ben could be a great big brother-in-law - if she didn’t ask, “Do you have someone waiting for you at home?”
“Other than a grumpy old cat, no,” he said, lifting his left hand to indicate the lack of ring there, as if Rose hadn’t already looked there.
But because he had looked a little bit awkward at the prying, she had allowed the subject to turn to cats and how even though she was more of a dog person, her soon-to-be husband was not, so they had a cat who she loved nonetheless. From there, Ben had moved from showing her his actual portfolio to some (also professional quality) pictures of his cat, as well as a few other animals that he spent time with because, as he explained to her, he'd accidentally wandered into opening a Rover profile and he was a surprisingly good pet sitter.
And then from there it had been easy to just decide that yes, she didn’t need to meet with any of the other photographers that she had been considering. His prices weren’t exactly cheap, but it would be worth it, and she felt comfortable enough that he would do a good job capturing their wedding. Hell, she would even pay extra for him if he had asked, because he was genuinely likable and not too “snooty” like “some artsy types”, as her fiance had put it.
***
After that point, Rose didn’t worry too much about Ben Solo and the wedding photography. Planning a wedding was hard, and once one decision was taken care of, well, she didn’t really want to fuss with it any more than that. The important thing was that she had given him a deposit and she’d gotten him in touch with the venue so that he could check it out before the big day came, so as far as she was concerned, they were squared away.
And as it turned out, Rose had probably never been more grateful for her choice in photographers than she was when her wedding finally came. There were plenty of minor hiccups, because as it turned out it was just about impossible for weddings to go off without a hitch, as she had been warned so many times. Most of those fires had been able to be put out relatively easily, and she wasn’t going to get too worked up about any of it until Paige came up to her with a pinched look on her face. It turned out that there had been some sort of mix-up with dates and locations, and so their caterer wasn’t going to be able to make it. So there would be no food at their reception, which was taking place in just a matter of hours.
Even the most chill of brides, Rose was sure, would have freaked out over that, and she was starting to panic when apparently word of the catering debacle had reached Ben Solo’s ears.
“I’ve got it, don’t even worry,” he told her, and she wasn’t sure that she had ever heard more wonderful words in her life. “I know some people that should be able to help.”
And so he made a few calls, and about twenty minutes later he had someone confirmed and on their way to set up, which was absolutely nothing short of a miracle. When she told him as much, he’d just given her a noncommittal shrug and told her that the guy owed him a favor.
Rose wasn’t sure that there would ever be a way to repay him, and she didn’t even know where to start on figuring it out, especially not on her wedding day. But she decided that if her life ever intersected with his again and she could do something that would benefit him, then she would absolutely do it.
***
Though she received some sneak peek pictures from Ben, it was about a month and a half before she actually received a full gallery of pictures from the entire day. It took Rose hours to go through them, curled up on the couch with her husband ( husband!! ) and crying her way through them.
(Rose wasn’t really an overly emotional sort of person, but maybe from time to time certain things got her particularly weepy, and she wasn’t about to apologize for her wedding being one of them.)
Even though she had been aware of Ben and his assistant flittering about the entire wedding prep, ceremony, and reception, she hadn’t really realized just how much he had captured until she looked through the photos. He had done a fantastic job of getting all of the little details covered, every little event and plenty of things that she had missed in the chaos of her wedding day. She had never been much of a fan of seeing pictures of herself - she always felt a little bit too awkward, like she apparently perpetually just didn’t know what to do with her arms.
The thing was, though, she did notice a theme as she went through the pictures.
Lots of Rey.
Sure, there were plenty of pictures of all the guests there, and it seemed like he had gotten every single person in attendance in at least one picture, which was pretty impressive on its own. But there were plenty of pictures of Rey.
Rose could understand why, of course. Rey was beautiful and she had a way of capturing the attention of everyone she encountered. Rose had heard of brides selecting bridesmaids specifically because they wanted the pictures to come out better, and while she wasn’t that type of girl, she could absolutely imagine someone picking Rey for specifically that reason.
Part of her wanted to be able to write it off as Rey just being a good subject - she was lighting up the dance floor, after all, and she was a little bit all over the place making sure that everyone was having a good time and that everything was going well. So sure, there were going to be plenty of pictures of her, with various people.
But at the same time, the same could be said for Paige or Kay, really. They were everywhere in the wedding, and while there were plenty of pictures of them, there was something about the pictures of Rey that felt more… deliberate might not be the right word, but it was what came to mind. He had framed them oh so carefully, and he got different angles on her, and honestly Rose kind of wondered if Rey had noticed that the photographer seemed to be somewhat fascinated with her.
Rose finished up looking through the pictures before grabbing her phone and calling Rey. “So, I got the wedding photos back,” she told her in lieu of a greeting.
“Oh,” Rey answered. There was a staticky rustling in the background before things quieted down again, and Rose could hear the thud that accompanied Rey’s body hitting her couch full-force. “That’s exciting. How’d they come out?”
“They’re beautiful,” she said, humming as her eyes returned to the laptop screen where she still had up a photo of her walking down the aisle.
“Yeah? That’s good. The photographer seemed like he was on top of it.”
“He was,” Rose said, pausing for a moment as she held back the temptation to make a joke about Ben being on top of other things. “Did you talk to him at all?”
Rey hummed, and she could just picture her shrugging even though she wasn’t face to face with her. “I guess, a little,” she said. “Why? Should I have?”
“He was a pretty nice guy,” Rose said, and briefly she wondered if she should be hyping him up a little bit more, like a good wingman would do. “He’s got an eye for photography, that’s for sure.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Are the pictures going to be hitting social media soon, then?”
“They are. But I actually - you should see these.”
There was a sound of curiosity on the other end of the line, immediately followed by a groan. “Oh god, is there something bad? Did I blink in literally every photo?” she asked. “And I swear, I didn’t think that much, sometimes my face just looks like that.”
Rose couldn’t help herself but to laugh. “No, no. You look lovely in the photos,” she told her. “And that’s kind of the thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re in a lot of the pictures.”
“Oh… Okay,” Rey responded slowly, and she could just hear the confusion in her voice.
“You’ll see. It really looks like you left quite the impression on him. Come over sometime and we can take a look at them.”
“I just want you to know that you are absolutely still terrifying me.”
“It’s not a bad thing. You’ll probably think it’s funny,” she said. “ Or , you’ll maybe even get a boyfriend out of the whole deal. Not too shabby, right?”
“Okay, actually, I think I’m going to just hang up now, because I think you have gone over the deep end.”
And then she heard the telltale beep of a call ending, and Rose couldn’t help herself but to laugh. All the same, she knew she was on to something.
***
“Okay, there’s a reasonable explanation for it,” Rey said when she finally did get to look at the pictures from the wedding, squinting down at a picture of her laughing, a glass of wine in her hand.
“Yes, and that explanation is that he developed a crush on you,” Rose responded brightly.
“No. No, that isn’t it,” she said. “I mean, like I said, we talked a little . It wasn’t like a did anything particularly charming.”
“You have a very charming smile.”
Rolling her eyes, Rey tapped the arrow key on Rose’s laptop and started cycling through a few more pictures. “Cheesy,” she commented, shaking her head. “Anyway, maybe it’s just… I don’t know. It’s just a coincidence. Or maybe I was subconsciously following him around, wanting more pictures of me, and so he had to take a bunch of pictures of me.”
“Nope, that’s not it. You don’t like having attention on you like that,” she pointed out.
She shrugged, leaning back and looking away from the computer again. “Okay, okay, you’re right. But it just seems so strange to me. Like, I see what you’re talking about, I do. But it’s… I don’t know. I don’t get it.”
“Maybe,” Rose said brightly, looking at her with a little twinkle in her eye that Rey knew to mean nothing but trouble, “you’re his muse .”
“His muse? I don’t… think that that is a real thing.”
“It absolutely is a real thing, and it makes more sense than any other explanation you’ve come up with so far. He’s clearly inspired by you.”
“It’s still a stretch,” Rey told her with a shrug.
And for a moment, Rose thought that that was going to be it. When Rey decided that she was done talking about something, she had a way about firmly closing the door on it and making everyone else abundantly clear that they could not bring the topic back up again. It seemed as though she was putting those walls up again, until suddenly…
“Do you have any pictures of him? I mean, not in this album, obviously,” Rey said, and there was a forced casual tone in her voice that gave Rose a little thrill. “I know I saw him in person, but… His website, or his Facebook, or something?”
“There wasn’t anything on his website, but…” she trailed off, reaching over to grab her laptop from Rey. Opening up Facebook, it didn’t take her very long to locate the profile of one Ben Organa-Solo . It was pretty well locked down and she couldn’t see much without being his friend, but she was able to pull up his profile picture to show Rey. He was outside, wearing a sweater and knelt down next to a black lab.
“Oh shit, he’s got a dog,” were the first words out of Rey’s mouth, and that felt like a success right off the bat. She knew that this mission might all be for nothing if it turned out that there was another explanation for why Ben had chosen to highlight Rey in so many of his pictures, but Rose was choosing not to entertain that possibility.
“It appears as though he does,” she said. She squinted down at the picture, trying to see if she could make out a name on the tag, but it was too small to do so. “That’s something to ask him about. You know, when you talk to him.”
“I’m never going to see him again, Rose.”
“Yeah, unless you do,” she said, and she couldn’t hide the grin that was starting to form on her lips. “C’mon. I’ve gotten my happily ever after, let me try and help you find yours.”
“Remember what happened the last time I tried to date?” Rey asked, and before she could respond in any form, she barreled on, “I gave us both food poisoning, and I broke my ankle.”
“That was bad luck,” she pointed out. “And you can just go out to eat. Or maybe Ben can cook for you. There’s no way you’re both useless in the kitchen.”
“You know… I think you’d be surprised,” she said. “But anyway, I don’t know anything about him. How would I get in contact with him, other than just being a total creep and adding him on Facebook now that you found his profile?”
“I mean, you could do that. But… leave it to me.”
***
Rose got nervous at about the third ring.
She was suddenly unsure if she was making a terrible, creepy mistake or not. Maybe, even if Ben had found Rey attractive, he would be too embarrassed to admit to it. And that might even be the best case scenario. He could get upset. Granted, of course, it wasn’t as though Rose had a whole lot to lose at this point - she had only ever met Ben because he provided a service that she needed, and he had delivered her the photos, and there was no real reason for them to have to interact again. So, if she absolutely ruined things, then no harm no foul, right?
“Rose, hi,” Ben’s voice came through the speaker on her phone. “Have you had the chance to take a look through the gallery yet?”
“Yeah, I have actually,” she said. “They’re lovely, Ben, I’m so happy with them. But that’s also why I’m calling.”
“Okay,” he said, and he sounded a little bit curious about what was going to come next.
“My bridesmaid, Rey,” she said. “Brown hair, British, very cute.”
Ben’s voice was more hesitant this time. “Okay… What about her?”
“What did you think of her?”
“She seemed… nice,” he said, the last word ending on an uptick that made it sound more like a question than a statement. “I didn’t get to talk to her much, obviously, we were - uh, I’d say that both of us were pretty busy.”
Rose hummed in agreement. “That’s true. You both played very important roles in my wedding,” she said. “But would you have liked to?”
“Liked to?” he echoed, still sounding incredibly unsure.
“To have talked to her more,” she said.
There was a long pause, and she could only imagine what exactly was going on on the other end of the line. “You could tell?”
“I could tell,” she affirmed, though she wished that he would be a little bit more specific about what it was that she could tell, whatever it was that he saw or felt towards Rey.
“That’s… horrible,” he said slowly. “And terribly unprofessional of me. I am so sorry, I - I did try, I promise, to not keep returning to her, to make sure I got everyone, but she just… She has this aura that seemed to draw me in.”
“Ben,” Rose cut in, trying to stop him from continuing to ramble and seemingly spiral out of control. “Benjamin. Ben .”
Belatedly, he did stop talking, clearing his throat. “Yes?” he asked, his voice tentative.
“I’m not upset,” she said. “And I’m offering to set you up. Or at least give you her phone number.”
“Oh,” he said. “You’re - you’re not upset?”
“No. You did a good job, I’m not going to act like you didn’t just because I also got plenty of pictures of Rey in addition to all the rest of the lovely pictures I got of my friends and family.”
“Okay. Okay, no, good,” he said. She could hear the relief in his voice, and the subsequent heavy sigh that escaped him.
“So, are you interested?”
He faltered again. “In her? Does - Is she?”
“She seemed curious,” she said. “Which is more that I get out of Rey when it comes to any guy, so I think that’s pretty promising.”
“Okay,” he said. “Alright. So… Maybe you could give her my number, and let her know that she can text or call me if she’s interested. With no pressure.”
“Of course, yeah. I’ll let her know.”
“Thank you, Rose,” he said. “Seriously. For everything. And I promise you, I’m not lying when I say that you’ve been one of the best brides that I’ve worked with so far.”
“And you’re the best wedding photographer I’ll ever work with, crush on my friend or not.” She could hear him groan in the background, and she was helpless but to laugh. “Bye, Ben! Talk soon.”
***
After Rose gave Ben’s phone number to Rey, she didn’t hear anything on the subject for a while. Part of her had assumed that it was a nonstarter - maybe Rey hadn’t contacted Ben at all, or maybe they had gone on a date and whatever chemistry there had been just didn’t last.
She wanted to ask, but she was still riding the high of her wedding - when did that wear off? Never mind, don’t tell her, she didn’t want to know - and she couldn’t bear the thought of a negative answer.
And then, about a month and later, Rey had called her and asked her to meet her at the mall.
What had happened next was one of the most bizarre experiences in recent memory for Rose. Initially, she had assumed that it had something to do with using her GameStop discount or maybe a sudden craving for an Auntie Anne’s pretzel and company, but what she’d found was much different than that.
Rey, who had never been concerned about fashion or looking good (and who she had almost been concerned about having to force into a dress for the wedding), had led her into the Victoria’s Secret, where she’d immediately started fretting.
“I feel like I don’t even know my bra size,” Rey commented as she looked through a rack with a frown on her lips, shaking her head. “I live in sports bras.”
“You do,” she agreed. “What size did you wear under your dress for the wedding?”
“I don’t remember ,” she said, glancing back at Rose. “It was just an old bra I had. It wasn’t even strapless, I had to tuck them in, and Paige taped the bra to my boobs.”
“Really? You - how do you function as a girl?”
“I don’t, mostly,” Rey pointed out. “Just… help me figure this out, alright?”
Once they were in the fitting room with a few bras in different sizes that they thought might be right for Rey (who refused to allow the associate to just measure her), Rose had to ask. “Why are you even looking for a bra now, then? What’s the occasion?”
She suddenly looked a little bit sheepish when she looked back at Rose. She had been in the middle of changing, pulling a bra on and making faces at herself in the mirror as she bounced herself on her heels. “It’s… So, the third date is still the sex date, right?”
And damn if that didn’t completely throw Rose off. “The third date?”
“Yes. I’ve been out of the dating game for a while, but I think that’s just kind of a universal, right? I mean…”
“You don’t have to follow any sort of rules like that, you can have sex whenever you - Okay, no, more important: who are you going on a third date with?”
Letting out a quiet chuckle that sounded a little bit embarrassed, Rey answered, “Ben.”
“Ben Solo? Photographer Ben?”
“Ben Solo. Photographer Ben,” she confirmed with a small nod.
“You’ve been on two dates with him already, and you didn’t feel the need to tell me that?” she asked, almost in disbelief. Though, knowing Rey, this probably shouldn’t have been such a surprise.
“Well, I didn’t want to make a big deal about it,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t know if it was going to turn into anything, you know?”
“But it is turning into something?”
“It feels like it,” she said. “Dating him is a little hard because our schedules don’t line up, but I like him.”
“Apparently enough that you want to buy lingerie for him.”
“It feels right,” Rey said, shrugging. “And I just… I do want to impress him.”
“Then let’s impress him,” she said with a little grin, feeling incredibly triumphant.
It took nearly two hours to get Rey settled on a bra and panties set that she felt was appropriately sexy while also being her , but Rose didn’t mind spending that time. It was good to see Rey going for what she wanted again, especially since taking their time meant that she was able to calm her down.
(Rey still did get a pretzel with cheese dip before they left the mall, though.)
***
It took about another month after that for the relationship change to happen on Facebook - that section of Rey’s profile went from completely blank to saying ‘In a Relationship with Ben Organa-Solo’.
It wasn’t long after that that the pictures started to come up. It was clear that Ben was enjoying being with someone who he liked to photograph so much, and while Rey’s feed had always been kind of quiet, with occasional shared memes or cute animal videos, suddenly it wasn’t more than a few days between posts that she had been tagged in by Ben.
Most of the pictures were just of her in various settings, be it his apartment or hers, or at the park, or wherever they were having their dates. At first, the pictures looked just the slightest bit awkward, like Rey was far too aware of the camera being pointed at her and she was concerned with looking ‘right’. But then, Rose could see in the pictures how she went from being a little bit awkward to genuinely being comfortable and at ease around Ben, and the pictures felt so natural.
Out of curiosity, she’d looked at Ben’s Instagram page. For the most part, it was a lot of artsy-looking, well-framed pictures of landscapes and beautiful plants and buildings - the sort of thing that Ben had said he’d always wanted to photograph, more than people and weddings - but there was now the sprinkled-in images of Rey. Most of them were posted on Wednesdays, lovingly labeled with a ‘wcw’ hashtag.
Some of the best pictures, however, were ones that Rey had taken. It seemed that she would steal his camera from him from time to time, and maybe he’d shown her how to use it and maybe he hadn’t, but she would turn that camera on him and he’d look just the right combination of hopelessly in love and a little bit unnerved by being on the wrong side of the camera.
There weren’t a whole lot of pictures of the two of them together, mostly selfies that were clearly Rey’s idea, but it was good. They were both so very happy, it seemed to leap right off of the screen.
It was nice to see, and Rose would be lying if she said that it didn’t feel like a personal triumph. She knew it was all Ben and Rey, of course, but she’d been the one to nudge them along.
She smiled to herself as she hit ‘follow’ on his Instagram profile, and ‘add friend’ on his Facebook. It only felt right.
***
It was about eight months in when Rose helped Rey pack up her things and move into Ben’s apartment.
“We were both a little nervous about moving too quickly, but honestly speaking, I think that we’ll be okay,” Rey had told her on the drive over. “And it just didn’t make sense to keep having separate apartments, especially not with how often I was home. Otherwise we would’ve never seen each other.”
“You don’t have to convince me.”
(At the same time, however, Rose did kind of have to question how true it was that they wouldn’t have seen each other if they didn’t move in, because it seemed like they got by just fine. At the same time, of course, she supposed that that was because Rey had already practically been living at Ben’s for the past few months already.)
“Right. I just, I don’t know. I’ve never taken this step with anyone before, you know?” she said. “It feels like a big deal.”
“And it is,” Rose agreed, giving her an encouraging smile when she looked over at a stop sign. “But that doesn’t have to mean it’s a scary thing. You and Ben are great together. And like you said, you were never home anyway. You’ve already been living with him, and keeping your things somewhere else.”
Laughing, her friend nodded. “Okay. Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “It’ll be just… so convenient to not have to go across town to get clean clothes. And not having to worry about having that ‘oh, it’s getting late, should I go home?’ conversation.”
“Oh, yes. I can’t tell you how much I hated playing that whole game,” she said. “Like, we both know .”
“The worst part is the Ben never wanted to assume. Like, he’s a gentleman to a fault, you know, but we’ve been dating long enough that I don’t know why it should really be a question.”
“That’s good of him, though,” Rose told her, giving her a small smile. “I mean, we’ve always known he seemed like a good guy, but he also could have been creepily obsessed with you. I could have set you up with a potential stalker.”
“Oh, make no mistake, he is creepily obsessed with me,” she replied and let out a laugh, bright and clear and happy. “But he’s cute, so it’s okay.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” she told her, but she was still smiling. It wasn’t as though she could actually worry when her friend’s relationship clearly brought her so much joy. There were a lot of relationships Rose wasn’t too sure of, but she would cheer Rey and Ben on till the very end.
***
About a year after they moved in together, they were all having a night out when Ben pulled Rose aside.
“I have a big favor to ask of you,” he said, and he looked more nervous than she had ever seen him, and perhaps a little bit nauseated on top of that.
“Okay,” she said with a nod, because when he looked like an oversized, scared puppy like that, there was no possible way that she would be able to tell him no. “What is it?”
He glanced back in the direction of the table where Rey was still sitting, chatting with Armitage and showing him something by folding the table napkin in front of her. When he looked back at Rose, he fished his cell phone out of his pocket. He pulled up the camera and then handed it to her. “I captured one of the most important days of your life on camera, so… I need you to do the same for me,” he said.
For a moment, Rose was confused, taking the camera as it was offered to her mostly out of instinct. But then it clicked, and her eyes widened. “You - Is what I think is about to happen actually about to happen?”
He swallowed nervously, reaching down to pat his hip with a nod. She could make out the square shape of something tucked in his pocket. “You don’t think that it’s too soon, do you?” he asked, and it was all she could do not to laugh.
“No, no, I think you’re fine, Ben,” she told him, reaching up to gently pat his arm. “Just tell her I call maid of honor.”
“I don’t think it works like that, but I’ll tell her,” he agreed, sounding a bit more at ease and definitely amused by her words. “Thank you, Rose.” He took in a deep breath, rolling his shoulders back as he turned back towards the table they were sitting at.
As he got Rey’s attention and prepared to sink down onto one knee, Rose lifted the camera and hit record on two of her best friends' happily ever after.