Chapter Text
“David,” Ben says, flinging a paper ball at her.
The paper ball hits Devi in the side of the head, and she groans in disgust, crumpling up a ball of her own and tossing it at Ben, without even looking at him.
“David,” he sing songs again, throwing another paper ball at her.
“Go away, Gross. I’m trying to do some work.”
“But David, this is important,” Ben says, and god, he’s probably pouting at her, staring at her with those brilliantly blue eyes. She kind of hates him.
(she kind of doesn’t)
“More important than me reviewing the last of these patient charts?” she asks, not even taking her eyes off of the piles of paperwork scattered in front of her.
“Come on, wifey,” Ben says, snorting, and this makes Devi turn around and glare at him.
“Do not call me that,” she says, crossing her arms.
“Why not? It’s accurate?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.
The sad thing was that it was true. She and Ben had gotten married last month so that Devi could stay in the country to apply for a few prestigious residencies. Sure, Canada had a few programs of their own, but the best ones were here, and she was going to stay here and be better than everyone else.
She just kind of can’t believe that she’s legally married to Ben Gross, the one of the lawyers for the hospital she worked at, her best friend Eleanor’s friend, and now, her husband.
She and Ben had rubbed each other the wrong way from the moment they had met, clashing even more when they had found out they were working together occasionally, and even more so since they had gotten married. But Devi had had no other options, her work visa denied, and not knowing anyone else in the country, she had asked Ben. What was surprising, perhaps, was that he had agreed.
(perhaps it was less surprising now that she had gotten to know ben, had started to understand the kind of guy he was, annoying, and ridiculously competitive, but loyal to a fault, the kind of person who would do anything for his friends, and devi tried not to think about what it meant that she was now considered one of them)
“I don’t like it,” she says instead.
“Learn to love it, honey, because we have our interview soon,” he says, tossing an envelope at her.
“What?” she shrieks. “Our immigration interview?”
“Yeah,” he nods slowly, staring at her like she’s gone insane, which, to be fair, Devi’s not entirely sure she hasn’t. “Why are you acting like this, David? We both knew this was going to be something we had to do the second the both of us said ‘I do.’”
“I just never thought it would be so soon,” she mutters, sliding the letter out of its envelope.
Ben looks at her like she’s grown a third head, and honestly, she’s getting tired of him looking at her like that. Why wasn’t he freaking out about this like she was?
“How can you be so calm?” she asks, setting down the letter to stare at him.
Ben shrugs, propping his legs up on his mahogany desk even though she had told him not to do that a million times. Honestly, it was just the two of them in this office, and yet, he acted like it was his own personal place to wreak havoc. Professionalism breeded professionalism, and the more professional they were at home, the easier it would be to sell this marriage as real.
“Did you know that immigration consular officials themselves estimate that anywhere from 5% to 30% of all marriages through which a green-card is obtained are false?”
When he notices her staring at him incredulously, he shoots her a wink that does not make her flush, it really doesn’t. “You didn’t think I wasn’t going to do some research before I agreed to this, did you? And, even with rates as high as that, very few of these marriages were detected as false.”
“Ok, well, Ben,” she says, voicing rising in pitch and nerves, “25% of all visas obtained in the past few years have been through marriages, so very few have been detected as false proportionally to 25%, or very few, like, 3, because those are two different things.”
Ben puts his legs down from the desk and peers at her from across the room. He’s wearing the blue shirt she told him to wear more frequently, she notes, and it brings out the colors of his eyes beautifully, so much so that she thinks she could get lost in them. “Devi, we’ll be fine. Might I remind you before we got married we’d known each other for like, two years? That’s as long as most people know each other before they get married.”
“You don’t know everything about me,” Devi retorts, crossing her arms as if that’ll provide some sort of defense against Ben’s piercing gaze.
He just laughs. “And you don’t know everything about me. I don’t think people who have been married twenty years know everything about each other. But, we both know enough. If you’re not satisfied, we can certainly go a few rounds quizzing each other.”
Devi bites back the insult that springs to her tongue. The thing was, she was grateful to Ben for what he did, she really was! It was just hard to remember to be grateful when he just generally existed and rubbed her the wrong way.
“And anyways,” Ben says, nodding towards her desk. “You’ve been working for too long.”
She shoots him a withering look. “Says the man burning the midnight oil more often than not.”
“We’re burning it together.”
That much, at least, was true.
(devi was discovering, unexpectedly, that she and ben were far more alike than she had previously thought, not at all the opposites she had presumed them to be; both of them were workaholics with a competitive streak a mile wide, enjoyed trying new foods and were great at bottling up emotions until the day they died)
Devi sighs, pressing her fingers against her eyes. “Ok, fine. Do you think we need to prepare for the interview?”
Ben gets up from his desk and comes around to hers, leaning forward on his hands to look her better in the eyes. “Honestly, Devi, no. But I know it’ll give you some peace of mind if we do, so I don’t mind sitting through a few review sessions.”
She looks up at him, and her breath catches in her throat at the look in his eyes.
(suddenly it’s far too real, far too vivid for her, and devi can almost perfectly picture him leaning forward and softly kissing her, holding his hand in hers and falling asleep with him on the couch, before she blinks and the vision is gone, and she doesn’t even know where it came from)
She blinks again, forcing the vision to dissipate from her mind, and gives him a shaky smile. “So, you won’t hate me forever if I print up flashcards for us to quiz each other on?”
He smirks. “What, you don’t have them already?”
Devi flushes gently and reaches into the second drawer of her desk on the left side, pulling out two stacks of flashcards held together with rubber bands. “I made them before we got married, but I need you to fill in your answers cause I didn’t know the answers to some of the questions.”
“Oh, I see how it is.” Ben takes the flashcards from her and flips through them, grinning. “You gave yourself an unfair advantage, David, getting to study these cards before I even knew they existed. Sneaky move.”
“That’s not what I meant to do,” Devi protests, but she can’t help but smile. She probably would have suspected the same thing of Ben, had the roles been reversed. She stands up and swipes her stack of cards from the desk. “How do I know you weren’t just pretending you didn’t know these existed as a ploy for me to feel bad and go easy on you?”
“Please, David, there’s nothing in the world I could do to make you want to go easy on me, and vice versa. It’s an insult to the both of us.”
He’s got a point there, but now that he’s stroked Devi’s competitive spirit, she’s not going to just let this go.
“Well, Gross,” she says, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “We’ve got two months until we have to head to the interview. We’ll do weekly review sessions to get to know each other better from now until then, and then at the end, we’ll tally up all the points to see who wins. I bet you I’ll win.”
Ben taps his finger against his chin. “I like it. But what are we going to bet?”
Devi smiles evilly. “If I win, you have to eat an entire Indian meal without one sip of water, and I get to insult you for two solid weeks, and you can’t say anything back.”
Ben frowns at her. “Well, if I win, you have to admit that I am the smartest person you have ever met, and you also have to do all the chores around the house for two weeks. Without any help.”
Devi hated doing chores. That was part of the reason this marriage to Ben was bearable, he split the chore duties with her so she didn’t have to do everything by herself, and he was actually a decent conversationalist when it came down to it.
But as much as it was bearable doing chores with Ben, she knows it’ll be a thousand times more fun to watch him have to take all of the insults she lobbies at him without a single reprieve, without arguing back whatsoever. After all, there was absolutely no way Devi was going to lose, so there was no harm in taking the bet.
She stuck her hand out. “Deal.”
“You’re going down, David.”
‘We’ll see about that, Gross.”
They’re doing the dishes later that night when Devi finally works up the courage to ask Ben the question that’s been on her mind since she got the letter.
“Ben?”
He hums at her, not turning to face her as he stacks the rest of the plates in the dishwasher, but she knows he’s listening.
“Why did you agree to this?”
He stops stacking and then turns around fully, leaning against the kitchen sink. “You’re seriously asking me now?” he says, raising an eyebrow. “After we’ve gotten married?”
“Well, it’s not like we had a real romantic ceremony or anything. We just got a Justice of the Peace and signed the papers, that’s it. Not like, the royal wedding or anything.” She pauses. “No, I just—I wanted to know why. I mean, you gave up a lot for this, didn’t you?”
Ben smirks at her. “Glad to know you see me as a ladies man.”
Devi rolls her eyes and smacks him with her dishtowel. “You know that’s not what I was talking about.”
Ben smirks at her once more, and she resists the urge to slap him. “No, I mean, I wasn’t really giving up a lot. It’s not like you date a lot either.”
Devi begrudgingly concedes the point with a nod of her head. The both of them were far too obsessed with their work to even consider dating, especially now. Just about to start her residency, Devi was more married to the hospital than she was to Ben.
“And it wasn’t a big deal. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, you scored the jackpot. You got someone hot, rich, smart. Really, David, I’m surprised you didn’t thank me sooner, but I’m just glad you came to your senses.”
“Oh yeah,” she deadpans. “I’m so glad I got stuck with a 5’2 Jewish white boy who thinks the food from Taco Bell is spicy. Really living the dream life. I didn’t even get his hot dad and the Porsche Cayenne.”
Ben chucks his whole dishtowel at her, and it smacks her in the face while she’s laughing. “You couldn’t handle my dad, David.”
“Oh. I’m sure,” she gasps, ribs shaking with laughter. “He’d introduce me to Kanye at least, so I’m pretty sure he’s the Gross I should have married.”
Ben rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “And I don’t think the food from Taco Bell is spicy, just the ones they advertise as such. You know there’s a reason they have mild salsa, right?”
“Oh yeah. For all the white people who decided spices weren't for them after colonizing half of the world and killing millions of people in their quest to get them. Just like you guys to ruin things for the rest of us.”
Ben points a finger at her, and she wants to bite it off. That’ll show him to point at her. “Hey, I’m Jewish. You can’t lump me in with all the other white people.”
Devi rolls her eyes as she moves to wipe down the dinner table. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Ben,” she gasps, pretending to grovel. “I must be confusing you with the other Ben who had a bite to eat of my mom’s aloo gobi and then proceeded to down an entire glass of water. And it was mild, Ben. MILD.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not mild, ok. Mild is like, macaroni and cheese. That was spicy.”
Devi presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose, resisting the urge to bang her head against the kitchen counter. “Oh god,” she sighs. “You poor, poor boy, living a life without any kind of flavor whatsoever. But you still didn’t answer my question. Why did you do this?”
“Maybe it’s because I wanted to live a life getting yelled at for my choices in food,” he smirks, but then catches the look on Devi’s face and sobers up. “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “You—you were my friend, you know, and you needed help. Despite what you think of me, Devi, I’m not a bad person. It’s not like I wanted you to get deported.”
(oh, but devi knows ben isn’t a bad person, in fact, she thinks he might be one of the best people she’s ever met, to go this far for a friend. some days she lies awake at night in her bed (not theirs, never theirs) and feels guilt pool in the pit of her stomach at the thought that she is taking advantage of him, but then she reminds herself that she did this so she could be closer to her friends; fabiola, eleanor, and him)
Devi purses her lips and drops the dishtowel on the counter, leaning opposite him. “I know that. I just can’t help but feel that you gave a lot of it up. You know, you can’t exactly go dating other people while we’re married.”
Ben laughs. “Oh, you really don’t know, huh?” At her confused look, he rushes to clarify. “My mom was pushing me to find someone. I told her I, uh, was dating someone from work, and she was happy about that. Of course, she was a little less happy when I told her we were getting married, especially under these circumstances, but, you know, she came around eventually. She really wants to meet you, by the way.”
Devi tries not to blush at this. Ben had met her mother and her cousin, and had only received their approval when he insisted that he had done this because Devi had asked them to, and even then, it took forever for Devi to convince her mother that she was doing this for a job, for her future.
(it definitely helped that devi had done it so she could be in the best residency programs, and that her mother actually somewhat approved of ben)
“Well, let me know when she’s here,” she says. “I’ll try and keep the house clean.”
Ben snorts at this. “We both know you don’t know how to operate the vacuum cleaner.”
“Well, I’m not the one who insists on operating it at 7 am on a fucking Saturday.”
The way Ben smirks shows Devi that he knows exactly what he’s doing when he does that, the little shit. “Maybe if someone got up at an acceptable time, then she could help me do the chores and I wouldn’t be waking her up early in the morning.”
Devi sticks her tongue out at him, moving around the counter so she’s a few feet away instead of with the giant block of marble separating them. “Well, I’m not the one whose apartment we’re living in.”
Ben laughs. “Devi, you moved into my place cause yours was tiny and you were sharing it with Eleanor and Fabiola. Admit it, my place is a lot better,” he says, showing the space off with a flourish of his arm.
(which it was, devi wasn’t going to lie, and the fact that she now had her own office, even if she was sharing it with ben, was a definitely plus, because he respected her drive and work ethic, even more than fabiola and eleanor did, and he had hot water for a lot longer than she did, and really nice sheets with a ridiculous thread count)
“Never, Gross,” she says, poking him. Suddenly, she remembers something, something that worries her, and she knows Ben can tell from the way his face morphs from teasing to serious.
“Devi, what’s wrong?”
“Do you think they won’t be convinced we’re married because I didn’t take your name?” she asks. “No offense, Ben, but, I—I didn’t want to, but now I’m thinking that might have been a mistake.”
“No, no, no,” Ben assures her softly. “They won’t think that. Plenty of women keep their names now. Plus, I totally get why you kept yours. You got your degree and everything under your name. It’s all you, Devi. None of it was me. I don’t care that you didn’t take my name.” He reaches forward, and for a second, Devi hopes that he might touch her skin, to set her aflame like she knows he would, but then he pulls back and she’s disappointed before she remembers she’s not supposed to be.
“Devi, your name is you. It’s your father’s name and it’s your mother’s name. Keep it. I want there to be something of yours here.”
(she realizes she’s twisting her wedding band around her finger as he says this, a beautiful silver band that he had insisted on getting for her, and she has an honest to god engagement ring as well, so beautiful she can hardly look at it, because when she looks at it something very dangerous stirs in her, and when ben talks to her like that and looks at her like that, with those shockingly blue eyes of his, it makes her feel something, and she’s not sure exactly what; devi lives her life in definites, but this is the most uncertain she has ever been)
She gives him a wry smile. “What, like my mismatched plates weren’t enough to convince you this was also my place?”
And the moment is broken. He rolls his eyes and steps back from her, and suddenly, it’s like she can’t breathe. She can’t figure out whether or not she can’t breathe with him by her side or far from her.
“I keep telling you, now that we’re actual adults, we need to have matching plates.”
“Right, because matching plates are a testament to a long lasting marriage.”
“You don’t know that they’re not!”
“I’m pretty sure they’re not the reason that a marriage fails,” Devi fires back.
Ben runs a hand through his hair, laughing softly. “Agree to disagree, David.” He glances at the clock. “Well, since it’s not that late, I’m going to get some more work done. You going to join?”
She shakes her head. “No, I want to watch some TV.”
“Make sure to—”
“I know, Ben,” she sighs. “Tape the next Rick and Morty episode and I won’t tape over it when I tape my shows, I promise.”
He smiles at her before walking back into their (his, when did she start to think of it as theirs?) office, and Devi settles herself on the couch, determined to lose herself in some shitty reality TV.
She flops on the couch and uses her arm as a pillow, lying down to stare at the TV, but she must be more exhausted than she realized, because she wakes up suddenly, and the apartment is dark and quiet, the only sound and light coming from the TV.
She shifts, and a blanket falls off of her shoulders. Ben’s blanket. Devi runs her fingers over it, reveling in the softness of the blue cotton. He would never let her use it when they had movie nights or watched TV together, claiming that it was too expensive for her and that she wouldn’t appreciate it. He’s not wrong, the blanket is easily one of the softest things she’s ever felt, and now it’s draped over her. Ben must have come in and found her asleep on the couch, given her his blanket to use. It’s something shockingly sweet, and Devi wants to think it’s so unlike Ben to do something for her and except nothing in return, except she’s starting to realize it’s not.
(devi doesn’t know what’s happening, why her heart rate picks up like this, or perhaps she does, and just has to ignore it, because if she admits the truth to herself, the situation would get a lot more complicated than it needed to be, because suddenly all she wants is nothing more than to drag ben in here and to kiss him, to burrow underneath the blanket with him and fall asleep with him on their (his) couch)
She presses her fingers to her lips, cursing herself in the dark.
Devi takes one of the throw pillows and sticks it over her head. She didn’t want to think about what she was feeling, all of these emotions swirling up inside of her that she didn’t know how to handle. There was something about Ben that made her defenses come crumbling down, that made her weak. Maybe it was the way his smile settled in her stomach after a long day, or the way his blue, blue eyes made her want to drown in him, or the way he always knew how to make her feel better. Whatever it was, Ben made her vulnerable. He saw through all of the bravado she put up for everyone else, and he was pretty much the only one who did. She didn’t know how she felt about that. In fact, she was rapidly becoming sure of only one thing: Ben.
Devi groans, burrowing back into the couch, the scent of Ben on the blanket more of a comfort than she wanted it to be. She wants him here, with her, even though she knows that’s an impossibility.
Just her luck to want to kiss her fake husband.