Cleona clinks her fork absently against her plate, not looking at either of them but a small smile on her face in spite of herself.
Benjy had bought a burgundy tie to match her dress, a plain thing that Axl and she had found in the thrift store down the street from their apartment but it complimented her curves quite nicely and she could wear a normal bra in it, a concept. And then her new boyfriend’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head when he saw her in it.
She self-consciously smooths her hair over her shoulders, avoiding his eye. This was the third wedding in her family this summer alone and it was only July. Her cousin Rosalie and some perfectly fine dipshit named Ken were getting married at St. Mary’s in the Hamptons because Ken apparently had money. Axl and Killi were pulling the car around while she waited for Benjy on the stairs. “I know. I’m terrible at dressing up for these things and I–”
She’d been told she was pretty all her life, or rather she would be if she put in an iota of effort, but never beautiful. Especially in a way that seemed to take his breath away just as he spoke. Stranger still, she believed him. Still believed him even as he coaxed her out to the dance floor, skimmed his fingers along her bare shoulders, an apparently innocent action in case her father was watching but sensuous enough to send shivers down the base of her spine. Even with the baseline thudding heavily in the pit of her stomach, she felt light as air in his arms…
“Beautiful,” he whispers again as the song finishes and the world returns to her feet. He looks at her almost like he’s expecting her to argue or roll her eyes or do just about anything to contradict him like normal. But this time, she only smiles at him and leads him out of the hall, away from the always disapproving gaze of her father to wander the golf course in the twilight.
“What’s ‘Stand By Me’?” Shay pipes up, disrupting her reverie. If only evenings on golf courses could stretch out into forever…
“It’s a song, Shay,” she replies helpfully and more than willing to steer the conversation into less emotionally charged topics. “Pasta’s very good, Benjy, thank you.”
Benjy opens his mouth to reply but, Shay refuses to be dissuaded and fixes his mother with a hard scowl. “I know it’s a song, Mama. What’s the song?”
Cleona stares at her son for a beat, meanwhile noting that Benjy has barely made a sound himself. When she glances at him, he has his mouth full and his brow slightly furrowed as if he didn’t himself inspire this topic of conversation. For a moment, in another life, Cleona could easily see the two of them teasing their seven-year-old for not knowing a song that’s over forty years old and come on Shaybaby what are they teaching you in those dance classes? Then, they’d both launch into some horrid duet rendition of Ben E. King’s classic while Shay has his hands clamped over his ears giggling and begging them to stop until Cleona runs to their bedroom to dig out the mixtape Benjy made her a week after her cousin’s wedding…
Her chair scrapes against the linoleum as she stands and tugs at the hem of her t-shirt. “All right, kid, I’ll play you the song.”
Shay looks positively gleeful whereas Benjy looks confused to the point of distress. Before she can think better of it, she heads to their-her bedroom and digs out the tape from the bottom of her sock-and-underwear drawer.
When she re-enters the dining area, Shay is jabbering away about something that happened in his dance class the other day but Benjy looks distracted, his eyes flitting to hers almost nervously as soon as she walks in. She raises her eyebrows back as if to say what do you want me to do? he asked.
She crosses over to the CD-tape boombox she has on the kitchen counter and slides the tape in the deck, both boys following her every movement.
The tell-tale beat opens the track and not completely unexpected, her heart lurches in time.
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No I won’t be afraid
Oh, I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
“I don’t think your dad likes me very much,” Benjy chuckles nervously in her ear, his hand squeezing her hip from emphasis as they sway to the music.
“That’s okay,” she says with a half-smile, tilting her head back so she can look him in the eye. “I don’t think he likes any of us very much.”
“Not even a little bit,” she laughs, letting her hand fall a little from his shoulder to his chest. “Don’t get me wrong–objectively, he’s a good man, all things considered, but children are a requirement for every good Catholic marriage and well–one thing to not like kids. Quite another to get a bunch of duplicates who are keen on causing trouble and being queer and generally problematic in just about everything they can get their hands on–well, we never really stood a chance with him.”
Benjy laughs and shakes his head, his gelled hair falling out of place.
“What?” she cries, mock affronted.
“It’s just–” he smiles at her, then ducks his head. “those might be some of the best things about all of you.”
“Oh.” Her face is starting to hurt from smiling. “I think so too.”
“What about me, Benjamin?”
God, have his eyes always been so bright, so deep, so goddamn brilliant? He laughs, leans in so their foreheads almost touch. “I’m just so happy to be here. With you.”
So darling, darling
Stand by me, oh stand by me
Oh stand, stand by me
Stand by me
Benjy can’t even make it through the first chorus. His stomach bottoms out, like it used to at the top of the ramps at the skatepark, and Benjy stands abruptly. His fork clatters and his chair scrapes across the floor loud enough to cut through the music, earning him identical looks of confusion from mother and son.
“Excuse me.” Benjy says lamely, his palms sweating as his walks stiffly out of the kitchen. He’s too hot, even though it’s almost cold in the apartment, and as he closes himself in the tiny half bathroom on the first floor, he rips his shirt off before crouching over the sink, sure he was going to vomit. It’s only when he sees his hands shaking that he recognizes what’s happening.
The first panic attack he’d had had been in the tiny apartment he and Cleona had shared before this one, before Shay. It was the day after his mother’s funeral. The kitchen had smelled entirely too much like flowers, entirely too much like grief and had been entirely empty of the only constant he’d had in his entire life. Cleona found him probably about half an hour later, when she’d returned from her quest for hamburgers and had scooped him up off of the stained white tile floor as if he were the helpless child he’d felt like. He’d cried into her neck while she rubbed his back, the hamburgers growing cold beside them. They were pretty constant for those first few months after Samira died, the worst one happening on the subway on his way to skate practice. He’d been frozen in place, riding the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again, until Cleona had found him one more, wordlessly knowing what had happened without needing an explanation. He used to joke with her that she was psychic, tuned into him in a way that seemed otherworldly, and now, as Benjy falls to his knees in the tiny half bathroom of the apartment that used to be his, he wonders if Cleona’d lost that sixth sense along with her love for him.
He had no right to be bitter-he was self aware to know that much-but that didn’t stop the bitterness from coming. Hearing that song-their song, even though neither of them would’ve ever admitted so hideously cliche-at the dinner he’d made for Cleona and their son, the possibilities of what could’ve been presented to him on a fucking platter-it was just too much.
“Fuck.” He whispers softly, taking a shaky breath. The bathroom was still the same depressing shade of beige it’d been when he’d bought the apartment-his promises to paint of course falling flat with each new deal and competition and event that took him away from New York. Away from Cleona. Away from the family they should be right now if only he’d tried a little harder.
Benjy smacks himself, hard, in the side of his face. Left then right. He clenches his fists as tight as he can and counts backwards from ten in Arabic as quietly as he can manage. When neither of those don’t work, and he can still hear the strains of the song from other room and the clatter of forks and plates, he does the next logical thing; he sticks his entire head under the cold tap and lets the sound of water numb his brain.
The panic attacks had gotten bad again when he’d moved back to California more permanently. Without Cleona. Without Shay. He still wasn’t entirely sure how to get through them without her, as unhealthy and as useless as that was. The water is surprisingly effective, shocking Benjy back to the present and reminding him of how complicated it was, that even though it wasn't the future they’d planned, they both have pretty good lives-and most importantly, Seamus had a great life. Their son was the reason Benjy was subjecting himself to the hell of having to stare his mistakes in the face and eat fettuccine with them-and he needed to stop being a pussy and get back out there.
He dries his curls ineffectively on a hand towel and pulls his shirt back on over his head, pausing as he pulls it down around his hips. The tiny shamrock he’d gotten on his twenty-first birthday was so small and faded now that he hardly noticed it anymore, but it seemed to glow now. Drunk and insistent on doing something memorable for his twenty first, he simply would not shut up until the Finnigan triplets took him to a tattoo parlor. He’d wanted to get Cleona’s name, but she’d insisted that he didn’t, and they’d settled on an homage to her homeland instead.
“This way if you ever get rid of me it can just be a stupid ass tattoo.” She said with a grin, drunk enough to kiss him in front of her brothers, who both promptly took a break from their bickering to make dramatic retching sounds.
“Baby.” Benjy said with as much serious as he could muster. He couldn’t quite see straight, but Cleona was somehow even more beautiful when he was cross-eyed. Maybe it was the whiskey.
“If I ever get rid of you, you might as well just shoot me in the head, cause I don’t really see the point of being alive if you’re not there too.”
He’d meant it, even though Cleona had laughed and told him to stop being stupid, and that hadn’t changed. He never wanted to be rid of her, not all the way. Even if she just tolerated him to the point of confusing dinners and co-parenting.
God. He thinks as he pulls his black teeshirt over the shamrock. I really am still in love with her.
He feels a twinge of guilt as he opens the door, thinking of Cher. Another twinge of guilt tickles down his spine as he realizes it’s the first time he’d really thought about her all day. He was sure she didn’t care-her best friend from childhood(-or college? Benjy couldn’t remember) lived in the city and whenever she flew over with him, they almost always partied until ridiculous hours, entertaining herself while he saw Shay. Benjy stands in the doorway for a minute, rocking back and forth on the arches of his feet, making sure he could handle going back in there.
International daredevil and he can’t even face the first woman he fell in love with. Maybe he really was a fraud.
Shay’s yammering away, telling his mother about the dog he’d chased when Benjy re-enters the kitchen.
The question is so simple, and Shay says it with genuine distress clouding his big blue eyes. God-of all the things to take from his mother, of course it had to be her eyes. The ones that always could see through his bullshit-Benjy wasn’t entirely sure where he’d gone either, but he smiles at Shay as he sits back down.
“It’s not polite to talk about at the table, just had a bit of a er...personal matter to handle.”
He notices when he picks up his fork that Shay and Cleona are both done-he’d been in there longer than he’d thought.
“I haven’t uh, been eating a lot of carbs lately.” He says before he can catch himself, feeling even more like a douche when Cleona raises her eyebrows at him. He gives her a tight half smile, thankful that the stereo is now playing a toothpaste commercial instead of that fucking song.
“I’ll clean up and then I’ll get out of your hair.”
