Platonic (10 page)

And then he meets Ben.

CHAPTER 5

Mark falls in love with Ben within a few weeks. Ben asks him out for coffee minutes after helping him pull off his soaked jacket, and while splitting a dessert on their second date, Mark asks Ben—in a terrible, cliché little speech that he’s entirely ashamed of—if he’d like to be his boyfriend. Part of what makes him rush is a sense of time creeping past him. It’s almost Christmas, and then he has his final months at Stanford and at least one bar exam to sit. Ben is also kind of wonderful.

Quietly, Mark calls the few friends he casually sleeps with and ends the sexual element in their relationships because Ben—as much fun as Patrick and all of that was—is what he has always been looking for.

He hurries back for New Year’s after Christmas in Illinois and they go to San Francisco, booking a hotel suite that Mark can’t afford but Ben can, and making the most of it. Mark says “I love you” about ten minutes into the new year and, much to his delight, Ben says it back.

***

“So what are you gonna do now?”

Ben hums at him and tugs his scarf tighter around his neck as they walk toward their usual coffee place.

“I mean, you’ve basically finished your master’s, what’s the plan?”

Ben looks sideways at him, loops an arm through his and pulls him in tight, away from the cold Pacific wind. “Have we really not discussed this before?”

“We have, but I’m starting to think about what I’m doing and I feel like what you’re doing needs to be taken into consideration.”

Ben stops him in the street and presses a cold kiss to his lips, the tip of his nose bumping Mark’s even colder than his mouth. They’ve only been together a handful of months, but they either need to start planning their lives together now or start planning to say goodbye.

“Well, you know I fancy myself a columnist, perhaps even a novelist. You can’t rush these things.”

Mark laughs, “You’re just going to laze around and write?”

Ben shrugs. “I’ve got the means.” He does: His parents are artsy people who love the idea of a novelist son. They made their money the old-fashioned way, opening a chain of restaurants, slowly taking over the restaurant industry in Ben’s hometown in Tennessee and then happily selling it all to some big corporation. They’d retired to sail every coast they could find in Central America, but not before setting up Ben with a constant stream of money.

“Okay,” Mark shrugs. He doesn’t want to take advantage, of the money or Ben’s lack of direction, but there’s also no point in making things harder than they need to be. “Hey, did I ever mention I went to school with Rita Sutherland?”

“The novelist?”

“The one and only.”

“She’s insane,” Ben points out, but his interest is piqued.

“She’s also one of our greatest living authors,” Mark counters.

“I’d put her in the top ten.” Ben takes a moment to process. “Are you still friends?”

“Facebook friends. We like things on each other’s walls.”

They fall silent. Mark knows he just set the bait, blatantly (and gently), but still, it involved manipulation and he’s not sure how he feels about it.

“What about you?” Ben asks. “Your future?”

Mark tugs Ben to a stop so they can stare at the newly arrived assortment of satchels and wallets and belts in the window of their favorite leather store. Mark stalls as long as he can, pointing at things in the window until Ben tugs him back toward the coffee place and asks again.

Mark bites his lip. He feels excited. “I think I want to be a lawyer.”

Ben cracks up beside him, almost tripping over a split in the pavement. “That’s lucky.”

“No, I mean… shut up!” He pinches Ben in the side through all his layers to make him stop laughing. “You know I came here because it was either this or ending up estranged from my entire family, not to mention any sort of money, and the only things I enjoyed as an undergrad were the classics electives I only took because of my mother’s obsession with Greek architecture. And I hated it when I was thrown straight into law school with my father’s bullshit reputation hanging around my neck
and
no desire to be here. That internship at Whitney & Tomlins almost made the no-money and total estrangement life look appealing.”

“I get it, you hated law.”

“The district attorney’s office in New York offered me a job.”

“What?” Ben sounds nothing but excited. He turns to face Mark in the street. “Why didn’t you
open
with that? That’s amazing!”

“It’s a big deal, it’s a move.”

“When?”

Mark grasps Ben’s hands and holds tight. There’s a sliver of recognition at the back of his mind, old memories making his stomach knot. “I need to finish here first, and they need me to pass both the New York and New Jersey bar exams, but they want me there full-time by fall at the latest.”

Ben is still grinning, and so Mark makes his stomach settle and his grasp on Ben’s hands loosen. “I really love it there,” Mark says. “I love the office and the people. The cases we had over the summer, they were worth something. And I’ve always wanted to live in New York, I don’t know if I ever told you that…” He tries to remember. “When I was growing up it held so much promise for me. I love it here; California is fantastic, but New York has always had my heart just because it has always felt like where I’m meant to be.”

He’s rambling and realizes it, clicking his teeth together as he shuts his mouth.

Ben squeezes his hand back. “This is seriously fantastic. I am just so incredibly happy for you.”

“I don’t want this to make things weird between us,” Mark rushes to say.

“Why would it?”

They’ve started walking again and a light raining is falling, making Ben’s hair darker and Mark’s hair curl. He takes a deep breath. “Because I’m either going to have to ask you to move to New York with me or we’re going to have to break up.”

“It’s only March,” Ben says, his eyebrows knitting when Mark frowns. “What I mean is, you don’t have to ask me either question now, but when the time comes I hope it’s the former. We get along so well, and I’m an aspiring writer. Why wouldn’t I move to New York with you?”

Mark stares at him. “We’ve only been dating a few months.”

“So?”

Mark starts nodding and smiling, and Ben kisses him again there in the street, wrapping him up as it starts to rain properly and then pulling them both under an awning. It’s not their usual coffee place, but it’ll do.

“Give it a couple months, see if you get sick of me.”

“I’m pretty sure I won’t,” Mark says breathlessly, and blushes. He can’t stop staring as Ben goes to order for them, and now when his stomach knots it’s wonderful and warm and so full of hope.

***

Mark’s father isn’t pleased when he calls home to deliver the news, but Mark sits up straight and stares hard at the wall, calls his father “sir” and doesn’t back down. By the end of the conversation, his father has resigned himself to a reality in which his son will not follow precisely in his footsteps; he mumbles about it being less than optimal but does not say no. Even if he had refused to let him become a public prosecutor, Mark was ready to do it without his father’s blessing.

One day he is going to be a District Attorney. He has decided. And he feels strong enough, smart enough, to do what he wants to do.

His summer internship had gone well, he knows; he’d worked hard, and the job offer had come quickly after discussions that had indicated he was on the top of their list. He has the tenacity and the intelligence, he’s sure, to do a good enough job to keep him there and eventually excel.

He graduates from Stanford, doing better than even he expects to, and then he works even harder prepping for both bar exams. Ben brings him coffee and forces him to stop for lunch, and very occasionally drags him into the shower to wash his hair and distract him for an hour or two. Mark walks out of the New York bar exam breathing easily and grinning, knowing the New Jersey exam will be just as straightforward. The job waiting for him in New York is guaranteed. He needs only to pack his things and find a place to live when he gets there.

He brings up New York with Ben again in June. They haven’t made it official yet, but they’re pretty much living together. Mark’s dorm is noisy and he only has a single bed in a tiny room, while Ben has a two-bedroom house with a converted office and a corner bath.

“So—New York?” Mark asks, grinning into his bowl of Cocoa Puffs because Ben is going to say yes, he is sure of it.

Ben laughs and clicks his laptop shut, leaning forward on the table and beaming back at his boyfriend. “When do we leave?”

***

Mark loves Ben, he thinks, as he has never loved anyone. They’ve had six solid months together while Mark finished his degree and Ben wrote short stories and editorials, sold them all freelance and made hardly any money. Now Ben’s thinking about a PhD to keep his mind moving, but is in no rush. He is happy trailing Mark to New York and throwing money around to make everything easy. He can enroll whenever he wants to at a New York college, he argues, and keep himself busy decorating their new apartment.

Mark occasionally feels guilty about the money thing. His parents won’t support him in any way, shape or form now, but at least they still speak to him. The beginning salary for a research attorney wouldn’t keep a pigeon alive, and he doesn’t like to think about how he’d be faring without Ben. When they visit New York to hunt for somewhere to live, they eat at expensive restaurants. Ben buys him nice clothes, and the apartments they look at, while not lavish, are on the island and have some space. But whenever Mark gets that little crease between his eyes that clues Ben in to his over-thinking, Ben just kisses him on the nose and clicks his tongue at him. “It’s just money,” he says. “I love you.”

***

Their first trip to New York occurs just as summer is starting to cool into September. Mark has his start date for work, and Ben has done research online to work out where to live and how much to pay. Ben has lined up dozens of apartments to look at over the weekend before they head back to Stanford and start packing. They’re in the city, walking fast with the flow of pedestrians and still arguing about money, when Mark stops suddenly in the street.

He’s frozen, and his hand in Ben’s drags Ben back laughing and looking around to see what has caught his boyfriend’s attention.

On the opposite corner of the intersection stands, unmistakably, Daniel O’Shea.

With a start, Mark realizes it’s been almost a decade since he saw him in the flesh, at least six years since he deliberately unfriended him on Facebook and lost access to his pictures and stories. Only a few hours since he last thought about him, but that is because Mark is in New York and, for so long, this city was their dream together. Finally arriving had unavoidably stirred up the nostalgia.

And now here he is in his natural habitat, having just gotten out of a cab, wearing a thin, immaculately tailored and pressed coat with sleeves that end tight at mid-forearm. It’s in the high eighties, but Daniel doesn’t look as if he’s sweating. He’s grown beautifully lean in sharp contrast to his teenage roundness, his waist tight and his shoulders broad. He carries an oversized folio and a shoulder bag, and his sunglasses are perched high on his head, his mouse-brown hair lightened to almost blond and cut shorter, falling around his ears and across his eyes in wisps of bangs. He’s on the phone and he’s smiling.

“What?” Ben asks, staring in the right direction but not picking Daniel out of the bustling crowd of New Yorkers.

Mark starts to answer but his voice cracks. He swallows and tries again. “That’s my ex.” His teeth clack. He’s not sure he’s ever called Daniel that. “I mean, from way, way back. High school.”

Ben laughs and continues to scan the crowd for the man he’s supposed to be looking at. “You dated in high school?” Ben knows about Mark’s past relationships, for the most part. They’ve talked about his failed undergraduate loves and the friendship with Patrick. Mark hasn’t detailed every casual encounter, but he hasn’t hesitated to tell Ben that he’d had fun for a while, and really learned his body and how fun sex could be. He hadn’t mentioned high school, though, choosing to keep that story between him and Patrick. Ben had assumed Jason was Mark’s first real relationship.

Looking harder across the intersection, Ben works out whom Mark is talking about and can’t stop himself from looking his boyfriend’s ex up and down.

Mark thinks he must be a little intimidated; who wouldn’t be? Daniel looks fantastic. He retains all the charm of his youth—the roundness of his cheeks and the jut of his chin, his hair still falling across his eyes and down to the nape of his neck.

Suddenly Ben is dragging Mark across the street, weaving in and out of traffic and jaywalking in a way that earns them honking horns and brings one car’s tires screeching to a halt.

Daniel sees them before they get there, the horn of a taxi close by making him look up lazily from where he’s hung up his phone and now riffles through his bag. His eyes widen when he sees Mark being tugged toward him. They’re such a soft brown in the sunshine, Mark notices, exactly as they were when he and Daniel were young. Even if so much else has changed.

Closer up, Mark notices that Daniel’s skin is darker by several shades. His hair is indeed borderline blond, with subtle highlights of honeyed and amber browns, and product to keep it ruffled in place. The jacket is stunning, as he expected, fine shimmering thread stitched into the collar and cuffs, and underneath Daniel wears his usual low-slung jeans and T-shirt. They fit him differently now, though, tight across the chest and thighs, loose everywhere else.

Daniel keeps staring back at him, and for a split second, Mark thinks he looks terrified and lost and as young as when they knew each other. And then he’s grinning and placing his folio and bag at his feet. His teeth flash white in the sun.

There are a couple of missed beats, both of them just looking, both of them very, very aware that Ben is standing there looking back and forth between them and slowly realizing there is so much more here than hilarious anecdotes about teenaged Mark.