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Beth wakes up in Benny’s bed earlier than usual, stirring before he does, just as dawn has cracked the city and the hubbub of the morning commute has begun (sirens, so many, such shrill sirens).
Just like when she’d been here last year, his sheets are the most comforting shade of gray, its scent something she recognizes like her own heartbeat but for which she lacks a name.
She feels a shudder through her body. Unsurprisingly, the air inside is cooler in winter than it is in the fall, but if anything, the heat of his body has gotten stronger.
She rolls in the sheets gently to avoid creaking the bed, because this mattress should’ve been replaced five years ago, Benny. It’s time to dust as well, she thinks, her nose stuffier than usual. She has to breathe through her mouth. Ugh.
The man is a restless sleeper. He told her once that’s one reason he prefers people meet his mind before his sleeping habits. At night, he tosses and turns and kicks and snores and mutters and steals the sheets. Beth is a heavy enough sleeper that it doesn’t bother her too much. If Beth does the same, he never mentions.
Today, however, he’s snoozing peacefully. She takes the time to study his body, shirtless, and his face, so youthful even with the mustache and the creases in his expression.
The light stretches softly through the blinds of their — his, she corrects herself — window and casts shadowy stripes on his face. The stripes strikingly resemble bars on a jail cell. They only serve to remind her of the distance that still separates them, even after all this time. Together, Beth and Benny exist here in this liminal space between coaching and studying and rivals and friends and something more. Strangely, she’d still wager a guess they’re each the closest person the other has right now.
Nonetheless, every day with him feels like coloring in the sketch of this person she still is just getting to know.
They aren’t great at hammering out the details of this framework in which they operate. Beth just follows her instincts. She scooches herself a little closer, resting her head on his arm. She knows from experience he sleeps through things like this.
Then, she jolts away from him toward the floor to sneeze into her arm — ah-choo! She muffles it the best she can. It’s not too loud, but the motion and the noise still manage to wake him up. She covers her face with her arm; he doesn’t need to see anything coming out of her nose. He takes a couple seconds to blink blearily into the light, which is becoming a brighter yellow by the minute, and laughs when he catches sight of her, wretchedly trying to stifle her sneezes and not make a mess.
With the tired reluctance of someone who definitely wanted to spend a few more lazy minutes in bed, he rises and pads with bare, flat feet out the door, then returns with some napkins and a small trash can.
Beth accepts them gratefully, sneezing a few more times, not minding that the rough paper of the napkin will irritate her nose pink. Her forehead is aching from all the sneezing, punctuated by hoarse coughs. She feels a rush of warmth, replaced immediately by a flash of cold shivers. She curls his duvet around herself a little more tightly.
“Did Levertov break your vacuum? Is that why you have so much dust?” she asks, not hiding the annoyance in her tone.
Benny quirks an eyebrow and crosses his arms as he sits on the edge of the bed. “You sound congested.” He presses a cold hand to her forehead. “You’re a little warm, too. I think you’re coming down with something.”
Beth can’t help but groan. She hates rhinoviruses, hates feeling as indisposed as Alma all too often had been. She misses Alma, will always carry that loss in her soul, but she wants to be better, healthier.
Head ensconced in the pillow toward the ceiling, Beth says, miffed, “I wanted to play through the Hastings pamphlets today.”
She flips to her side to face him. To her mild surprise (and a twist in her stomach), he sits at the edge of the bed, contemplative, then lies down on his back next to her. He says, “And I really wanted to sleep in today.”
She understands what he’s not saying, that he’s lending her the bed to rest and recover. Beth laughs.
Of course he is more tired than usual this morning. He’d had a poker game late last night to make rent this week. Donning a black shirt she’d borrowed from his closet, she’d stayed up reading at the card table until he’d returned with his winnings and her favorite sandwich from the 24-hour diner on Second Street. They’d stayed up a little longer to have some fun. In bed, Beth had stared down at him and felt a rush of something in the brightness of his smile, something that reminded her that, yeah, sex is pretty fun. They’d fallen asleep not long after, their clothes still forgotten on the floor.
When Beth had first stayed in New York, kissing Benny had hit her like lightning. For their first time, he hadn’t been harsh or austere, like when they trained during the day. He wasn’t detached like Harry, or stoned like Tim. Benny had made sex something intense and intelligent and exciting, not unlike the game they both loved so much. He worked methodically, caring and careful, responding to her every gasp and shift and ecstatic arch of her back, her mind all white noise and static from the overwhelming sensation.
Playing chess with a friend is an art form of conversation, and their intimacy is no less than that. In their encounters since, it’s become a language they speak with each other fluently, her lips humming and her hand on his shoulder tensing as she climaxes, his shaking and his ragged breathing as he follows her. They experiment, and that’s how Beth sometimes ends up on top and in control, and god, he feels amazing, perfectly full.
It’s as easy to fall into bed with Benny as it is to ask to play a skittles game. It’s what came after sex that was always trickier to navigate, slower to develop: sometimes, an ill-timed remark about the Sicilian that happened once but Benny learned quickly should not happen again; other times, a silence Beth had longed to break but didn’t know how. One night, Benny had merely said her name with labored breathing in a way that made her heart skip a beat. So she had uttered his name back. That’s all it had taken to nudge open this microcosm of a golden hour they share. While they still mostly talk simply about what they’ll eat for breakfast tomorrow or a new book they want to read, Beth now feels comfortable, at home, in his arms.
He doesn’t hold her right now, probably in case she’s contagious. She still frowns at his proximity. “Aren’t you going to get sick?” Now that she’s more conscious of her body, she can definitely hear the thickness in her voice and has to blow her runny nose again.
He shrugs. “My immune system has survived New York this long.”
Well, if he’s not afraid — she closes the gap between them, presses her lips to his neck and feels them burn at the touch, rests her forehead on his chin, not caring if her hair gets in his mouth (he’ll live). His arm winds beneath her, and his fingers lock into hers, the best kind of familiar. At this angle, the stripes of shadows on his face have lightened significantly. Unbidden, Beth's mind summons the word enchanting.
Beth had wondered for years now if affection could feel all-consuming, unstoppable. Addicting. Like the tranquilizers from which she’s nearly a year sober. She wonders if socialization weighs heavily on your spirit in the worst way, like mediocre food that leaves you full but unsatiated and bloated and bored. Beth thinks maybe… caring, whatever these feelings she has, isn’t that at all. Despite her throat so scratchy she’s coughing like mad, she feels none of those things. Just happy. Better to be ill with Benny by her side than anywhere without him.
“Can you wake me up in an hour or so?” she asks. She feels her eyelids falling already. “I need to get up —“
“You don’t need to study today,” Benny cuts her off, so matter-of-fact. No matter how assertively he speaks, the sentence seems foreign coming out of his mouth. Wrong. In a month, he'll be playing at the Hastings Premier tournament, too, which means he has as many pamphlets to sift through as she does.
“What if Jolene or Wexler call?” Or if you get lonely? She opens her eyes a smidge to look at him, observes the way his body is angled toward hers. He’s done this a lot lately, like a heliotropic flower chasing the sunshine west. (In her head, Beth hears Jolene's derisive snort, let's pretend you didn't just compare yourself to sunshine.)
“Shhh.” He puts a finger to his lips. His face is always so serious except to smirk, but Beth’s become attuned to detecting the faint smiles in his face.
When he spots her awake, he sweeps two fingers down her eyelids to close them gently. On instinct, as soon as his hand is gone, she reopens her eyes and makes to snap her teeth at his fingers, though he dodges just in time with an indignant yelp.
His heat feels so soothing, staving off a chill threatening her backside. If she falls asleep right now so nestled into his chest, he won't be able to get up without waking her. Beth wonders if maybe her cold is his thinly veiled excuse to sneak in some extra rest as well.
“You better wake me up, Benny,” she warns, wiping her nose with another napkin and smiling at the not-so-quiet rumble of laughter in his chest.
She hopes her nose doesn’t run all over the place. Almost to herself, she murmurs, “We’re going to need actual tissues later.” Only once the sentence has spilled out of her mouth does she realize she forgot to say “you” instead of “we.” Whoops.
The last few sensations that Beth registers are: Benny leans down to press a kiss to the top of her head, his mustache tickling her scalp, their breaths in tandem; he murmurs into her hair something that’s three syllables, maybe, she can’t tell; the spinning darkness provides relief from the pulsing pressure in her tired head; she knows there’s nowhere else she’d rather be today besides their bed.