Two

“Fine,” I tell him. “I will tell you.”

He blinks as if he wasn’t expecting me to give in. “Seriously?”

I nod, then go back to leaning against the wall. With my eyes set on the back door of the house, where kids keep streaming in and out, I say, “Staying away from you was the only way I could… Well, stay away from you.”

Ben positions himself against the wall too, but on his side so that he is facing me. “What does that even mean?” he asks. From my peripheral, I see him reach into his jacket pocket and pull something out, then stick it in his mouth. I look at him just as he retrieves a lighter from another pocket.

I arch my eyebrow at the cigarette in his mouth. “I’m not going to stay here and talk to you if all I get back is second-hand smoke.”

His mouth grins around the stick between his lips. “You want one?” he asks, reaching into his pocket and presenting me with a cigarette.

“I don’t smoke,” I tell him, even though I’m pretty sure he already knows that.

“Really?” he asks, putting it back. “Too bad, you were so good with your mouth.”

He and I both know he is fucking with me.

He pulls the cigarette between his lips away and hooks it above his ear. “Okay, no smoking. Now tell me. You were saying something about staying away from me.”

I look away from him and rake a hand through my hair. “It means that I didn’t want to stay away from you.”

There is a notable silence from his side, and I know he is frowning when he says, “But that’s exactly what you did.”

I nod, waiting for him to catch up. But when I look at him, he is giving me a confused look.

He laughs. “Wait, am I dumb or something?”

“I’m starting to believe so.”

He laughs. “Nah. If I didn’t want to stay away from somebody, then I wouldn’t stay away from them.”

I nod. “Unless you had to.”

“Like for what reasons?”

“Maybe they are not the right person for you.”

His eyes narrow. “I think I’m starting to catch up.”

I look away from him. There, I said it.

Before either of us can say anything else, a rowdy group of partygoers spills out of the back door and into the lawn. Now, I can’t pretend to not be at the party if they bring it out here, can I?

“Come, hide with me in the bushes,” Ben says, and before I know it, he’s holding my hand in his and pulling me past the flower bush he appeared from earlier. When he sits down and pulls me with him, we can’t see the other side of the lawn. And there’s nobody else on this side. Just us.

“So, I was not the right person for you,” he says, getting right back to our conversation. He sits on the grass with his legs stretched out, leaning back on his hands. He focuses his eyes on my face. “What made me so wrong for you?”

I sit with my legs crossed, one hand twiddling on my thigh while I lean back on the other. Why did I think this conversation was a good idea?

“Nothing… You were just not my type.”

He scoffs. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You were giving me eyes for weeks before we fucked. I don’t know if I need to remind you, but that night? At the club? You were all but fucking me on the dancefloor, I barely—”

“You don’t have to get into details,” I cut him off, trying to sound cool—as if my face isn’t heating up and my little head isn’t getting ideas.

He shakes his head. “No, I do, if you’re going to sit here and tell half-assed lies about how I’m not your type when you showed me that I was in a hundred different ways that night.” He reaches for that cigarette tucked behind his ear and fiddles with it as if dying for a smoke. “Fucking hell, Isaac. Just tell me the truth. I swear you’re not going to hurt my feelings.”

I feel his gaze on the side of my face. It’s heavy, it’s unwavering, and it’s not going anywhere.

I give in—again. “Fine. You’re a type I’m trying to quit.”

“And what type is that?”

Do I really need to say it?

I should have brought a beer with me. That would have made this conversation much easier. But since I don’t have any liquid to back me up, I go with good old balls.

“Bad boys,” I tell him.

There, it’s all out in the open.

“I think this is the first time I’ve been accused of being a bad boy to my face,” he says.

I look at him. “Are you saying that you’re not one?”

He gnaws on his bottom lip. “That depends on what you mean by bad boy.”

“Are there different meanings?”

He nods. “There are. Do you think I’m a bad boy because I have no inhibitions and make you lose the control you want to have? Or do you think I’m a bad boy because I’m a jerk who only thinks about himself and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your feelings?”

“I don’t think you are a jerk,” I tell him.

“No? So it’s the first reason?”

When I was deciding to stay away from him, did I go into categorising what kind of bad boy he is? No. I didn’t need to. Whether he is a jerk or not, at the end of the day, bad boys cut your heart out and watch you bleed while they move on to the next new exciting thing.

I shake my head. I mean, sure, that’s part of it, but it doesn’t cover everything.

“Alright, tell me. What kind of bad boy broke your heart?”

Even as my heartbeat kicks up, I feign confusion. “What?”

He arches an eyebrow and reaches for his lighter. “This is all because some bad boy broke your heart, right? That’s why you’re pushing away amazing guys like me.” He gives me a wink and then waves his lighter in the air. “Come on, let me have one.”

“Go ahead,” I tell him, and watch as he smiles before sticking the cigarette between his lips and lighting it up.

When he has put away his lighter and taken a puff, he focuses back on me. “What, you don’t want to tell me?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Come on, it’s only fair that I know whose mistakes I’m paying for.”

I sigh. “Mostly mine. I knew what kind of guy he was, I just… I was just…”

“You were in love,” he puts in.

Our eyes meet for a second, and it feels like I’ve been too forthcoming. This was a bad idea. I sit down with the guy for five minutes and I’m already telling him my love sob story? He just has a way about him; he’ll get you talking and you’ll think you’re keeping the dirty bits to yourself but before you know it, you have laid out your entire life story.

“I need to go,” I say, straightening my legs out and getting ready to rise. I’m halfway up when he wraps a hand around my arm and pulls me back. I stumble back to the ground, my upper body crashing into his. I go to quickly pull away but he switches his hold to around my waist, keeping me in place. “Ben—”

“You are driving me crazy, Isaac,” he says, stubbing his cigarette on the ground on his other side. “You know that, don’t you?”

I’m so close to him. Our lips are literal inches away, and my chest is pressed to his side. With his cigarette out of the way, he turns his entire attention on me.

Reaching up, he rubs the pad of his thumb over my bottom lip. “Do you know how crazy it makes me, thinking that all these months you’ve been running away from me would never have happened if I pushed just a little harder? Because if you had told me all this back then? I would have shown you exactly how much better I can be to you than the asshole who broke your heart.”

I swallow hard, his words being nothing like I had expected.

He leans in, his lips getting closer to mine with every passing second. “And isn’t that what you want, Isaac? Someone who can be good to you?”

When I do nothing but stare back at him, he makes eye contact.

“Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes.” The word slips past my lips of its own accord.

“Good,” he says. Then just when there’s barely any space left between our faces, he pulls back. I sit back on the grass, catching up with my breathing because I seem to have taken a break for a while there.

I watch as he rises and extends his right hand to me. “Come.”

I don’t think.

I just go.