Messy Ending

Ben

Puffs of smoke billowed out from the ashen tip of the lit cigarette between my index and middle finger. I’d stopped just before my actual entrance to the diner to smoke away my stress driven nerves. Each inch of the cigarette to ash another nerve was forgotten in a cloud of smoke.

The cigarette had shortened to a stub before I dropped the cancer stick to the cracked pavement and crushed it beneath the sole of my boot.

The cool November air caught in my throat, nervously. There was no way Dai could know that I’d just been on the phone with a girl I’m cheating on, but nonetheless I worried. I worried that I’d hurt her, I worried that she’d hate me, I worried that I’d let the beautiful girl slip from my grip.

“I can’t lose her,” I murmured, through a strangled breath, at myself. Those words registered within me and I prepared myself to step through the threshold of the small diner.

Upon my entry, a girl across the diner caught my eye. She wore the required pink uniform, I knew she hated the hue, and had tied her beautiful dark brunette hair into a high ponytail. Dai poised her pen over a pad of paper and intently listened to the family relaying their orders to her.

“That should be out soon for you guys,” she was saying at the moment I wandered behind her. I snaking my tattooed arms around the girl’s slender waist and rested my chin in the crook of her shoulder.

Dai gasped in surprise and spun to face me head on. “Shit, Ben,” she muttered too low for the small children, sat on the red cushion of the booth, to hear. “You scared me.” She ducked behind the counter and pinned the order for the chef to see.

Dai

I spun to face Ben, palms pressed against the cheaply made counter of the diner. I took in the features of his speculating face. “I saw you twenty minutes ago, Ben,” I smiled crookedly. “What are you doing here?”

“Danny and Sammi passed out in my living room,” he chuckled, softly. “You guys don’t mind, do you?”

I’d been about to tell him that it wasn’t a problem if he hung around the diner, but from the kitchen Steph emerged, a broad grin spread across her lips. “You know we don’t mind, Ben. Just so long as Dai isn’t distracted from her work.” She snaked her thin arm across my shoulders.

“Would I do a thing like that?” he inquired in a playfully astonished tone.

Steph lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “You might, considering Dai looks rather beautiful in her pink uniform,” she only managed through snickers of amusement.

“Fuck you,” I mumbled under my breath and began to scrub down the countertops with a white, ragged cloth.

Ben smirked, his thick accent streaming from his next words, “I think she always looks rather beautiful, Steph.”

Butterflies attacked my stomach in a swarm much like they had always done all the times Ben had so much as looked at me. Pink rose to my cheeks along with the heat that accompanied the blush. It was the silly, bubbly effect that Ben had over me.

Steph smiled brightly at Ben’s words towards me. “That she is. So, I heard through the rumor mill that you guys might be coming up to the diner for Thanksgiving?”

“More than likely. I mean you, more than anybody, should know Danny’s love of food,” came Ben’s soft chuckled answer.

I traded the wet cloth I held between my fingers for a dry one and slid it over the damp countertop, absorbing the water into the fabrics of the cloth. Ben’s eyes only left me to speak politely with Steph.

~~~

“Dai, would you please hurry. We’ll be late if you don’t,” Danny pleaded through my white painted bedroom door days later on the twenty-second, Thanksgiving.

“Danny, would you relax?” I yanked the door open and came face to chest with the tall, bearded man. I craned my neck to look him in the eyes. “Either way we’re arriving a little early to help Steph with everything anyway.”

Danny’s brown eyes grew double their sizes taken over by a small child-like wonder. “Don’t you realize the faster we get there the faster we’ll get to eat?”

“Danny,” I snorted through laughter. “That’s not how clocks work.” My hand raised to cover my laughing mouth.

Over the past few days both Danny and I had come to be just the same as siblings. We joked and laughed. He even protected me with the same nature as a brother would a baby sister despite the fact I only lacked a few years on the man. Danny told me that if Ben ever broke my heart he would personally cut off his balls to which I jokingly agreed.

Shoving Danny playfully aside, I stepped into the small living room of mine and Sammi’s apartment, a place I rarely spent time anymore. I had even begun my baking over at Ben’s house once I was certain he had no problem with that.

Ben spoke with the remaining three members of the band and Sammi the moment I traipsed over the carpeted floor to meet my boyfriend. He sat on the couch with one leg crooked onto his lap and completely unaware I stood behind him about to lock my arms around his shoulders.

“Hey, Ben,” I giggled a soft greeting into the crook of his tense, muscled shoulder blade.

“Hey, love,” a small smiled graced his spider bitten lips. “Ready to go?”

“Mhm,” I hummed softly into his ear, tightening my grip around his body.

~~~

“You’re sure you don’t need extra help, Steph?” I questioned, my eyes tracing across each of the dishes filled with food that Steph had made all herself for the occasion. Literally every inch of counter space had been taken up with one delicious food at least. The only food I had contributed was the few pastries I had baked… in Ben’s kitchen of course.

“Dai, I’m fine. This is it.” She shoved her oven-mitted hand into the blistering hot oven and it returned with a tray of rolls in its grip. Butter atop the crispy surface glistened in the overhead oven light.

“Danny,” Steph caught the attention of the somewhat chubby man. “Tell everyone they can eat now, please?”

Instead of simply walking to the table they sat at, he shouted across the diner that the food had been waiting for them. Not another word left his mouth even as they made their way across the diner and we began to pile our plates with food.