Just Ben

He wasn’t gone fifteen minutes before I heard his footsteps bounding up the stairs to our flat. At first I thought it was a neighbor, but I could place his gait anywhere. He pushed open the door in a gust of excitement as I was coming out of the kitchen. His hair spilled over his forehead like vines over a stone wall. Soapy water dripped from my elbows on to the floor. When he had that wild look in his eyes, I never knew what to expect.

“What is it?” I asked, my mind racing. I clutched the pot I was scrubbing a little tighter. “What brings you back so soon?”

His face crumpled into a triumphant smile. “It’s all settled,” he said, shoving his hands in his coat pockets for dramatic effect.

“What’s settled?” I asked. “I thought you weren’t due in Toronto until January.”

“No, no, nothing to do with filming,” He took his phone out of his pocket and waved it at me. “I’ve spoken to Karon. She’s issued a statement, and my schedule has been cleared for the next three weeks.” He paused, studying my face, letting me absorb the news. “So we can go away.”

The pot fell to the floor with a dull clang.

He chuckled, his light blue eyes twinkling with mischief. He took a step towards me and laid his long, cool fingertips against my cheek. His smile widened, and my heart squeezed at the sight of the wrinkles around his eyes that I loved so well. They looked deeper and longer from when we had first met, and in this moment of elation I felt a tinge of concern.

For a moment, I couldn’t speak or breathe. Three weeks of being this close to him was an eternity. I had accustomed myself to living with his ghost, with a voice on the other end of the phone and lines of text on my phone and computer. In that moment I was ashamed to admit that I had forgotten what his touch felt like. Even now, in my state of inertia, I couldn't remember the last time we had made love.

His fingers traced the edges of my lips, and his eyes searched mine for approval. “Say something,” he whispered. “I know how much you wanted to go away. I know how much this means—“
He didn’t finish his sentence, because I had kissed him. I threw my soapy arms around his neck and pulled his neck toward me. He returned the kiss and deepened it, pulling my face closer to his and cupping my cheek with his free hand. A warm rush spread from my toes to my fingertips, wrapping around us like an invisible force field. When we pulled away, I was surprised to feel tears in my eyes.
“We can go anywhere you want,” he said, taking off his coat and sitting down so he could accommodate our height differences. “Paris. Rome. New York. I don’t care. And I promise I won’t be taking any calls, unless they’re from Mum. But I don’t think she’ll call if she knows I’m with you.”

I looked over at the pot lying in a puddle of suds on the floor. My teeth clamped down on my lower lip, and I took a breath to steady myself. After all this time, I still did not like him to see me cry.
I felt his hand take mine, and I looked in his eyes, which were the color and translucence of the ocean on a clear day. Against my will, a few warm drops leaked onto my face.

“I want to go to the place where we first met,” I said.

His lips twitched with amusement. “I had a feeling you would say that,” he replied. His words sounded like a purr in his chest. “That’s what I love about you.” He took me in his arms and cradled my head against his chest.

“I’m doing this for me, too,” he said after a moment. The words reverberated in his chest like rumbling thunder. I inhaled the scent of his soap and aftershave and felt him tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. “I need to get away from all this.”
I felt an aching at the center of my stomach. I hadn’t realized how much I missed him. He shifted, and I stood upright to face him. He took both of my hands in his, and kissed my left hand and held my palm against his face. “Starting now, I’m not an actor, I’m not Sherlock, I’m not a movie star, or a celebrity, or any of those things,” he said, his face somber. He took a breath. “From now until we come back, I’m just Ben.”
I brought my lips to his, and my fingers found their way to his collar and began unbuttoning his shirt with an eagerness that surprised me. Perhaps this was why I had felt so inhibited before. I didn’t feel that I could make love to an actor, a movie star, or a detective whose intellectual powers dwarfed my own. But I could make love to Ben. Just Ben. My Ben.

Eighteen Months Earlier--- Kythria, Greece

I was so busy arranging a checkout for one of my difficult guests that I overlooked the three weary travelers standing in the lobby, leather luggage strewn in a haphazard pattern, cotton shirts sticking to their torsos in patches of sweat. It was a Sunday, my slowest day, but this Sunday was shaping up to be a chaotic one. I learned that the guest in question, a French diplomat, was in the midst of an extradition nightmare and chose my establishment to wait things out. In my line of work, this sort of thing was not unusual. I had had more than one client with a questionable history pass under my roof. But I always demanded upfront honesty from all my guests—I could not protect them if they lied to me. When this diplomat told me he wanted a quiet seaside getaway with his wife and young son, he failed to mention he was wanted for embezzlement and money laundering in Paris. When the news broke on the Internet that morning, I sent my assistant, Anna, to tell him to pack his bags. She returned in an hour with his counteroffer: double my nightly rate for another week. That set me off.
“Anna, I don’t care how much money he offers me, I’m not housing criminals,” I told her point-blank. “I won’t have him bring scandal here. I don’t want it being said that we provide amnesty to those who wish to dodge the law. If he’s being extradited back to France, he has to go.”
Anna was near tears. “I explained all this to him, but he won’t go,” she said. “He refuses to budge an inch.”
I sighed and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not your fault. You’ve done what you you can. I’ll just inform him that if he’s not out within an hour, I’m handing him over to the authorities, simple as that.”
Anna’s eyes widened. “You’re going to call the police?” she gasped.
“Of course not. I called Stefanos an hour ago.” Stefanos was the mayor of our small town. “He’s waiting for me to give the word. He doesn’t want him here any more than I do. It’s bad for tourism, and he’s not going to let anything interfere with the taxes I send him every quarter.”
Anna and I walked down to the lobby and went outside to check the perimeter for paparazzi and press. It was then I noticed an elderly man and woman, with a younger man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties. I presumed they were a family.
“I’ll be right with you!” I called out to them.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Anna said in her sandpapery Ukranian accent. The glass door clicked shut behind us
I glanced over my shoulder at the trio to see if they were offended. They didn’t appear to be. After a quick glance around the entrance and the immediately spots, the coast seemed to be clear. I decided I would keep looking, though. The paparazzi were getting better and better at hiding these days.
“Anna, go inside and check our guests in,” I told her. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
As she turned to head back inside, I caught his gaze. A tall man with leonine features, light curly hair and eyes the color of the late afternoon sky beamed out at me. A warm rush of electricity jolted through me. Blaming it on the heat, I gave the man a curt nod and focused on the task at hand. I was sorry I could not be more inviting, but the diplomat had shifted my priorities, at least for the moment.