Some Assembly Required (17 page)

Patrick froze and tightened his grip on the counter until his knuckles bleached white.

Benji kissed him again, encouraging Patrick to respond. But he remained still, his mind a muddle of primal need and emotional exposure.

Finally, when Benji looped his arms around his neck, Patrick fell into the tenderness. He returned the kiss with one of his own, leading Benji’s chaste and timid kiss into a hungry one.

Patrick pulled him closer, their bodies meshing and singing with the energy transfer between them. It was never about the kiss. Kissing was an activity for the living. Sharing auras was the true pleasure between spirits. Benji shivered against him and moaned against his mouth. Patrick tilted his chin down and coaxed Benji to open for him. When Benji submitted, they tasted each other, and Patrick pulled away suddenly with the remembrance of sweetness.

His breath stuttered in his throat, and Benji mewled disapprovingly. Patrick answered in kind by returning the affection and claiming his mouth once again. Benji’s hands trembled as he explored Patrick’s frame and crept up his shirt to his taut stomach.

Patrick nestled one hand in Benji’s hair and the other at the small of his back. When he felt Benji’s knees quake, Patrick abruptly pushed Benji away and held him at arm’s length.

“That’s… enough,” Patrick said as he fought to catch his breath. If he had taken any more of Benji’s aura, they would have gone down a road there was no coming back from.

Benji’s face was sheened with sweat, his mouth glossy and red from Patrick’s attentions. “What… what happened? What was that?”

Patrick didn’t answer and pulled away from Benji. He considered the plates scattered across the floor. If the car he had crashed into the downstairs entry hadn’t already convinced them, the employees would start thinking the store was cursed.

“What did you do to me?” Benji insisted.

Patrick looked up to the FIORE light and took a steadying breath. He’d definitely need a moment in the employee showers later.

“I believe it’s called kissing, cupcake.” He grinned as Benji staggered to a seat. “You know about the birds and the bees, right? They’re not literal birds and bees.” He slipped behind the butcher block to hide the evidence of his arousal but maintained his unruffled attitude. “So. We’re doing this.”

“This?” Benji shook his head.

Patrick nodded slowly as if Benji were a small child. “You know. That thing where we sometimes stop talking and make out?”

“Dating?” Benji asked with a smirk.

Patrick reeled back, offended, and his stomach clenched. “I didn’t say anything about dating. I said checking each other’s dental work.”

“Dating.” Benji gave him a wolfish grin.

“No. Dating is when you suck my dick,” Patrick said flatly.

“That’s not how dating works!”

Patrick blinked. The blissful innocence act would only get him so far, but he was going to ride that pony to the end of the line. In the distance, an Impression groaned, calling out for her relative. Saved by the fucking bell again, and the perfect answer to a cold shower.

“Fuck. I’m off the clock,” he muttered. He watched Benji, who still had that big smarmy grin on his face. “Gotta jet. Working overtime tonight.” Benji’s grin crawled up his skin, and he fumbled. It wasn’t like him to fumble. Karin would have a fucking field day.

“Um. See you tomorrow?” Patrick asked, trying to save face and failing.

“It’s a date.”

Patrick scowled and answered Benji by flipping him off.

Benji had never been one of the popular kids growing up. He’d been too ordinary to stand out, which had never really bothered him. It had also meant he was rarely bullied. But his sister was his opposite, always going out of her way to be noticed, even if it wasn’t in a positive light. Allyssa had hit a goth phase in middle school that had been painful for the entire family, especially when a few of the boys in a grade above her had started calling her Wednesday Addams. The teasing and pranks had escalated from there, though the details were fuzzy in Benji’s mind twenty years later. What did stick out was his mother’s speech—ostensibly to both of them, but he and Alyssa had known even then that it was just directed at her, since Benji got along with everyone—about how to fight back without fighting at all.

“Kill them with kindness,” she’d told them.

It hadn’t worked for Alyssa. The boys had kept on tormenting her until she left a dead mouse in one of their lockers. She bought it frozen at a pet store, but school lore was that she’d killed it with her bare hands.

But his mother’s words had hit home for Benji, and they had become his modus operandi whenever things were rough. Hindsight showed him that it led to him letting people walk all over him, but it had also served him well when he needed to defuse awkward or difficult situations. He was using it in force now. He wasn’t sure if he’d say he and Patrick were in a relationship, exactly, but they were at least relationship-adjacent. Patrick insisted they weren’t, but he seemed to enjoy Benji’s company to a point. Every time Benji pushed Patrick further out of his comfort zone, Patrick slammed on the brakes in the most peculiarly cute way. It wasn’t like Patrick to get flustered and fumble. But Benji’s niceness and understanding noticeably messed with Patrick’s sense of balance. Keeping Patrick even more off-kilter by being unrelentingly
nice
was all part of Benji’s master plan.

Each time he kept his cool when Patrick invariably lost his own, Patrick became just the slightest bit more immune. Benji reasoned that within a few weeks, he’d actually be able to give Patrick a compliment without Patrick tearing it apart, looking for a hidden meaning. Maybe in a month Patrick would be able to stick around after a make-out session. Maybe they could even have sex.

Patrick was definitely willing on that count, but Benji was holding firm. But the clues were there even if Patrick hid them behind his usual air of confident bullshit. Benji recognized emotional fragility when he saw it, and he wasn’t going to take advantage. Mess with Patrick to put him off guard? Yes. Sleep with him when his head wasn’t entirely in the game? No.

Besides, cockblocking himself had some unintended benefits. Their astral energies were tied to high emotions. Anger sucked it out of them. And apparently lust—especially frustrated lust—gave them a bit of a power boost.

Patrick remained tight-lipped about what had happened between them in kitchens that night. Benji didn’t have words for that kind of aura transference. There was so much he still had to learn. Like how to replicate
that
interesting party trick that had left him shuddering for days.

Benji wrapped his fingers around the Lego Yoda he’d fished out of the ball pit in Bambini Mondo a while ago. He liked to carry it with him because it was small and didn’t take up much of his energy to hold, and it was also convenient when he wanted to practice manipulating objects. He held his palm out, pouring his focus into the small plastic toy until it hovered just above his skin. Patrick was wrong about CASA having limits. Anything was possible if you had enough energy to expend.

And boy, did he. Every time he thought he and Patrick were on the same page, Patrick threw a wrench in things, like he had at the romantic dinner Karin and Agnes had set up for them. They’d had a few tense make-outs since then, always with Patrick trying to push for something, like Benji wouldn’t notice his trembling hands or the way his breath stuttered out of fear, not arousal.

It was hard to get to really know Patrick without all the conventional trappings of a regular romance. They couldn’t go for long walks or weekends away at a seaside hotel. They couldn’t have awkward barbecues to introduce their friends and family to each other, or wander around each other’s apartments taking in all the knickknacks and other ephemera that really showed who someone was behind closed doors.

But Agnes and Karin’s dinner had shown him that although they couldn’t do it conventionally, they
could
date. It would just take a little more finagling and planning than the baseball games and concerts in the park that Benji had used as his fallback when he’d been dating in the mortal realm.

He’d been at a loss for what to do until he’d stumbled upon an Impression who had been killed by a television. She hadn’t been in CASA long—not only was she completely unable to communicate with the man who’d been scoping out the television benches, she’d barely been able to communicate with Benji.

He smiled now, remembering how fierce the Impression had looked despite being clad only in an oversized NKOTB reunion tour T-shirt and a pair of fraying granny panties. Her attire hadn’t stopped her from frantically trying to shove the customer away from the aesthetically pleasing and temptingly priced television storage solutions. Her hands had kept going through the man’s chest, and she’d been getting increasingly desperate. When she realized Benji could see her, she started yelling something, but he hadn’t been able to hear her. From the way she went practically apoplectic when the customer crouched to look at the price on the ORBA, Benji surmised that it was the offending piece of furniture. He couldn’t understand her crude hand gestures, but when the man pulled out his cell phone and started googling fish tank dimensions, he got the general idea.

“Particleboard and water don’t mix,” he’d whispered in the man’s ear. The customer squinted at the ORBA and shook his head as if trying to clear it before walking away.

The Impression went from faded to clear-as-a-bell as soon as the man left the aisle.

“The idiot was going to put a fifty-gallon fish tank on one of these,” she shouted, still agitated. “And when it broke he was going to sever an artery trying to save the damn fish.”

Benji smiled and reached for her, pushing a bit of his energy at her when she flickered. She went with him without question as he guided her toward the elevator so they could go down to the entrance.

“I take it you had a ORBA?” he asked, curious but not wanting to probe too deep in case she didn’t know she was dead. Some of the Impressions didn’t.

She snorted inelegantly. “I did. Stubbed my toe on it in the middle of the night when I got up for a glass of water, fell, and put both hands right through the flat-screen TV I’d saved three years to buy.”

He wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, but luckily they arrived at the entrance before he had to respond. She clung to his hand when he stopped a few feet from the door.

“I can’t go any farther,” he said apologetically. “But you go on. Great things are waiting out there for you.”

She frowned at the doors. “I’m going to miss Netflix,” she said before squaring her shoulders and marching off into the unknown.

Benji didn’t stay to watch her go through. He never did. It freaked him out a bit, and it made him jealous too. It didn’t seem fair that others could move on and he couldn’t. But she’d reminded him of one of the benefits to being on the mortal plane—streaming movies.

How could he have forgotten about Netflix? And in that moment, his grand plan to start sweeping Patrick off his feet started to come together.

Benji raised his head, listening carefully. Karin was coming down the hallway, her breathing more labored than usual. She was concentrating hard, carrying a laptop with several cords draped around her shoulders like scarves. He grazed his fingers over his Yoda one last time and tucked it into his pocket.

“On the table?” she asked as she passed him with the laptop. That close he could see that her brow was furrowed and she looked a little sweaty. He was glad he hadn’t tried to transport the laptop himself, energy boost or no. It was precious, and he couldn’t risk dropping it. Without it, his whole date night would be ruined.

“Yes, please. By the projector.”

He’d been able to drag that over by himself, but it was lighter than the laptop and had a considerably shorter distance to go. Moving it from the cabinet to the table was nothing compared to Karin carrying a laptop up from the employee locker room.

Benji had been relieved when he’d snuck up to the administration wing a few days ago and found that his Netflix login still worked. It was technically Charles’s account, but he hadn’t changed his login after he’d moved out, and Benji had taken that as tacit permission to continue using it.

It had been hard, logging in and seeing his own profile had been deleted. Charles had always hated how the sappy romances and comedies that Benji favored ruined his own dull academic documentary recommendations, so he’d set the separate profile up for Benji when they moved in together. Benji assumed he’d just forgotten about it and that’s why he’d never deleted it after their relationship ended, but now he realized Charles must have kept it active on purpose. The unexpected kindness of that act had hit him hard. As had logging in and seeing that it was gone. He wondered who had been the person to tell Charles he’d died. It wasn’t like they shared any friends—Charles had taken them all with him when they’d split.

Benji fell over the table when he turned around and saw Agnes there with her arms full of candy from the registers and a big steaming bowl of popcorn. Or rather, he’d done the ghost version of falling over something—starting so hard he went incorporeal and actually fell through it.

The popcorn. There was no way to describe it. Benji’s mouth would be watering right now if it were capable. It smelled amazing.

Agnes rolled her eyes and dumped her burden on the table Benji was currently sitting under. “Get up off the floor, and I’ll teach you how to actually eat it instead of just pretending to drool over it,” she said dryly.

It was tempting. God, was it ever tempting. But as much as he wanted that popcorn in his mouth, he wanted the lesson to come from Patrick more. Even if that meant he didn’t actually get any of the hot, buttery ambrosia tonight. There would be other chances.

He manfully suppressed a pout as he stood up, brushing his clothes off out of habit. Dust didn’t stick to him, not unless he willed it to. It was a neat trick, but took some getting used to. Just like everything else about CASA.