19th
Second Chance Part 1
Ben was at work when his girlfriend received the news. In his single-piece gray uniform that made him appear as though he had just escape from the local prison, crawling through the greased piping until he was able to lose sight in the sun’s brilliance, he pumped people’s gas and cleaned their windshields even if they weren’t dirty because it passed the time. And despite the name stitched into the single pocket overlaying his heart, he was commonly referred to with a pronoun and ‘sir’ only on sunny days. The oil stains covering most of the uniform had become so comfortable that it seemed as though it had been designed that way but they continued to emit a scent that reminded Ben of high school ease.
Most evenings Ben wore the uniform long after he had walked home from the gas station. A blue 1969 Stingray Corvette awaited him, sleeping underneath a silky green tarp which whispered as it was removed. Ben had spent almost a decade rebuilding it and now that it was fully functional he almost never drove it. It had become his child and like any caring parent he wanted to protect it from the rigorous world beyond his garage. And it matured like a child, as Ben found improvements and tested imported king pin bolts, idler arms, tie rods, and radius arm brackets taking the finished corvette far beyond its original design. Since the day he had driven it forty miles from Westborough to begin his college education in automotive technology it had only seen the road with Jess and Ben together.
Though Ben would tell anyone it was love at first sight, her face had passed him unremarkably under the lights of the Stranton University football field. The moderately competitive team that owed none of its pride to history attracted only several handfuls of students who tended to sit in one section, leaving the rest of the bleachers remarkably empty. Ben often walked over just after work because it reminded him of high school and Jess came to feel a part of and they always sat amid the crowd, protecting themselves from the knowledge that they were there alone.
The night that Jess’s face changed from a generic commonality of those football games into something that could flush Ben’s entire nervous system, it was the sewn name over his heart pocket that directed her to him. It was as though the patch itself could no longer accept the daily anonymity and it beamed unnaturally from the light’s reflection from a silver handrail, demanding to be read.
Jess hadn’t come to watch the game that evening. Instead, she was there to meet someone with whom her friends had set her up on a blind date. Jess was far from unattractive. In fact, she was the target of dozens of secret crushes and more than one stalker. However, she had grown up without a father and often had a difficult time understanding and eventually trusting the personalities and motivations of the male species. She had had many first dates and almost no seconds. Her freshman naivety had so far been the only thing that had given someone a route into her. She lost her virginity half drunk the other half hung over a bedroom one floor above a frat party because the only girl she had met since classes a month previously had told her to. But it hadn’t been enough time for Jess to learn that her friend was really just using her to fulfill her fetish of watching from a shadowed corner while her boyfriend cheated on her. In the year’s time between then and that blind date she had avoided all social encounters with any man. She had completely boarded herself in the house where her virginity had once lived.
Two Bens played a role that night. One stood in the shadow of his own first time while the other played in the shadow of his last. While the former scanned the bleachers, the other Ben donned his football uniform. Despite the plans that had been prepared, Ben glowing from a win that could ferry all avenues of conversation and relieve the awkwardness that Jess deemed inevitable, and the counsel her friends had given, anxiety refused a backseat to fact and Jess had forgotten all but his name. So when that nametag finally found a voice, she lost the chance of ever meeting her intended Ben, the one who passed a football only feet from her shoulder.
Jess looked at Ben and his attractiveness and the way his eyes searched the crowd told her that he was her blind date. But she wondered why he wasn’t dressed up. Was it normal to dress like that on a first date? Jess’s lack of experience, however, prevented her from discrediting Ben’s identity based on his attire. And maybe it was the slightly greased hair, or that fact that he had an even patch of scruff along his chin and cheeks that forced her to practically stare at him the way a painting may cause you to stop just after passing it and go back gaze no matter how much of a hurry you’re in. Ben was about to pass by to the opposite side of the crowd when Jess said,
“Hi… Be’n?” Her voice cracked from a minor case of social phobia halfway through his name. She had tried to sound sweet but her voice was so weak that it sounded as if she were inhaling the words rather than exhaling. Ben’s gaze left the home-team’s cheerleader number thirteen and his brown eyes met her green eyes a moment before their persons. Her eyes were shade of money but to Ben it was like the green of photosynthesis. At that moment, it wasn’t quite love that he felt, not yet. It was something about her face, the way her chin subtly came out at the end, or her left eyelid resting a nanometer lower than her right, or the small indentation in the middle of her nose and the way it seemed to make the tip of her nose rounder, like the side of a marble, that he found completely irresistible. Jess was smiling and Ben found himself smiling, like a newborn baby will smile at the smallest hint of a smirk on its mother’s face.
“Do I know you?” Ben replied, finding a tentative seat next to her. He knew that she was attracted to him; he could tell by the way her smile jutted upwards just at the tips and the way her eyes darted over his face, taking a few quick trips down and back up the rest of his body. The instant comfortability that came from the knowledge she wouldn’t have to be ‘won over’ boosted his attraction to her even more.
“I… I don’t know… maybe.” She stammered, wondering if her friends had given any thought to how awkward and uncomfortable this was going to be without them there to make the introductions. But they had; they planned on showing up during halftime and hanging out until the game ended when they could take her to him. But as she stuttered at this Ben, the game had only just begun.“My name’s Jess. If it isn’t you them I’m going to sound incredibly lame but I saw your nametag and I’m meeting someone here for a blind date and his name is Ben…so…” Ben didn’t reply and Jess wanted to run for her life, “… does any of this… ring a bell?”
Ben was too busy musing at the way she pronounced ‘inkcredibly’ and didn’t bother to think before nodding. It really was simply that one word that caused Ben to continue,
“Hi Jess… haha no, you don’t sound lame, you got the right guy. Nice to meet you.” He held out his hand and she took it gently, not quite allowing a real sense of physical contact and shook it. She glanced at the field because looking at him made her face heat to a thousand degrees and it gave Ben a chance to check out her body. She was wearing a gray wool sweater and jeans that had manufactured frays. Her thighs were small; she had the body of a seventeen-year-old. He could sense that her introduction had spent all initiative she had and so he took over, not sure what he was doing but sure that something had just been given to him and he would be a fool to hand it back,
“So what now? You want to stay and watch the game? Or, we could go down by the park. They’re having a free show down there tonight. Local band, they’re not bad if you’re into soft music, someone told me that they sound like Richard Marx… Honestly I’d prefer that over the game.”
Jess smiled and this time it was a much friendlier, more comfortable smile. The kind of smile you get right after a successful first kiss. What were the chances? She hated football. Among many other things, she had been stressing for the last hour that this guy was going to make small talk about a stupid football game all night for lack of any real conversation topic.
“Sure… I love Richard Marx” she whispered and Ben only heard ‘sure’ because her voice was retracting like a turtle into its shell. He held out his hand for the second time and she took it completely, curling her fingers in front of his palm and letting his wrap around them and the spark that came from that full contact practically knocked her unconscious.
When he dropped her off at the end of the night, Ben kissed Jess on her cheek. She pushed her lips to his for a brief moment before practically sprinted into her apartment. Ben whistled while he walked back home. He hadn’t whistled since he was in the seventh grade.
