Page 13 of The Cubby Hole

When I picked it up, Ben made a sharp, wordless sound of protest and snatched it from my fingertips.

“What the fuck was that?”

He didn’t answer. He tucked it into the pocket of his folded jeans and pointed at the box. “They’re in chronological order.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course they are.”

Nobody would ever have known from his faded jeans, T-shirts, worn work boots, and the laid-back way he carried himself how fucking organized his shit was. His fifteen-year-old truck was always detailed, his tools were immaculate, his bills were color-coded and filed. For a few years, I thought he’d been playing Candy Crush on his phone—he always had his head down, tapping and thumbing away whenever he could steal a moment—but it turned out he’d been updating project spreadsheets in his Google Drive.

I riffled the satisfyingly uniform edges of the envelopes. Photographs, concert ticket stubs, a few letters and cards here and there.

Ben came to sit on the arm of the sofa, leaning close to look over my shoulder, still wearing nothing but a towel. I blinked away the image of him sitting on the lip of the hot tub and tried to focus on the pictures.

The first had been taken the night we’d met. It was intended to be a photograph of me—I was in the foreground, staring down the camera, mouth open in a drunken, unflattering laugh. A few feet behind me stood Ben—still a stranger to me at that point—inadvertently photobombing with a bewildered expression on his face.

We both looked like babies compared to now, although Ben had already had a full beard at that age. I was attempting a sparse goatee. Both of us had long hair: mine dark and slicked back in a ponytail, his a warmer honey-brown, hanging around his shoulders.

“Blatantly celebrating my nineteenth birthday in a bar.” I shook my head fondly. “With a fake ID that had a completely different birthday. Not just a different year but a different day.”

Ben had never been carded; he’d looked like a hot, thirty-year-old man when he was twenty. He still looked like a hot, thirty-year-old man.

After we’d started dating, he’d said the picture immortalized the first time he’d ever looked at me. I didn’t share that remembrance with him now. I tried to keep things light. “You look like you were thinking This guy is fucking wasted.”

“Nah. I was thinking, Wow, that’s the guitarist from Fur. I thought you were cool.”

I huffed softly in disbelief, but I didn’t interrupt. He never reminisced like this. Not out loud.

“You were in a band. You had all these cool-looking friends. You were flirting with guys. You were obviously out and didn’t give a shit who knew you were gay. You were fearless.”

I turned to glance up at him, but he was looking at the picture.

Ben smiled. “I wanted to be like you.”

I’d always wondered why it had felt like a competition when we’d opened up our relationship, like he had to outdo me in prowess and experience.

My mom had actually proposed this theory—that maybe he’d wanted to be like me more than he’d wanted me—but I’d dismissed it.

Speechless at his confession, I opted to move on to the next picture, hoping I might get more of Ben’s rare psychoanalysis of our relationship.

I’d wanted to be like him too. Mostly in a superficial, physical way. For me, it had been more hero worship than competition because I’d never felt like I could compete with how sexy he was, his natural build, the unselfconscious way he inhabited his body.

There was some photographic evidence of me trying to dress like him—a black and white of the first time we’d gone tent camping at Bear Mountain Lodge. Black and white because we’d thought we were being, you know, artsy. We were wearing the same style cargo shorts and tank top. I had a hot dog on a stick that I’d just pulled away from the campfire, holding it out of his reach as he made to grab it with his teeth. My mouth was open, yelling for him to stop—I was worried he’d burn himself—and his teeth were bared. But somehow the camera had captured a split second where we were obviously looking straight into each other’s eyes.

“I was such a skinny little nerd,” I said wistfully. “And you were a hot little bear cub.”

“Before that trip, I’d never even heard of bears.”

“I think I worked Goldilocks references into every single fucking conversation.”

Ben snickered.

“You know all those men were like, who is this loud-mouthed twink, and what is he on?”

Ben wasn’t laughing. “I’m sure some of them were into you.”

“They were into you, dude. You came back from the bathhouse that first night looking like you’d found God. I just knew you were gonna leave me for someone bigger and furrier.”

“Not all bears like other bears, you know. You were always handsome.”