Page 18 of The Cubby Hole

There definitely wasn’t much talking. If there were tears, the shower covered for me.

No campground cabin water heater could have outlasted our kiss. We eventually had to flee for the bedroom and the promise of blankets and sheets where we could generate a tent of warmth.

While I dug for basketball shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt in the exploded mound of clothes where my bag used to be, Ben disappeared into the main room and returned wearing the homeliest pair of plaid pajama bottoms and a threadbare Ford Trucks T-shirt. He also carried a sack of assorted Little Debbie snack cakes and a half gallon of milk.

It was a postsex I love you in carbohydrate form.

We sat cross-legged on the red-and-black-checkered blanket, facing each other, knees together, devouring cheap sugar and passing the milk back and forth, drinking it straight from the jug.

I’d just bitten into my second oatmeal cream pie when Ben said, “I wrote you a letter once.”

The casual bluntness of his tone startled me more than the confession. I chewed furiously, swallowing without tasting anything. “I never got a letter.”

He shook his head. “I wrote one. I didn’t send it.” He started needlessly folding an empty snack wrapper. “It was supposed to be one of those exercises. You know, where you get your thoughts out or whatever.”

I held my breath, praying I wouldn’t have to force the details out of him.

He shifted position, hugging his knees to his chest. “It was a few years ago. You and Bradley were starting to look at houses together.” He rolled his eyes and made a retching noise. I shot him a mock glare. “But I didn’t want to fuck anything up for you. It was always so damn exhausting trying to convince your boyfriends I wasn’t a threat.”

I snorted. “Newsflash. Not one of them was ever convinced.”

“With good reason.” Ben started unfolding the empty wrapper he’d just folded. “It was right after I’d taken that picture of you in your gray morning suit at the wedding.”

Our friends Adam and David had insisted everyone dress like we were in an episode of fucking Downton Abbey. We’d all moaned about it behind their backs, but the resulting photographs had been worth it. “I love that pic of me.”

“You posted it on Instagram with the hashtag always a bridesmaid.”

“Yeah, well. That passive-aggressiveness was intended for Bradley as I’m sure you probably guessed.”

Ben released the wrapper he was torturing and met my eyes. “It bothered me, though. I had this sense of dread that something might happen to me and you’d never know. I couldn’t stand the thought of you going through life thinking nobody ever wanted you like that. That nobody ever saw you as the one. So I wrote a letter.”

I grabbed his ankle and squeezed. “I’m gonna need to read this letter immediately.”

“I don’t have it.”

“You didn’t put it in the big red binder?” Ben kept a special folder grandly labeled Upon the Occasion of My Death.

“Nope.”

“That sure seems to me like the kind of thing you’d wanna file in there.”

“I burned it. Like, you know, a Saturday-night thing.”

Ben was referring to the campground’s weekend bonfire ritual. Smokey the Bear may have been all about preventing forest fires, but the men at Bear Mountain Lodge were awfully into burning shit. It was their rustic, neo-pagan version of group therapy.

“Are you at least gonna tell me what it said?”

He gestured vaguely, indicating everything—us, the cabin, here and now. “Just that if I was ever gonna try to be that with someone, it would have been with you.”

I froze. “Would have been? Past tense?”

“I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. For a while, I thought maybe one of my fuck buddies would eventually stick. Turn into something more like we did. But it never happened.” Ben sighed. “I was just trying to get over you.”

“I thought you were trying to get away from me, not over me. Why didn’t you just fucking tell me?”

“It seemed pretty clear from the guys you chose that I wasn’t what you were looking for. I mean, they were all preppy and ambitious and premed or whatever, and I was just a redneck dropout, working construction and smoking weed.”

It killed me to hear that. It felt like my heart was going to cave in on itself. “I never thought you weren’t worthy, Ben. I just thought you weren’t ready. Neither of us was. I was so insecure about being your first. I thought I wasn’t big enough, or butch enough, or sexy enough to be your last. To keep you. To hold on to you.”