Chapter Text
“You forgot to lock the door. I was just—”
In the half-light, Ben Solo’s panicked face comes into focus.
“It was open. He must’ve sneaked in late last night.” They both turn to look at Chewie, who snuffles as he presses his soft, animal body close to hers. “I just came in to put something in the nightstand.” As if to further demonstrate this, he slides the drawer close, twisting the key in the lock. “Sorry I woke you up.”
“It’s okay,” she mumbles, propping herself up on an elbow. “What time is it?”
“Early. I’ll wake you up when breakfast is ready, go back to sleep,” he coaxes. “I can take Chewie with me.”
She places a hand on top of the dog’s belly, feeling the rise and fall of his delicate lungs. “It’s fine, I like him here.”
He takes a step back, the key to his drawer disappearing in his sweatpants pocket. “I’ll lock the door on my way out—”
“I was thinking—” With a quick glance at Chewie, she makes the smallest of movements to get out of bed. “I could—” She cuts herself off, noticing the way his gaze lowers from her chest to her bare feet.
“You’re still wearing my t-shirt.”
She pulls at the hem, self-conscious. “It’s—it’s comfortable to sleep in.”
He only nods at that, curt, before turning to go.
“Wait, so I was thinking.” She takes a pause to center herself, keenly aware of what feels like the tenuous peace of a brand new morning, easily broken with a wrong turn of phrase. “Maybe I can take Chewie to the groomer’s today,” she offers. “His fur’s grown too long and it’s matted in places.”
“That’s all right,” he says in much the same slow, hesitant way. “His sitter’s taking him on Wednesday. The place is always booked, so.”
“Oh.” Last night, desperately frustrated after he dismissed all her attempts to help around, told her in no uncertain terms to just go back to sleep—like she was a little girl with a bedtime, she tossed and turned with unspent energy, and decided to be more determined about things. “Maybe I can take him out for a walk? For you?”
“If you want,” he allows.
“No,” she corrects, gentle, “if you want.”
His shoulders tense all the same, and she knows she’s put him on guard.
“Are you going to keep doing this?” he sighs. “Please, go back to bed, it’s Sunday.” He stresses the word as if that clarifies things.
“You’re out of bed already,” she points out. “I just thought I could run errands for you, I feel rested, there’s barely any pain in my—”
He doesn’t even wait for her to finish speaking before storming out the bedroom. She takes a sharp inhale for focus, balls her fists, and follows after him.
He’s rummaging through the open fridge, broad back completely blocking it.
“I took the weekend off, like you told me to,” she tries again, “I don’t have anything to do, so I might as well—”
“Why are you so bad at this?” he snaps, elbowing the fridge door close, and throwing the three plastic containers of fruit down on the countertop, with more force than needed.
“At—at what?” She bites her tongue to keep from adding a polite “sir.”
“At this. At—” He turns to look at her but whips right around, pausing before opening a cupboard and taking a colander out. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t start snapping at you again. But I’m not a morning person, Rey. And I’ve been trying really hard—” She can’t see his face, just the way his sleep-crumpled t-shirt shifts to suggest a sinewy back when he leans down and grips the edge of the countertop. “Will you please put on the robe—”
“I’ve done everything you told me to do, I’m only asking—”
“Why do you have to make everything a challenge?” He yanks another cupboard open and reaches for what looks like a bag of pancake mix. “I don’t know how else to make you understand.”
“I do understand.”
“Do you,” he scoffs.
“It’s you who don’t understand,” she accuses.
He rips open one of the plastic containers, dumping strawberries on the colander somewhat aggressively. Opening the tap, he runs water over them. “What don’t I understand?” he asks, caustic.
She takes a deep breath for courage, then goes, “You don’t understand that—that I’ve been self-sufficient my whole life, I’ve always had to work hard for what I have—”
“Which is why I’m telling you—”
“—so I’m not used to just taking things,” she insists, speaking over him, “just like that, without knowing why I get to have them, I’m the only one getting things out of this—this agreement, and it doesn’t feel right, I feel useless.”
He throws the fat, glistening strawberries in one of the glass bowls, washing a handful of raspberries and blackberries next, quiet and efficient.
She shifts awkwardly in place, noticing she forgot to put on his house slippers too. “I know for you—for—for people like you—it’s easy to just accept things without—”
“I’ve never had to work for anything in my life,” he cuts in. “Is that what you mean? I’ve been given things, whether or not I deserve them. That’s what you’re saying?” He turns the tap off, and in the ensuing silence he continues, “It’s true, deserving things is a moot point, for people like me.” He starts drying his hands with a kitchen towel, methodical. When he speaks next, there’s a tenderness that she tells herself not to submit to. “I just wanted you to know what that’s like, Rey. To have things and not have to literally work on an injured hand for them.”
Even though he can’t see, she shakes her head, unyielding. “Why—”
“Because I have everything, and you have nothing. Isn’t that much obvious?” The way she recoils is reflexive. “You have nothing,” he presses, turning to face her at last. His pause feels considered, calculated. “I know all about it. I asked my uncle—I asked Skywalker Legal to run a background check.”
“You—you what?”
She wants to stomp up to him, but seeing his eyes drilling into her, she cowers instead.
“Friday night. When you agreed I could pay for your loan, you effectively became Uncle Luke’s potential client, so he got his people to do a background check. I just wanted to know—”
“You had no right to look into my—that was my—” All of a sudden, getting air into her lungs feels like tremendous effort. Her vision’s quickly blurring from unshed tears. “What—what do you think you know about me now?” she demands.
“I know about those poor fucking excuse for parents you had,” he bites, vicious, stalking towards her. “Those junk dealers who practically sold you off for drinking money. They’re long dead, but if they were still alive, I’d make them pay for what they did.” She tries to square her shoulders, stand her ground as he approaches, towering over her, but she can feel herself shrinking. “For the year you had to spend basically homeless, all on your own. For every one of the five shitty foster placements you had to endure before Maz Kanata.”
He places a hand on her shoulder, kneading hard. “I just want to take care of you, Rey, the way nobody has. You’ve had to live with nothing, but I’m here now, I’ll give—”
“Just because you think I’m nothing, that I’m—” She blinks, and the tears trickle down, salting her lips.
“Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he murmurs, appeasing.
“Okay?” she scoffs. “You—you think it’s okay. But you’ve never had to steal your next meal, or—or fear you won’t find shelter during a storm, or—” Again, she tries to get him to stop touching her, but he won’t take his hand away. “If you really wanted to know, you should’ve just asked,” she cries.
She wouldn’t have told him. She would’ve lied—a habit, a mechanism—but it still didn’t make it okay for him to know everything. All the unattractive things. “You don’t know how humiliating…”
“No, no,” he insists, “there’s no reason to feel ashamed about any of it.”
Suddenly, a tiredness overtakes her, body going limp, without fight. And as if sensing this, he runs his hand through her hair, resting it on her nape and holding her in place. “I’m sorry, you’re right, I’m sorry,” he concedes.
His touch reminds her of Friday night, when he’d done much the same thing, trying to calm her so she won’t start attacking Plutt again. Something inside her broke then at his reassuring presence, at the immense relief of having someone on her side.
Now, she squirms inwardly when she feels him crowding her. But she’s also confused why she gasps, why she feels, if not relief, then something akin to tremulous anticipation, and even more than that—to shocked disbelief. “Why are you really doing all this?” she pleads.
“I want to, Rey. It feels good, when you let me. It’s really a selfish thing, it’s—”
“Just admit you pity me.”
He shakes his head, looking almost regretful. “You’re giving me too much credit.” He walks her back to the kitchen island and pushes her down on a stool. “I’ve been feeling many things about you, Rey, but I assure you, pity’s far too uncomplicated a feeling to even… it pales against the other ones. And if I slough off all the fucking layers of denial?” He positions her roughly in her seat, like a rag doll. “Pity’s certainly not why you’re here.”
Three months ago
Ben never knows when it’s enough, when to dial things down.
In school, he just had to be valedictorian, had to be debate club president, rowing team captain.
In college, he just had to be the freshman who qualified for the graduate-level courses, had to be the alpha-male who got the most pussy.
He had to be the only one at everything. He couldn’t be that, if he went into medicine, into law, into aviation. So, like the graduate-level courses and the pussy at the frat parties, he had to do engineering, because—though the logic seemed circular and faulty—he just had to.
The way he also had to get the MSc and the PhD before anyone else. What did it matter that he was burning himself to the ground the whole time?
A job at the top engineering firm in the city should have been the thing that really satisfied the hungry maw.
But of course it doesn't.
What does it matter that he’s just been made lead engineer? He doesn’t even think to celebrate the promotion long enough before he moves on to wondering, when will Snoke make me partner though? What does it matter that he doesn’t even really want that? That he’s not skipping merrily to work each day with a great sense of purpose, only the constant fear of failure. Not living up to the Organa legacy, the Skywalker legacy, even the fucking Solo legacy.
Snoke said it was possible—he had come from nothing, and built First Order from the ground up.
All that, however, is why Ben’s slumped on a disgusting bench in the filthy train again, head precariously cradled on a clammy hand. The train’s groaning as it chugs along the track: have to, have to, have to, it says. Ben feels stressed on a bone-deep level.
This may be why some people off themselves, he thinks, and then marvels at how he’s stumbled into this minor truth at—he checks his wrist watch—ten to midnight, courtesy of the lulling effect of public transportation during the city’s ghostly hours.
He’s just about resolved, once and for all, to quit the pity party, and to stop making a habit of getting drunk and then sobering up on the late night train, when he sees the girl for the first time. Or more accurately, when the girl happens to him.
It’s not an immediate thing—she happens to him gradually.
First, the train halts.
Then, she steps in the car, head bowed. Grabs the metal pole and sits on the bench near the train doors, across from him, sad eyes on the grimy aisle.
She sighs, miserable.
He thinks, what got you so tired?
He thinks, what shitty thing did you have to endure today?
Then, some schmuck in the next car, drunk too by the way he stumbles on nothing, thinks it would be highly amusing for all if he transferred seats and plopped next to the girl and bothered her by asking his stupid questions.
“Who you with?” the guy slurs. “Don’t think it’s safe for a pretty thing like you to still be out this time of night.”
Ben sits up straight, mind suddenly clear, alert.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” the guy leers.
Ben’s about to jump out of his seat, a mild threat already formed in his tongue, when the timid girl looks up. He's never seen such an eerily affectless face, even in profile.
“Why are you asking about my boyfriend? You don’t look like the police.”
“The what?” the guy barks.
“The police,” she repeats. “My boyfriend brutally stabbed some guy who tried to talk to me once, with an ice pick, and the police have been looking for him since.”
The guy has a disbelieving smirk on his ugly mug. “He didn’t.”
“It was on the news, look it up,” she says, deadpan. “He’s the jealous type, so you probably shouldn’t talk to me. I’m sure you don’t mean anything by it, but he gets irrational. That’s how this other guy, someone from work, lost all his front teeth.” She palms her phone out of her jeans pocket. “He has a bug installed on my phone so he can hear everything. I don’t know how he’s able to track them. I’ll spare you the details—you don’t look like you’d be able to stomach it. But let’s just say he likes the sound of bones crunching beneath the sole of his shoe. One time a nice guy on the train, just like you—”
“All right, fuck this,” the guy mutters. “Crazy bitch. I was only trying to make small talk.”
The girl half-shrugs, watching as the nuisance stumbles away, before she replaces her phone in her pocket and clasps her hands over her lap, eyes cast down.
When the train slows at the next stop, Ben’s stop, he gets up from his seat carefully, hoping not to look like another drunk asshole on the late night train. It doesn’t matter though, because the girl never even glances at him.
As the train roars away in the distance, he pulls his phone out of the inside pocket of his work jacket and types jealous boyfriend, stabbing, ice pick on his browser.
He’s skimming the fifth page of search results when he looks up from his screen at the empty platform, and is taken aback when a puff of laughter escapes his pursed lips. At first it feels strange—he’s out of practice—but the laugh rumbles once again from deep in his chest, creasing his eyes and cheeks.
Walking the few blocks to his apartment building, he grins and chuckles, remembering the growing uncertainty in the drunk guy’s red-rimmed eyes, especially when contrasted with the girl’s blank, unamused stare.
It’s only a coincidence, the second time it happens.
He’s not on the train to sober up but to get home after a hook-up. He never likes to drive to and from the things, in case he’s too filled with self-loathing and, ironically, that empty feeling that comes over him, without fail, even after a perfectly adequate one-night stand.
He notices the girl’s dirty, beat-up sneakers first, before it even dawns on him that it’s her, in the car next to his.
He thinks, why aren’t you wearing socks? It gets cold out there.
He thinks, why do you have a pain relief patch on your ankle? That whole thing about having an abusive boyfriend was made-up, wasn’t it?
None of the assholes on the late night train accost her this time.
He thinks, are you lonely? You look so lonely.
Turning the matter over in his head, he decides that it’s only a mild curiosity, not an actual obsession, the third time it happens, even though it happens because Ben deliberately makes it so.
The fourth time, he tells himself he’s not really being a creep. Because a creep would do this every night, and he’s only going to do it maybe once, twice a week. He won’t go out of his way—he’ll only ride the train when things are extra shitty at work and he needs a sort of… pick-me-up.
He’s not being a creep, he vows, because a creep is someone like the guy who now keeps staring at her with a lecherous sneer.
Ben surreptitiously watches in interest as she sighs, weary, and with an utterly vacant expression, gives the creep the middle finger. She doesn’t put her hand down until the asshole, sneer replaced with an uncomfortable, pinched look, transfers seats.
She appears almost bored as she takes her earphones out of her backpack. Stares at the train window—looking but not really seeing.
He thinks, what are you listening to?
He thinks, why do you always look dead tired? You’re too young to be this exhausted with life.
He thinks, is anyone ever kind to you?
Ben hoards greedily what facts, what details he can snatch up.
Such as that time she has to teach another asshole a lesson and she deploys the jealous boyfriend theme once more, only with some revisions, the details gorier, more embellished.
But, always, there’s a boyfriend, so Ben supposes the lies are founded in some truth.
He convinces himself it’s all harmless, his curiosity. It won’t go anywhere anyway.
Besides, he’s careful not to think of her that way. She could be eighteen, nineteen, and he may be a freak—a too-tall, too-big, lumbering monster—but given the chance, he won’t actually pursue a teenage girl.
Besides, he’ll have stopped all this nonsense before it gets to that. He’ll know when it’s enough.
Everything about it is unplanned, when he finally catches her attention.
He didn’t even know she was on the late night train because she’s in the wrong car—several cars away from her usual spot.
Ben hears angry yelling, and rouses himself from his one-man pity party to rush to where some moron is being rude to a homeless person. His eyes happen to skate over to the next car, and sees her. Sees how she flinches, makes herself smaller, shuts her eyes tight. Unmistakable fear etched on her usually blank face.
The threats roll off Ben’s tongue, fluent, fed and flamed by a single purpose.
When he tells the moron, “—stay at the car farthest from here, bother no one else—” he’s not only thinking strictly of the poor, elderly woman the asshole had accosted, but of her too.
He thinks, you need to rest, sweet girl.
He thinks, you need a break from all this. I can give you that.
Then he feels her eyes on him, and he thinks, all right, Solo, you freak, that’s enough, that’s your fucking cue to dial things down, and he gets off at his stop without glancing her way.
But when he opens HR’s email several days later and sees her resume among six others, he convinces himself that he’s not actually acting on any sort of ulterior motive, that he’s not some pervert with a fucked-up plan to use this manna-like opportunity to feed the hungry maw. That he’ll stay far away. Won’t even talk to her. Even as he types—
Ms. Tico,
Rey Johnson looks like the right fit for the position. The other candidates are either under- or over-qualified.
Thank you for processing her application as soon as possible.
Ben
Present
“We could’ve done this differently. This isn’t—honest—I tried, I really fucking did,” he babbles, apologetic as he steps between her legs and grips her bare thigh. “I have even less self-control in the morning, Rey, I told you—”
She lets out a pathetic whimper at his insistent hand rucking up the overlarge t-shirt.
“But you just had to walk around in my t-shirt—drive me insane—the outline of your pert tits burned into my—what’s the matter?” he asks when she moans at the lightest of touch on her cotton underwear. “This is what you meant, right?” he murmurs in her ear. When he presses, there, she realizes she’s already wet and aching for contact. “I don’t want you feeling useless,” he purrs, rubbing her underwear and getting it even more soaked, “so you’re going to be useful now, like you fucking asked.” He pushes her legs wider apart, before pressing his finger on that damp spot, where it aches the most for him. Overwhelmed and unable to contain her gasps, she grabs a fistful of his t-shirt and buries her face in his neck.
“I’m sorry for making you cry,” he coos. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have gone too far. But it’s been hard, keeping myself in check.” His plush lips skate her earlobes, almost but not quite biting. “I’ll make it better, Rey, I will,” he whispers darkly. He considers her for a moment, writhing helplessly at his touch. “What is it? Do you need to come?”
She nods, frantic.
His hand wraps around her jaw, thumb and forefinger dimpling her cheeks. “You can come if you promise not to be difficult anymore.”
She grips his wrist, trying to loosen his hold, but he clicks his tongue disapprovingly and she stops.
“Know what my first thought was this morning?” He leans into her, and Rey feels something hard pressing against her middle. “I imagined this mouth—tasting sweet, like strawberries. Feeling wet and slick, like syrup… So I got up to make fucking pancakes.” He lets go of her jaw, but only to cage her middle. “This tiny waist. If I touch it, like this. See?” he laments, hands spanning, possessive. He casts his eyes down, where her legs strain to make space for him, where the crotch area of his sweatpants has tented significantly. “You’re so fucking small, Rey. I need to fill you up.”
Her vision spots when he grinds into her, once, not nearly enough—but the fledgling, incoherent thoughts she’s trying to have dissolve into nothing. There is only the heat, the need. “Please,” she moans. “Please, I—”
His hand slips past the waistband of her underwear, finger parting her folds urgently. Her sigh of relief is mirrored by his deep groan, long and indulgent. He sounds better like this, without her needing her cheap earphones to hear.
He circles her clit, the pressure and the rhythm unrelenting. “Just—just promise to be my—just be a sweet girl, Rey,” he pants.
The pleasure’s just beginning to build, but already it’s too much, threatening to careen through her at any moment. She tries to pull his hand away, but he only doubles his efforts. “I’ll make you pancakes, and you’ll eat them, and you’ll let me spend all my fucking money on you if that’s what I want,” he growls, breath hot on her cheek. Slowly, slowly, while still thumbing her clit, he sinks a finger, knuckle-deep, inside her. “And if you feel the need to thank me by letting me fuck this tight cunt,” he grunts, feral, “why should I pretend that isn’t what I want? I’ll fuck you senseless, I’ll use you.”
When she comes, it’s nothing like when she touches herself at night while listening to a recording of him, lips pursed as she concentrates on his words, again and again, trying to pin something elusive. After the short reprieve, she only has to take a few steadying breaths before she’s back to herself.
When Ben Solo makes her come, now, speaking directly into her ear, saying her name—“lift your hip a little for me, Rey, like that, feels good this way, right, haven’t fucked a nineteen-year-old since I was one, fuck, fuck, can’t even take two, you’re going to feel so fucking good when I break you—” she cries out, surrenders to the wave, total and obliterating.
She’s too lost in the flood of pleasure to even think to feel embarrassed for all the obscene noises.
She’s still not fully back to herself when he cradles her face in his hand, looking at her tenderly, adoringly. That something alien and strange in her chest, which first stirred the night he stayed late at the office to help her and then went out of his way to ride the last train with her, flounders awake.
But then he licks his lips, eyes focused on her mouth, and she watches with a rapid heart rate and a slow comprehension as he leans closer.
He looks like he’s about to kiss her, but—“You don’t like kissing,” she blurts.
“What?” he asks, mildly confused, eyes still trained on her mouth.
“You don’t—you don’t like to kiss them—when you—the women—you don’t—”
The warmth in his face shifts into something cold and stony. “How do you know that?” he asks, dropping his hand to his side and stepping back.
“I—” She gets off the stool, wobbly on weak knees. “I’m sorry,” she sobs, “I was only trying to—”
The urgency in his voice makes her flinch. “How do you fucking know that, Rey?”