Archive of Our Own ^beta

It isn't the perfect day to go looking for redwoods. It's overcast, the sky as grey as the ocean and threatening enough that it looks ready to spill, but Rey watched the little neon colors flit across the radar map and she knows it isn't going to rain today.

Her hiking boots are as ideal as the weather: borrowed from the roommate too distracted by her new redhead boytoy to even ask what Rey wanted with them, and maybe it's for the best because Rey's not sure what she's doing out here in the almost-weather at the almost-coast in her boots that almost-fit after she'd shoved three pairs of socks onto her feet.

But she doesn't need the trees to be perfect. She just needs them to be, and then maybe while she wanders she'll find the parts of herself she hasn't seen lately. Her hope. Her sense of purpose. Her reason to be.

The wind rolls in from off the California coast, gusting the limbs of ancient redwoods. Their branches shimmer like delicate fingertips at the highest edges of ivory piano keys, and Rey understands the reason people say the wind has a voice.

Rey's boss—too smiley, like actually concerningly smiley, like anyone that gentle should maybe be assessed for latent psychopathy—calls it joie de vivre, bracelets clinking on her elegant wrists as she fans out her fingers and beams at her so kindly that Rey has to wonder whether she's been mistaken for one of those puppies in the heartbreaking ASPCA advertisements.

Does she have something on her face that screams to other people I'm doing the best I can with very broken pieces on the inside? Does she have spinach in her teeth? Maybe it's worse, maybe it's not something she can brush out of her teeth, maybe it's just something about her, which is actually a lot more concerning to think about because if she can't walk it off or brush it out of her teeth then she definitely isn't going to find her way through it on the other side of these redwoods—

Anxiety, her EAP therapist says, in a voice that makes Rey remember the salon and the stylist who told her, age four, that getting her hair cut wouldn't be painful even though yes, there were sharp pointy objects involved, but Rey doesn't need any of that unquiet mind bullshit, she already has an unquiet mind and maybe more people talking at her isn't actually going to make a goddamn difference—

But suddenly, beautifully, and bizarrely, Rey's mind does go unexpectedly quiet. Silent, in fact—maybe for the first time in her twenty-four years. At a loss for words and at a loss for her anxieties in a way that would make her EAP therapist annoyingly pleased with herself.

Because just there, stretched out against the wide girth of the decidedly brown redwood tree across the clearing, is a man.

A very large and very, very naked man.

"Oh, my god," she breathes, and promptly trips over her own two feet for no particularly good reason.

***

Up until quite recently—and he'd know exactly how recently if Baz hadn't taken his watch—Ben was having a perfect day. He'd woken up beside his beautiful new fiancée snoring contentedly in her sleep—the memory so endearing it makes his heart soften until it occurs to him that they might not still be dating.

That point may have been left slightly fuzzy when she made her hasty and unexpected exit—her irresponsible, confusing, dangerous hasty exit—and under the circumstances the matter of whether he is still engaged might not be the most important riddle of the sphinx.

Because, really, Ben has bigger problems.

Like being tied up in an ushirote munenawa body harness, lashed to a redwood when he wasn't looking—she was doing that thing with her tongue in his ear, okay, and he'll admit it, he's weak for that thing—and promptly left alone in the middle of a national park.

Well, maybe Baz hadn’t exactly left very promptly. Because she’d suggested that cycling fostered more group bonding than HIIT workout classes, and Ben just can’t let that stand when it simply isn’t true. So they’d gotten into a fight, and it was probably his fault.

But still.

Nothing about this screams safe, sane, or consensual. At this point Ben is seriously doubting that he's actually capable of making choices that are safe, sane, and consensual. Best he can probably hope for going forward is one out of three, tops, and that's really not very good unless he's playing golf, in which case it would be great. In fact it'd be fucking fantastic, but he doesn't play golf now, does he, because he's gotten very good—it’s a point of pride—at missing his father's phone calls.

But he’s less good at inventing solid reasons not to visit home. He was actually supposed to be visiting his parents this weekend. But he'd met Baz on Monday, when their hands had touched as they reached for the same loaf of rosemary sourdough at the worker-owned co-op. They'd locked eyes and he'd just known that this time, this one, this woman—she was going to be the one.

But if Ben had kept his plans and gone to visit his parents after all, he wouldn't currently be tied to a fucking tree in the middle of federally-protected parkland.

Is public indecency actually a crime, or is it just ... something that people get in trouble for on reality TV shows? Big Sur is a national park—can he be charged with federal public indecency? The federal part makes it sound more impressive, but … it’s probably worse, isn’t it?

All of these seem like decent questions for his roommate Hux, who’s a reasonably competent attorney even if he has been distracted lately with some dark-haired, doe-eyed girl who appears to be the only subject he can string together two words on.

So the odds of getting solid legal advice seem low, even if he could squirm his way to his cell phone, which he hasn't been able to manage in the last twenty minutes. But Rome wasn't built in a day, and it took Baz about half an hour to string up Ben, so by those calculations he has decent odds, perhaps even quite good odds of not being caught in an incriminating position by anyone and certainly not someone who can charge him with national park indecency—

A twig snaps and he whips his head toward the sound: but it's far worse than he could have imagined.

Because it's just a girl. And she’s not sporting one of those flashy federal badges or an olive-green windbreaker with a national park logo on the breast pocket, so seeing her should be a good sign.

Except there's a flush of endearing color in her cheeks and her ponytailed hair is trying to escape in little wisps around her jawline and her socks are mismatched and her thumbs are fidgeting at her backpack straps and, mid-stumble, she looks about as off-balance as he feels.

In short, she's really fucking cute.

And he's tied to a tree.

And his dick is out. Like, fully out.

Ben resigns himself to a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of tree indecency, and he swallows, fingertips fluttering helplessly against his bindings. "Um," he clears his throat, frowning as he tries to summon whatever remains of his pride, "I can explain."

***

Rey doesn't actually think she needs the oversized naked tree man to explain anything. What she needs is to not have redwood needles pricking her palms, dirt between her fingers, and crushed bits of soft earth across the knees of her favorite high-waisted jeans. Yes, she's heard of washing machines, but she was supposed to be able to wear these for at least one more day, which means laundry day will be Tuesday, which means she can say no to the after-work mixer without feeling guilty.

It's not that she doesn't like her colleagues. She just doesn't buy the corporate mumbo-jumbo, that's what it comes down to. She doesn't want to treat her co-workers like family, she doesn't want to be intimate with her teammates and she especially doesn't want a work wife or a work husband and definitely not both (it’s not that she’s opposed to polyamory, it just sounds exhausting), so as long as she and her co-workers don't own property together and aren't picking out contraceptives then Rey doesn't feel the need to get cocktails with them—

There's a cough, a throat-clearing in the tree clearing, and she looks up from the dirt on her jeans. It's a mistake, because her mind short-circuits again. The handsome naked tree nut is a real problem, even if looking at him does make her anxiety shut up. This can't be what her EAP therapist had in mind when she told her to brainstorm ways to create more space for herself. What does that even mean, anyway?

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because the tree nudist colony man is doing an approximation of a wave now. It's not very graceful or elegant; in fact it's almost unrecognizable as a gesture. It looks wrong on him, his wrist pulling at the edges of whatever he's tied up in—this has got to be a death wish or a sex thing or maybe both, she wouldn't put it past him—and he's so fucking built that he's got to be in a granola hippie sex cult because no guy looks like that and keeps his sanity.

She peers out from between her fingertips, taking him in. The tree is majestic but this guy is tall, so tall it takes her ages to look up, and up, and up the bright purple diamonds crisscrossing his shoulders, his chest—his dusky nipples only just lighter than the (still) brown redwood. Pieces of rope intersect at his waist, wrapping around his body, and his pecs—his pecs—ripple and shift as if to free the hands at his back.

Rey must be more red than a mercury thermometer, watching his toned muscles strain as he pulls against the tree. She really should have walked away already—she should actually already be in her car with the ignition on, halfway down the highway and three-quarters of the way to brunch with her roommate and the new boytoy, what'shisname, lanky neurotic blue-eyes? Doesn't matter.

Think about them, think about the hypothetical psychotic work wife, think about throwing herself into the ocean, anything to distract her from the wide stretch of shoulder pulled taut against the redwood tree, the swath of waist at his rippling abdomen, the vee of hip that always makes her go a little light-headed in a pleasant way, he's so big, isn't he, and she really shouldn't be looking, it's got to be a crime. He's got to be a crime, open-carrying all of that between his thighs, and in broad daylight—is it even noon? Are there blue laws for this? Can a cock like that be out on a Sunday morning in this country?

He almost-waves his hand again and her face burns—dunk her in a vat of cherry syrup and accomplish the same thing—but he's looking at her seriously, taut alarm in his frame; he’d flee if he wasn't stuck.

The guy clears his throat again. This time his abdomen flexes, and his half-hard cock bobs obscenely. It draws her eyes, and she squeezes them tightly shut, whirling on her heel before she can become whatever color comes after red.

But the glimpse of that swollen cock, stubbornly thrusting out from between the trunks of his thighs … the image is seared across her mind like a white-hot burn. She wishes her thoughts would stop spinning, impertinent questions bubbling up like: is it the tying-up part that has him so turned on, and exactly how long does it take to get a cock like that fully seated, and how much does he whimper when he’s feeding it to his partners inch by delicious inch?

"I'm so sorry," she exclaims, turning around to march off. She's never wearing three pairs of socks again at the same time even if her feet do blister. She needs to be able to make quick escapes from rogue redwood nudists, what a thing she never saw coming—

"This isn't what it looks like—"

"I really think I interrupted you, I'm so sorry, I'm going—"

"Wait wait wait, you can't go—"

"I really can, I really don't want to be involved—"

"You're not involved. You're not involved! I just need help—"

"—Not helping—"

"—getting free—please, I just—"

"No. Really not my thing."

"—just need some room to breathe."

Rey falters the way his voice does, by some miracle not tripping over her feet again. He's plaintive, pleading, and in his voice she hears her sleepless nights, the aching pressure behind her eyes when no tears will come, her throat seizing up and the air suddenly thin like she's trekking at high altitude.

Behind her he shifts, sensing her hesitation. Her weakness. "Please?" he calls out.

Rey lifts her hand to her face, to the tension at her brow that never seems to want to smooth out. The one that keeps her from her rest and her quiet and her peace. She’s no different from him: she, too, only wants to breathe.

At exactly the most inopportune moment, an abstract and irreverent voice bubbles up from the place inside her where her intrusive thoughts live: this guy takes up so much space that he might just know how to create more in her life. And wouldn't her therapist be pleased? Pleased first of all that she'd done her homework, and second of all that Rey wouldn't inadvertently end up complicit in a national park sex crime death that, with her luck, would land her on the front page of the Mercury News?

She can see the headline already, splayed out across the Formica surface of her desk: Local Caseworker Held in Connection with Suspicious Sexy Death, More from District Attorney at 10.

And Rey groans, decision made, steeling herself and squaring her shoulders as she prepares to come face-to-face once more with that damnable man and the parts of him so distracting she’s putting them out of her head completely.

Completely.

***

"Okay," the girl says grimly, her hands balling in two tight fists. The gesture reminds Ben of setting himself to a particularly difficult task, like pretending he has another working credit card when his is declined. Asking his landlord not to enter his apartment without prior notice. Figuring out how to put the pieces of his heart back together now that his third fiancée in five months has left. Is there something wrong with him?

"I'll help you," she tells him, eyes carefully pinned to his shoulders, and Ben hadn't realized how much stress was coiling up inside him bowstring-taut, but now he's sagging into the rope, it's cutting into the fronts of his shoulders in a way that would surely disappoint that woman who taught the bondage lecture he fell asleep in the middle of—so it's a good thing she isn't here right now. There’s just this cute girl he never has to see again after she gets him free, so all's well that ends with a broken engagement and shattered pride and near-lethal hubris.

"Thank you," he breathes, emphatic in a way that makes the girl do a double-take, eyes narrowing and skepticism clear as crystal in her face.

"If you're getting off on this—" she warns him.

"I'm not," he promises. He'd put his hand over his heart if he could. "Swear to God I'm not."

The girl grumbles under her breath, but Ben doesn't think he has enough shored-up goodwill to ask her to repeat herself, so he holds his tongue and holds his breath as she lurches toward him, halting half-steps in her floppy worn-out hiking boots and her endearing tomato-paste blush. Her backpack is a proper one, cinched around the front of her waist, and it shames him to know he's been stumbled on by a professional outdoorswoman enjoying the fresh air and the forest and the quiet. She’s probably training up to be the next Cheryl Strayed, and meanwhile he's just ... wrapped up in himself, tied up in knots, thinking with his dick. In moments like these Ben tries to remind himself that at the end of the day he's a real catch.

Technically he’s only a software engineer at Salesforce, but he has the sales pipeline to go public soon on the stealth start-up he’s been dreaming about ever since he was at Berkeley. They were just funded by Alchemist Accelerator, and he’s counting down the days until they’re ready for a dark launch. His portfolio is diversified, his eyebrows are plucked, his bench press plates just keep stacking up, and he’s very good at making women feel wanted. He’s a fucking catch.

But this morning ... it all seems to fall a little flat.

"D'you have a pocket knife?" she asks, her eyes as hazel as the rippling forest itself.

"A pocket knife?" he echoes thickly. Maybe she never actually planned on helping him. Maybe she agreed to help only to stab him in the elbow for his idiocy, or maybe to castrate him so he can never again commit federal indecency. Efficient, he'll allow. But cold. Very cold.

"Yeah," she says, chewing on her lip and shifting from foot to foot. The kind of woman who likes staying in motion. "Like a Swiss Army knife?" she gestures, miming as if to saw up a loaf of rosemary sourdough from the worker-owned co-op. "To cut you out?"

Ben looks down at the twines of fair-trade, organically grown Romanian hemp that crisscross his chest in lovely diamonds painstakingly lashed across his skin. The intersecting lines that bind him to the tree, each dyed in a shade of violet reminiscent of grape leaves and ripe fruit hanging from his father's vineyards. He should have anticipated that it could come to this.

"This isn't an emergency," he protests faintly.

"What?" The girl frowns, a furrow creasing her brow. She's more than befuddled, not simply studying a problem she doesn't understand—she’s disapproving, arch skepticism pressing her lips together. She doesn't trust him—and maybe she’s right not to. "You just told me you couldn't breathe."

"I can, too," he bites out, disagreeable and itching to move. His wrists flex against the bark of the redwood, against the curls of rope—Baz should still be here, and he should feel held, should feel cradled—but he only feels trapped and embarrassed and small.

"Then you don't need help," she says flatly.

"No, I do," he protests, manic half-laughter bubbling up his throat. "I really do. I just—"

But he can't think of a way to tell her how much of a travesty it will be to cut this gorgeous rope. Can't think of a way without a Powerpoint presentation and a TedTalk, not without boring her to tears and assuring her how out-of-whack his priorities are, so—

"Yeah, okay." He steels himself. "There's a pair of safety scissors in my pants."

The girl blinks. "Pants?" she echoes, her face shuttering into a careful composition of diplomatic remove.

He really can’t believe how grown-up she’s being about this whole thing. It’s like the washboard abs he’s worked so hard for might as well be invisible. And Ben knows the old saying: if a man does his reps in a forest and no one’s there to see it, does he even exist?

Ben tips his head toward the far side of the redwood. "Yeah," he says. "Front pocket." Maybe he should act like this is unemarkable for him, make inane remarks on whether they've gotten enough rain this year—and then maybe the whole naked-and-tied-to-a-tree-thing will seem more normal. It's still embarrassing, though. Frustrating, too. It makes him want to use his bare fists to crush the empty Liquid Death cans left behind in the underbrush. Maybe that would take the edge off his jumping nerves.

The mousey Cheryl Strayed is looking at him like she'd sniff out even the slightest hint of subterfuge, so he keeps his face open. Tries for a toothy, genuine smile, even if everyone tells him it always makes him look carnivorous—and as a vegan, he has a reputation to maintain, so he tries to smile extra prettily.

He scoffs indignantly when she only rolls her eyes and stalks off around the hulk of the tree.

***

Big Sur is a name that old growth forests put to shame.

Rey has known this ever since she moved out here after graduation and was gifted a secular Advent calendar by a well-intentioned great-aunt with a penchant for kitsch and too much excitement over geographic novelties. For twenty-five days in cold-but-snowless California December, Rey sat in the kitchen nook of her empty studio apartment, slipped the flat of her nail under perforated paper, unwrapped little chocolates from fragile aluminum—and there she learned facts about redwood trees.

Each tree has an ecosystem in miniature, like a child held terrariums in their pudgy fist and planted each of them all down the coast. They create individual soil compositions from the plants and decomposing matter that call the root system home, and the four-inch wandering salamander living in the canopy might never see the earth. How lonely, Rey remembers thinking. How lonely, and yet—if even the little salamander finds its balance and its place, knows the creatures around it and understands where its life begins and ends—then Rey could carve out those things for herself, too. She could learn strength and groundedness; perhaps setting down roots was not just something she'd failed at in the past, but something she could learn.

She'd known these trees by reputation all her life—but some things she knows, and others, like their majesty—she's come to know. It's one thing to sit wedged between her fridge and her table in her one-bedroom apartment, crinkling aluminum foil and sucking chocolates to the roof of her mouth—and it is another thing entirely to be with these old trees.

Which is why she doesn't really appreciate being asked to root around among the redwoods in a strange naked man's trousers for safety scissors that she can't even find. And why doesn't he carry a pocket knife, like a reasonable person? A reasonable article he can get confiscated in a reasonable way the next time he flies and forgets to take it out of his back pocket? But no, they're safety scissors—who carries scissors in their pockets, and what makes them safe? Is it safe to run with safety scissors?

More evidence for the granola cultist theory, regardless. More reason to get him out and get out of here. Maybe working on anxiety is better suited for other national parks and other days of the week.

"They're not here," she calls out, lifting his dark jeans and giving them a shake. They're all cut up, like the naked tree man is fourteen years old and shuffling through the shadows of his local Hot Topic to do important research on how he'll slice up the unsuspecting pair he has at home, the ones just waiting to turn into patch pants. But this pair does not look cut up by a punk or even a wannabe punk. These just look dumb. 

But maybe his stupid scissors have fallen inside, so—Rey gives them another shake and peers into them, crooking her little finger to fling away his dark cotton briefs with as little direct contact as physically possible. Ew.

From around the redwood, his voice is sharp. "What?" he snaps, and it makes her temper flare. He has no right to yell at her, but before she can tell him so, he calls back, "Look again," and if Rey's honest, it does piss her off.

"They're not here," she says, scanning the pine needles and sprays of foliage underfoot.

From around the tree, there's silence. Then, "Did you try looking in the back pockets?"

Is water wet? Is the sky blue? Should Rey go to small claims court and request emotional damages for having to look at this guy's cock under duress?

Because if her life weren’t falling apart and if he weren’t part of a nudist tree cult—if she had met him, like, the normal way, on Tinder—then she might not be so inherently opposed to looking at it. Because by certain standards it did look rather capable. In another light it might even be impressive. And Rey’s not usually an impressionable person.

But if she's being completely honest—and really who does she have to posture in front of when it's just her and the redwoods—it was the sort of cock that made her understand, with a painful white-light clarity, what Paige in the caddy-corner cubicle meant when she stage-whispered to Kaydel at 7:50 in the morning last week, making Rey spit out her coffee: life-changing dick.

Somehow Rey doubts, though, that Paige's dick was life-changing in the way that criminal public indecency is life-changing. But—oh God, if she doesn't get him untied soon someone else is going to come along and think she did this to him and then she’s really fucked and not even in the fun way.

From around the tree trunk, his voice startles her. "Did you try both back pockets?"

His cut-up jeans flutter in her hand, a touch of irritation in her frame as she whips them down to her side.

Exactly what kind of imbecile does he think she is?

***

When Ben hears stomping he cranes his head to look around the girth of the tree, though nothing could prepare him for the flailing denim octopus tsunami the girl accosts him with, and even as he’s cringing away he can’t help but notice the way she swings the remains of his jeans: like she wishes they were made of something with more substance. Something she could really lay into him with, and she does look like she has the upper body strength, he’s not opposed—though he probably shouldn’t be having thoughts like this about brunette Cheryl while she’s railing at him this way, fire in her eyes much like Bazine’s before she left—and isn’t that odd, when they aren’t even engaged?

“—and I think you’re an ungrateful bastard with a stupid waist,” she huffs, losing steam when he makes no effort to bite back. Her shoulders fall along with his jeans, bottoms dusting the earthy ground at their feet—and that’s when he understands how they became a denim octopus tsunami in the first place.

“My jeans,” he croaks, flexing against the rope. “What have you done to my jeans?”

They’re utterly in tatters, frayed and cut straight up the sides in long violent gashes, a Levi’s crime of passion in the palm of Cheryl’s little hand.

She goes quite still, blinking flatly between him and the limp denim octopus. The hollows of her cheeks are reindeer-nose red, though she’s staring fixedly at his face. “You didn’t do this?” she asks.

Ben really, really wants to be untied right now. He’s not just going to crush those cans of Liquid Death, he’s going to strangle their little aluminum necks. “I wanted you to cut me out,” he groans. “I didn’t want you to cut up the jeans I wore to see Neutral Milk Hotel right before they broke up.”

Before her face shutters, a note of relief unfurrows her brow. “I didn’t do this,” she exclaims, catching her fingers in his belt loops—and then she blinks. “You had to have scissors for this. What’d you do with them?”

Flexing his fingertips, he studies her. It’s remarkable how normal it’s gotten to be, that he’s naked and tied to a redwood tree. Practically mundane now, next to the mystery of his blue jeans. “Fuuucking Bazine,” he hisses, breath tight. “Must’ve taken them with her when she left me.”

Dark amusement quirks at Cheryl’s mouth, and she catches her lip between her teeth, like despite her better judgment and the flush spreading across her neck she might start laughing. At him, or with him? It’s impossible to tell which will sting more. “A woman did this to you? I knew it was a sex thing.”

“Not just any woman,” he tells her, eyes narrowing. “My girlfriend.”

“Some girlfriend,” she snorts, letting his cut-up jeans fall with a lifeless denim thud across the arthritic roots of the redwood. He’s about to complain, but she steps in close enough that he can feel her cool breath against the inside of his elbow, and her forehead pinches into a frown as she studies his bindings.

“Hey,” he says. Under her eyes he’s more flustered than he really wants to be. More flustered than he should be. “That’s actually my fiancée you’re talking about.”

Even if it is more noise and bluster than truth, the look Cheryl gives him—all owlish surprise, guarded, properly chastened—makes Ben feel sure he’s set her straight. Yet when she goes to work looking for the ends of the fair-trade violet rope, he can’t help wondering if his engagement might not be the only thing he’s broken today.

***

Untwisting the rope from around the trunk of the redwood takes on a meditative quality. Rey follows with her feet the paths her eyes trace, violet unspooling into curling loops between her fingertips. This deep in the forest, the trees themselves insulate the grove from sound, though birdsong echoes down from the canopy and the strange man's breath brushes against her ear as she passes him, eyes averted. She’s tempted to warn him that he'd better not be getting off on this, but that would break the spell—the one that feels to her like she might be a druid of old, casting ancient enchantments on the trees that the City of San Jose has long forgotten.

But though walking the girth of the tree reminds her of how often she ends up in precisely the place where she began, she thinks that druids must not wear three pairs of socks inside their hiking boots. They probably don't carry Tropical Citrus Vitamin Water in their satchels, either.

The naked stranger passes in and out of her sight, always exactly where she left him, and he inhales when she accidentally brushes his waist, the rope in her hands flicking across the span of his chest. He lets out a small huff, muscles flexing, and she realizes she's tickled him. "Sorry," she murmurs, wiping a nervous hand across her face.

He shrugs as much as he can while still tied to the ancient redwood. There’s a shimmer of sweat gleaming across his chest as the day stretches on. "S'alright," he says, voice a quiet velvet hum—and was it always like this, or has she not been listening? To avoid letting her eyes drift lower, she lifts her face to his—and this proves to be a mistake, maybe it would be safer to be sneaking glimpses of the cock she keeps ignoring as it lifts from his thigh, pulsing with want. And if his cock is bad enough then his eyes are worse, soulful pools of edgy frustration, chagrin, and surprise at the way she's paused, just here, to look at him.

Just to look, when she should be setting him free.

"You know," she says, while she still has his attention and while he's not spouting off some bit of ridiculousness. "You could stand to be nicer to me."

His brows lift, and his eyes widen. "Nicer?" he echoes.

"Yeah," she says. Bolstered by his curiosity, she straightens her backpack on her shoulders. "I am rescuing you, after all."

It makes him blink, and Rey thinks this is really not an appropriate demonstration of gratitude. "I'm sorry," the man protests, "I didn't realize there was a code of ethics for a rescue by a—" he tips his head at her knobby scuffed-up legs, her secondhand satchel and the patchy baseball cap velcroed to its straps, "discount knight in shining armor."

Her mouth actually falls open.

"Well," she scoffs, offended on principle and in practice, dropping the hemp rope in a violet puddle at his feet. "Fuck you very much."

"Oh, very original," he exclaims as she disappears once more around the tree. She really ought to leave him there, after all, but his voice follows her around the redwood, combative and sardonic. “Veeery original, Cheryl.”

Rey decides she can do one better: in one quick motion she slips free the Swiss Army knife from her back pocket and slices through the strands of rope that still bind him to the redwood, savoring the look of shock on his face as he stumbles to his knees, sputtering and choking.

But she hasn’t freed him completely: his strong arms are still bound at the small of his back, violet diamonds criss-crossing the planes of his chest and the beauty marks that dapple his shoulders.

She still has a point to prove, though, so she lifts her hand to her waist, cocking her hip. “How about that? Is that original enough for you, now?”

***

Ben’s knees hit the ground so hard his breath catches in his throat, and he pitches forward, muscles straining as he works to keep from tipping face-first into the roots and earth. His stomach heaves, and his eyes swim to keep up: half-crushed redwood needles lay in the ground, a sea of green he doesn’t fancy a mouthful of.

His chest heaves but his breath steadies, and as he lifts himself up to his knees he tosses his hair from his face, studying the girl through narrowed eyes. It’s still an overcast morning, and no sunlight haloes her hair: she studies him so piercingly that he wants both to squirm under her gaze and not move a muscle, for fear she’ll look away. She’s walked circles around him all morning, and yet he thinks this might be the first time he’s really looked at her and seen a person—not just someone there to help him.

This whole thing is actually getting pretty humbling. Shame begins to coil at the edges of his heart, and he blows strands of hair out of his face, with his most charming smirk shoving down the beginnings of difficult emotions threatening to take hold.

Experimentally, he flexes his wrists. His eyes fall on the frayed edges of violet hemp splayed around the crimson laces of her worn-out shoes. “You really know how to kick a man while he’s down, don’t you?”

Xena Warrior Princess Cheryl folds her arms over her chest (seemingly insubstantial, though breasts can be deceiving that way). He has to admire her: eyes flickering with her victory, shifting her feet as if to square off against him. And sure, it’s no hand touch in the worker-owned co-op, but Ben knows, knows with the kind of visceral truth that tightens his balls—she’s going to change his life. Maybe she already has.

In her palm she spins her pocketknife, then flicks it closed with a gesture so easy it must be instinct. “It seems to me,” she says coolly, “that someone kicked you before I ever got here. Bazine, was it? Some grand fiancée she must be, leaving you this way. And some perfect husband-to-be you are, cursing about her like that. Have to wonder … ” she trails off, “whether someone was worried about their safety.”

She’s still hefting that knife in her hand, and he’s trying not to imagine its metal coolness against the rope on his skin. She must keep it sharp if she can slice through that fair-trade organically-grown eight-millimeter hemp so easily. Kill Bill Cheryl has a dangerous streak.

But understanding hits him like a ton of bricks. “Wait,” he says thickly. “You think … you’re saying—Baz?” he sputters. “In danger? From me?” And it makes him laugh, loud in the quiet redwood grove.

But her thousand-yard stare is evaluating. Unimpressed.

“Huh,” he snorts, shoulders lifting as he studies the forest. What a day this has been: strung up by his ex-fiancée, abandoned in a national park, and held up at pocket-knifepoint by Cheryl Strayed in her John Wick era.

And he might still get indicted for arboreal obscenity.

“I asked you a question,” she snaps, sharp enough to make him flinch.

His brows crease and he folds his lip between his teeth when he straightens, trying not to laugh. “No,” he says, the word softly huffed. “No, that’s ridiculous, she wouldn’t be—”

The girl steps in, unfolding her pocketknife, and he jolts, letting out a noise of disapproval. “Hey,” he says sternly, like he would to a golden retriever. “Hey, hey, hey, let’s just take this down a notch—” But when she lifts one brow, the knife glints in her hand and he shuffles back on his knees, toes bumping the base of the redwood tree. “Okay, okay, okay, look. I would not threaten Baz. Do I look threatening?” he asks, hunching his shoulders forward into his best who, me?

“You look dumb,” Cheryl says. “Incompetent.”

“That’s—” he protests, and then his eyes fix on the tattered remains of his jeans, may they rest in peace. Pieces. “Okay,” he shrugs. “Yeah, that’s fair. But if anything, Baz was probably doing me a favor, okay?”

One of her elegant brows lifts again, and the pocketknife turns in her hand. “Because you’re a danger to yourself and others?”

“Well, sure,” he says agreeably, eyes on that slip of plastic case, that white cross on its blood red field tucked between her fingertips and the threat inside it. Ben understands suddenly why prisoners of war confess to crimes they didn’t commit. He’d be willing to admit to just about any kind of tree indecency—intreecency? He’ll workshop it—at this point. Oak, yew, palm…

“Yes,” he nods. “Very dangerous to myself and others. Mostly to myself, and mostly in the romantic department, not—” he adds, sitting forward on his knees, “that it’s any kind of, like, trouble getting it up—”

Her exclamation is an explosion. “I don’t want to hear about your dick!” she cries. “I’m trying not to think about it.” But her face flushes pink in a splotchy way like she’s been out in the sun too long, dapples of blush creeping down her jaw as she shifts from foot to foot.

Ben always knows a victory when he sees one, particularly when it involves his dick. Smug, he lifts his chin. “Trying,” he coos.

***

Rey doesn’t know who Bazine is, or how the woman learned to tie knots, or what might have possessed her to consent to marry this man, and yet nevertheless she feels they must share a certain kinship. Deep in her stomach, with visceral and instinctual truth, she understands the impulse to tie this frustrating man to the redwood tree and leave him here.

“You know what,” she says, slipping her backpack from her shoulders before she can fall, distracted, into the self-satisfied pools of his brown eyes. Before her eyes slip from his face, trip over the violet diamonds that intersect across his chest, and fall to the dark hair between his treacherous thighs, the flared head and impressive shaft of the cock her mind just can’t seem to shut up about. “I think I’ve figured you out.”

Waves of long dark hair fall to the fronts of his sloping shoulders as he lifts his face to watch her kneel beside him in the dirt. The hem of her jeans pulls up from her ankles, and she feels his eyes on the short dark hairs on her calves. Whatever, it doesn’t matter—who even bothers to keep their legs shaved all the time? Rey has more important things to do. Like work on her anxiety.

“Yeah?” he asks. “You’ve seen right through me, huh? Figured it all out?”

“Yes,” she says, setting one palm to his shoulder to press him forward, studying his bound forearms. “You’re like one of those beautiful orb weavers that spin their webs between the tulip stalks in spring. You know the kind? Spindly legs,” she gestures. “Gleaming black and yellow?”

He frowns, eyes flicking back and forth between hers. “You think I’m beautiful?” he squints. “Like a…spider?”

The tree man, she decides, has a handsome face that just begs to be slapped. He’s eminently slappable.

“The problem is,” she continues, “that at the end of the day, you’re a predator.” She says it carefully, deliberately, even gently—but his face still shutters. She’s only a stranger, her opinion shouldn’t matter to him, but she’s going to get this off her chest.

“Even if you do have nice eyes and a pretty face,” she adds, to soften the blow, “you’re still a predator. You snare all these insects inside the web you’re weaving, and maybe you’re not even conscious of it, maybe you just think you have to live somewhere. Maybe you’re just trying to survive, and people just keep wandering into your home unawares, so they have to expect to get walked on—that’s what you tell yourself when you devour them. And maybe you’re right, maybe you’re allowed. But you can’t act surprised when your dinner won’t take it lying down. When it fights you.” She pauses, thinking of springtime spiders. “That’s all.”

For a long and blissful moment he doesn’t say anything at all, though his plush lips pull together in a thoughtful frown. The grove of redwoods is quiet, and so are Rey’s thoughts, quiet enough even that she can sense out the spaces between them as if they were the hollows between heavy sandstone pillars inside a mausoleum. She thinks her EAP therapist would be pleased.

Licking her lips, she presses her hand into the blade of his shoulder. “Lean forward,” she says, “and I’ll cut you out.”

To her surprise he does without protest, glancing back through watchful eyes. She plucks at the rope, the violet strands that bind his wrists behind his back, and slips two fingers at the inside of his wrists, carefully setting her pocketknife against his skin. Better not accidentally stab him now.

She doesn’t even realize she’s holding her breath until he speaks.

“I’m Ben,” he says. The timbre of his voice is like he knows he should have introduced himself already, like maybe everything could have been different if he had just begun differently.

“That’s nice,” she says, not terribly interested.

He makes a small noise in his throat. “Aren’t you going to … tell me who you are?”

Violet, orchid-purple, grape-stain on the pads of her fingers—the rope frays in the palm of her hand. “You’re very self-absorbed,” she says. “Are you sure you could handle it?”

“Yes,” he snaps, swallowing like there’s a lump in his throat. “But maybe it doesn’t matter if you tell me who you are. Because I already know who you are, too.”

Rey’s half-laughter is sardonic. “Oh, really?”

“You’re Cheryl,” he tells her.

“Who’s Cheryl?” she asks, freeing his hands. The moment comes like a long exhalation, a breath of release like the one that comes when she pulls an old book from a tight shelf. He’s stiff, though, muscles flexing and yet not moving; without being invited she takes his forearms, leaning in to help shift them back into place at his sides. She wonders how long he was left alone before she found him.

“Cheryl,” he says, glancing at her with searching eyes as he shrugs his shoulders, biceps still pinned though he starts to pluck at the diamonds of his chest harness. “Thanks, yeah. You know, Cheryl Strayed. The one with the book about going hiking to … to find herself, or some other fucking bullshit. You know,” he straightens, “most of us have to figure out how to find ourselves without being unemployed for six months. There’s a lot of fucking money in some of these self-healing journeys, you know. And you look just like her. Except you’re a brunette.”

Lifting her brows, Rey sits back on her heels. “Wow,” she says. “There might actually be a coherent thought in there somewhere.”

His face lights, and his eyes sweep hers. “You really think so?”

“Don’t get too excited," Rey mutters. "I’m not going to call the New York Times about it.”

The naked tree man—Ben, she corrects herself—pulls the side of his lip between his teeth. “Maybe you could be nicer to me, too. Since you are rescuing me, and all.”

“Careful,” she tells him, slipping her fingers beneath the lengths of rope that bind his upper arm. “You might strain your ego.”

In faux offense, he shies back when she lifts the pocketknife to his skin, and then a small smile curves his lips. Rey rolls her eyes, lifts her hand to rub at the tension in her brow, and doesn’t breathe again until she’s cut the next strands—but somehow, he’s still not free.

Raking a hand through her hair, she lets out an exasperated sigh. “Exactly what kind of lunatic Wonder Woman is your fiancée? She really didn’t want you going anywhere. Every time I make a cut, six more knots appear. It’s like dealing with a hydra’s sexy alter ego. Don’t make anything out of that,” she warns him, brandishing the pocketknife.

Ben pffts, massaging his wrists. “That bullshit toothpick was scary when you first pulled it out, I’ll give you that. But you’re going to have to try harder than that if you want to intimidate me; I know you have a soft side now. You like giant yellow spiders. You’re probably…” he squints, swinging his broad shoulders, “one of those people who scoop them up and put them outside instead of just squishing them. Teaching them they can just come back inside if they want to. Shit boundaries, is what that is. So don’t try to play all tough with your secret pocketknife you could have just told me about from the beginning. I see you.”

Rey gapes. She lifts her palm, making circular gestures in his general vicinity. “So you’re really telling me that there was a woman who wanted to marry this?”

“Ass,” Ben grunts, studying the span of earth between his ankles. “She was a queen of Japanese rope bondage. As if you deserve to know.”

“You know,” Rey says with a tilt of her head, “you could probably make it back to your car just fine at this point. I don’t need to untie you the rest of the way.”

He glares at the blades of grass he’s twirling between his fingertips. “So you want to just rage-quit in the middle of a rescue mission? Take your participation trophy and go home?”

“I’m too old for this,” she scoffs, “and I think you are, too.”

“I’m twenty-eight,” he protests.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh, it’s very bad. It hits Rey as if in slow-motion, her ears ringing from the impact of the blow. He’s beautiful. He’s built like a classical Greek sculpture. His eyes are expressive and deep, his hands are broad, his shoulders strong. He’s got enough years on her to be alluring in a dangerous way—and he’s a living, breathing, disaster.

Several years younger and she could excuse it, chalk it up to the lingering fraternity-years hangover or parents who bubble-wrapped him. Or absent parents who never coddled him and never heard of bubble-wrap, his way of getting attention from the people around him.

But this at twenty-eight? He’s delectable. Rey sees the appeal. Beautiful, in the way a Venus fly trap can be.

And she knows better than to put her fingertips in his maw.

She sets herself to the distraction of the rope giving way under her little knife, holding it out of the way against his pec. The silence isn’t quite companionable, but it doesn’t need to be. Her self-preservation instincts remain intact.

Ben sits as if to ignore her, as if unaffected. But his eyes are restless, his feet shifting like he wants to be as gone as she does.

He sighs so softly that she wouldn’t notice if she weren’t close enough to hear him breathing.

“I don’t think she’s my fiancée anymore,” he tells her. “I think she probably ended things this morning.”

In the forest clearing his voice has shifted: he’s less rhinoceros in a china shop and more Rodin’s archetypal thinker, pensive and listless.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says, hearing in her voice that she means it. Her knee brushes the outside of his thigh as she shifts, her hands unpracticed. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing, and fear of hurting him makes her hesitant. But if the rope is a riddle, Ben is an enigma.

“It was probably my fault,” he says dully. “I probably wanted too much. Wanted to go places that she wasn’t ready for.”

“That’s hard,” Rey murmurs, carefully not touching his dusky nipples as she cuts him free. They pebble around her fingertips, and she ignores them. “When you’re ready to go deeper emotionally and people struggle to meet you there.”

“No.” He stirs. “I meant, like, actual places. Like the gym.”

Rey hears a record scratching in her mind though she goes quite still, and when her hands fall, he catches them. His thumbs graze her knuckles, the strands of violet rope, the blade of her pocketknife. Under his touch her anxiety is deathly silent, and it’s as much a blessed relief as it is deeply terrifying.

“I don’t know what to say,” she manages, her voice a whisper on the wind.

Maybe it’s because of the unexpected turn the day has taken, maybe it’s because she’s starting to suspect she loses a brain cell every time his mouth opens, maybe it’s because he lacks any self-awareness of how relentlessly ridiculous he is—

He makes a low sound that vibrates through his chest and gives her a small shake of his head. His eyes are dark rich umber and he watches her so closely that it borders on intoxicating. “Don’t say anything.” He licks his lips.

His shoulders are very broad. Rey could get lost in the hollow at his throat, in the constellation of beauty marks that dapple his collarbone. The pad of his thumb is tracing impossibly slow circles across the back of her hand, and she reminds herself that he’s a Venus fly trap, a planetary predatory plant she doesn’t need to be ensnared by.

Although it is nice to imagine.

Just for a little while.

The coastal wind is cool, raising gooseflesh on Rey’s arms. Ben’s eyes are on her mouth—she knows because she’s tingling in the places he’s looking at her. Her rescue mission isn’t abandoned, she’ll get back to it very shortly here, right after he—after she—

He shifts just so, and then he’s brushing the tips of her fingers. It’s very nice. The lightest sensation in places no one usually touches her—when was the last time someone held her hand, anyway—he’s so warm, almost hot, his skin all velvet.

The record playing in her mind skips once more, stumbling over his touch the way she tripped when she first saw him, the sensation akin to falling, her breath a shallow inhale. She realizes, too slowly, that he can’t possibly be touching her fingertips and rubbing circles across the back of her hand at the same time.

Her eyes trip down the planes of his chest, down his rippled abdomen, and lower still. He’s achingly hard, his cock swollen flush with color and desire where it bobs obscenely at her hand, and if Rey had thought he was big before, now she thinks a Venus fly trap would need to think twice before even trying to swallow him down.

“Oh my god,” she says, flinching and scrambling back as if burned. She’s not sure which of them she’s more horrified by—him, for coaxing her in like a moth to the flame, or her, for letting herself be coaxed at all?

“I’m sorry,” he yelps, and his voice sends a shudder down her spine—and it’s all so much worse that she’s responding to him, isn’t it?

“You’re hard,” she exclaims.

“I know,” he moans, half-turning away to shield himself, his face disappearing behind his waves of hair.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry. You know what—” and she hefts it in her hand but she does toss the pocketknife his way, “—you’re perfectly capable of rescuing yourself at this point. I should go. This was weird.” She makes to get up, hesitating when he doesn’t move at all. And it shouldn’t matter, should it? She hates the seconds that pass before she hefts herself to her feet and scoops up her backpack, but it must be the sound of Rose’s carabiners clinking against each other that break his reverie because it’s then that he turns his face to look at her, and she’s so guilty, isn’t she, because she’s been waiting for him to do exactly that.

His eyes are bright and wild. “Don’t go,” he says.

Rey wavers. She’s no redwood, but the impact will still break her if she falls.

He swallows, muscles taut and straining. “We took Baz’s car here. I don’t have a way to get home. Please?” he adds.

She’s not proud of the drawn-out whine that slips from her throat when his jaw flexes and the rest of his shoulder does, too—but in the end it’s his please that breaks her.

***

Against his better judgment, Ben dons the denim octopus tsunami. He doesn’t do it because he wants to; he does it for Cheryl, hoping her face will stop resembling a fire truck sometime later this century.

“You know,” it occurs to him, slinging her backpack a little higher up on his shoulder as they trudge up the path out of Big Sur, “I never got your name.”

She looks at him askance, her fingertips fluttering like she doesn’t know where to put them without her backpack. Like she might still be remembering the way she touched his hard-on.

“That was just an accident, by the way,” he says, in a tone he hopes is reassuring. “It was just one of those random erections. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

He thinks that even the top of her head might be blushing. There’s St Valentine’s Day red underneath the roots of her soft, dark hair, and the day is far too overcast for her to sunburn.

She ducks her face, but he still sees the way her lips press together. “I hope a lot of today was just an accident,” she says, a dark note in her tone he can’t read.

Absently, he tilts his head from side to side. He doesn’t know her from Eve, and yet she went out on a limb for him in a big way. He’s lucky that she did, since Bazine never came back. He really could have been caught by someone official, and arrested for his forest felonies. Next to that outcome, having to wear the denim octopus is a much smaller blow to his pride.

Never did find his briefs, though. Ben can’t put his finger on why exactly, but he thinks it’s weird that Baz took them with her.

“Maybe I’ll take a break from the whole romance thing for a while,” he says, glancing at the stray hairs that brush the girl’s jaw. There’s a restlessness inside him that goes still when he looks at her. Funny that he’d never even noticed it until now. “Maybe I’m not very good at committed relationships.”

The girl looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “In fairness,” she allows, “I can’t imagine that anything really prepares you for being engaged.”

“Well, sure,” he shrugs, “but I prepared myself. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

Again she gives him that diplomatic face, the one he associates with being naked. She’s a hard woman to impress, Cheryl is—but it hardly matters when she’s rescued him so well. Delicately, she licks her lips. “How many times have you been engaged?” she asks.

“Uh—three times,” he nods. “This year.”

She looks alarmed, so he assures her that they’ve all been very decent women, though if anything this only perturbs her further.

“It’s May,” she says weakly.

“No,” he says. “May was in January. This morning was Baz.”

A furrow finds its way into her brow, so deep and so concerned that he wants to offer to show her how to massage it out—though he’s worried that any more physical contact might make her screech again like a boiling teakettle, so he keeps it to himself, and he lets her hold the silence until they make their way out of the woods and into the light.

The girl swings her keyring around her little finger—he remembers how it was so little in his hand, the way he imagines fragile birds—and leads him haltingly to a sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle, turning on her heel as she catches the handle. “I’m Rey,” she says, hesitating before she offers him her outstretched hand.

She’s formal enough to be surreal, just like the entirety of the morning. Doubting after this whole ordeal that she’s even real, he takes her hand, and when she squeezes, offering him a little smile, he realizes she never laughed at him. Not once, not even when she was obviously tempted.

It’s the truest thing he’s said all day when he tells her, “It’s nice to meet you, Rey.”

He doesn’t mention that it’s going to take serious effort not to call her Cheryl.

They’re headed northbound on the 1 when she reaches for the volume knob on the radio and he leans forward, turning the little fans of her air conditioning. Distractedly, she helps him, eyes flicking across the highway, and it’s then that their hands brush.

Their eyes lock for an instant, and Ben feels it: the electric frisson of the tension he knows so well, the one that ripples through his body like the Santa Ana winds. Once more, he knows it balls-deep: this woman is going to change his life. Maybe she already has. But she doesn’t look at him like she’ll marry him, and for once in his life, Ben thinks that might be a good thing.

“Hey, Rey,” he says—don’t call her Cheryl—as he tugs at his midriff on the hem of the pale yellow cotton t-shirt she fished out of her trunk.

Oversized for her and left over from some corporate retreat, Rey was skeptical about whether it would fit him, but Ben’s game—he’s always game. He managed to pull his head through it without causing an international incident, and it made a ripping sound when it met his shoulders but valiantly endured the strain, so now he’s just trying not to move too much and wondering if he gets to keep it. It’s really not so bad; it’s tight and it exposes the bottom of his stomach, but he doesn’t mind showing off his abs. Fittingly, it smells of lemons, and something floral he can’t place. Her shampoo?

“Yeah?” Rey asks, squinting up into the rearview mirror. She braces her hand around the top of the steering wheel, sitting back and settling in.

“Maybe…” he says, plucking a stray violet string from the front of the denim tsunami. “Maybe we could see each other again after this.” What do people not on dates even do together? “Get lunch or something.”

The look she levels him with is cautious. Ben realizes it might not sound like a particularly tempting offer; Rey seems nice enough that she’s probably full up on friends.

After a moment she swallows and lifts her chin, brushing her pretty hair out of her face. “I don’t know if that’s a very good idea, Ben.”

He takes the rejection like the man he is: with a quiet nod as he settles his hands on his knees. “Yeah,” he says, looking out the window at the forest. It’s a dark earthy blur sweeping past them, not unlike her eyes. “Yeah, that’s cool.”

A beat passes, and his ears prick when she sighs. “I also … don’t know that it’s a bad idea.”

Ben catches his lower lip between his teeth, rearranging his elbow on the windowsill and trying to look more nonchalant than he feels. “Yeah?” he asks, scowling out at the coastline.

She makes a face he can’t read, and finally shakes her head: a decision made, as straightforward as changing lanes on the highway.

“Yeah, I mean—you could’ve been in a lot of trouble today.”

“I know,” he mutters, scrunching up his thumb against his face to help him chew on the inside of his cheek. “I don’t really need second-degree tree obscenity on my record.”

“What?” she frowns, confusion rippling her brow. “That’s not….”

“I know,” he reassures her. “They probably wouldn’t even grant me bail.”

“Ben,” she says loudly, raking her hair back across the top of her head a lot like the way he does. “I’m not talking about legal trouble. I’m talking about your life.” On the steering wheel her hand flexes, and his eyes catch on the whites of her knuckles. “Maybe you were going to marry Baz this morning, but she could have killed you today, leaving you like that. I mean it,” she adds when he says nothing. “You know that, right?”

He watches her hands from under his eyelashes, and his heart pounds in his chest. As if from far away, there’s a faint ringing in his ears. The kind he tends to wake up with the morning after Coachella. People always say the ringing is a sound he’ll never hear again, but he doesn’t have any idea how to test the truth of the matter.

When his sigh comes, it's a heavy one. “I did pick a fight with her. So….” he tries.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rey shakes her head, firm in a way that reminds him of his mother. “I don’t care. And I don’t want to hear you say a thing like that again. There isn’t anything you could’ve done to deserve being treated that way.”

“Maybe,” he allows, but he’s going to have to think about it longer than the time it will take to get back home. But he realizes something more, too: “You think we’re going to talk again?”

Rey makes a soft strangled noise, lifting her thumb and index finger to the bridge of her nose.

“As friends,” he clarifies. “And I’d buy your lunch. Of course.”

“You’re very dangerous,” she says, drumming her fingertips against the rim of the steering wheel.

“Sure,” he agrees, sitting forward. There’s a thread of warmth uncoiling inside him, probably a violet one, and he wants to follow where it leads. “But you know that already. And you like yellow spiders. I know you do.”

Her eyes bulge with confusion, and her shoulders lift. “What does that have to do with anything?” she asks, voice high and narrow and kind of cute, if he’s honest.

“Because,” he exclaims, plucking at the hem of his borrowed cotton tee. “You put me in your yellow shirt.”

“That’s…” she trails off faintly, primed for protest and yet losing steam as she goes. Like clockwork, her eyes flick across the highway, the rearview mirror. The dials on her dashboard. The remains of his jeans.

Rey worries her lip between her teeth, frowning vaguely. Again her eyes trace the white dashes in the road, the cars trailing at their back. She lifts her thumb to the radio, and through narrowed eyes she presses a thumbprint of dust to her jeans. They’re still stained with green from the forest.

Finally she turns her face to his. It only lasts a moment, but her features clear. The furrow unwinds from her brow, and her shoulders settle. Very faintly, she smiles, and he sees the forest reflected in her eyes.

“You know,” Ben tells her, “I know a great vegan place. They started in Pico-Union but they’re in the Bay now, too. I know the chef, it’s really good. They do this thing—you’ve never had seitan this way before, I know you haven’t, because nobody has.”

“You’re a vegan?” An amused quirk lifts her brow. “Ben, I’m…not a vegan.”

But he’s settling deeper into the passenger seat, a satisfied set to his shoulders, and he reaches for her hand, knitting their fingertips together. Surprised, she glances his way, and he gives her his most platonic smile. “Well,” he muses, lulled by the purr of the Volkswagen and its baby-blue curves. “We’re friends now, Rey. So we’ll work on that, too.”