LITMIR.BIZ

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Sound good?”

      I didn’t know these Mark-and-Rita people from Adam or Eve, but something about their names, or the fact they hosted a weekly picnic, made me feel like Benji was in good hands. And just like that, I felt myself starting to turn. Slowly.

      “And what about work? What about your apartment? Your rent?”

      “Babe, look at me.” I wasn’t sure how much closer he could have gotten, but he nuzzled in a little more and held my shoulders tightly. I granted him blotchy, tearstained eye contact.

      “That place I was living in...the landlords...they terminated my lease.”

      “They what?”

      Just when I thought I was calming down.

      “It’s my fault. I was late on rent, they had trouble verifying my work and after last night...things got a little trashed.”

      “So, where’s all your stuff? Where are you living now?”

      “Well, all I really had was cooking stuff and Sebastian is holding on to it all for me.”

      I pictured his apartment on the night he cooked for me; there really was no furniture over there. Just a mattress on the floor and some bar stools. That’s when I realized that in the corner of my studio was a black duffel bag. His life, whatever scraps of it he was able to pull together before being evicted, was most certainly zipped in there.

      “You want to stay here.” It was a statement, not a question—let me make that clear. “And get sober.” Again, not a question.

      “I’ll make you lunch every day, I’ll cook dinner for you every night. Your friends, too. I’ll keep the place clean for us. Run your errands. Do whatever you need for me to prove how bad I want this and how committed I am to our future. This is a good thing, Allie. For our relationship. I can get better at my own pace, figure out what to do for work and take care of you.”

      I don’t know how Benji got into my apartment that day. My doorman must have recognized him from the night before and figured he was on the let-up list. As far as my unit being unlocked, I was tired that morning. Really fucking tired. It’s entirely possible I forgot to lock up. Point being, as I looked around, I noticed my place was immaculate. Bed made, TV stand dusted, towels in the bathroom folded. He’d picked up while waiting for me to come home.

      It had seemed ironic to me that the trade-off for accommodating a drug addict was a series of proposed housekeeping services and a promise that I’d eat like a queen. But sometimes when you’re just that tired, worn down and desperate, the vision of a decent lunch and coming home to a clean bathroom is enough to make it all seem worth it.

      “I’m not going to starting cooking tonight, though,” he said.

      My heart fell through the floor. I couldn’t put up with another night of mayhem or another false promise.

      “Because tonight, I’m going to order you a pizza. I’m going to get your favorite—butter crust with crispy pepperoni and extra sauce on the side. And we’re going to share it, eat the whole goddamn thing. And we’re going to watch a movie, The Lake House or P.S. I Love You...one of those girlie DVDs I keep seeing in your collection that I’m too embarrassed to admit I want to watch. You can pick. And then, we’re just going to hold each other and talk if we need to talk, be quiet if we need to be quiet, and at the end of the night, we’ll go to bed knowing it’s just you and me against the world, and that tomorrow is a fresh start and a new day.”

      He never let me object. Not once did I poke a hole in his plan or tell him no or force him to at least pick up a part-time shift at CVS. Yet still, the relationship that every girl wants was right in front of my face. The one where you can throw on some sweats, get comfy on the couch and curl up with your boyfriend, a greasy pizza and a chick flick, and still feel like the prettiest princess in all the land. And best of all, I wasn’t begging him to be on the same page as me. That was all Benji. He was laying it all out there for me.

      Twenty minutes and two slices in and I had felt the stress and tension ebb out of me. How I was going to tell my mom and dad, or Jazzy and Maya, that an ex-addict was now sharing my address was going to require politician-like spin. But I’d deal with that later. Because right then, we were on the right track. Benji was there for me to rest my head on. The FoodFeed comments section and the Twitter speculation were out of sight and out of mind at that moment.

      Later on, his warm hands rubbed the small of my back under my favorite Mizzou hoodie.

      “I love you,” he whispered to me.

      “I love you, too,” I said, knowing with certainty that I was his fighting chance, not some dark, dingy rehab center on the far West Side of Chicago.

       6

      I like going to work for two main reasons. First, it’s a place I can go to escape my strange home life. The near-constant sound of a blender, prep bowls always piled high in the sink and the occasional sous chef asleep on the floor is enough to drive anyone crazy. Here in my River North office, I can table what’s going on in my world and tune in for eight hours to what other people, sometimes worlds away, are going through. Granted, these online conversations are almost always about cotton swabs, but I still find ways to engage with hordes of people who seem really nice, really normal. Sometimes I wonder...do any of them have a Benji?

      I’m good at what I do, too. So that helps. Our boss, Connor, doesn’t spend a ton of time with our social media department—he’s got bigger, more corporate fish to fry. But he checks in with us formally every six months to see how we’re feeling about things and where we want to go with our jobs. He and I last met together five months ago, when I hinted at creating a new role for myself: Creative Director. Essentially, I’d step back and oversee Stacey and Dionte, our graphic designer and copywriter, respectively, then lead a team of monitors who would divvy up responding to all the social streams. Though I’ve been a little distracted with my home life, I plan to pick up the conversation with him during our next one-on-one review, and remind him he’d been tentatively on board.

      The other main reason I like coming here is that people ask me about Benji. And because there are only a few office-appropriate sides of him that I can discuss with my coworkers, my office is a place where I get to bask in the more delicious reasons I love him. When I can only talk about the good, it helps me reaffirm that my feelings for Benji are stronger than ever.

      “What’s for lunch today, Allie?” Stacey asks, waiting her turn for the microwave.

      “Um, not too sure. Looks like Benji reimagined some of our dinner leftovers,” I say as I stir them around and nuke them for another fifteen seconds.

      I’m not giving the man enough credit, I just don’t know the technical terms for what he concocted and threw in a Tupperware for me. I do know, though, that whatever it is is a long way from barbecue sauce and mac ’n’ cheese—the first things he ever learned to cook on his own from scratch.

      I’ve never asked him to explain the history of his culinary career to me because I feel like that’s a job for a fawning food blogger—not his other-side-of-the-industry girlfriend. But I know his first kitchen job was when he was in high school. His dad left his mom for a much-younger woman and Benji wrote him off completely. He chose to live with his mom, who moved them to a small apartment in Austin, Texas. That’s when he got a job as a dishwasher at a BBQ joint to help her with the rent.

      A few months into the gig, the owners gave him a bit more responsibility—let him toy around with rotating chickens in the smoker, stirring the vat of coleslaw every thirty minutes so it wouldn’t crust over, things like that. One area they did not let him play around in so freely was the bar, but his teenage angst led him to a habit of topping off his free shift fountain drink with a shot of Jim Beam when no one was looking. One day, he got a little more buzzed than usual and decided the mac ’n’ cheese tasted like shit and the barbecue sauce was bland. So he afforded himself the liberty of redoing them both and

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