Grass looks very mundane in daylight. You can't guess its magic when your eye just barely notices it there, being all green and framing the day lilies and concrete driveway. At night, though, it has a blue glow to it and you just know it holds secrets.
Lying in it at night, feeling the green and the moist and the cool, it's freeing. Like you are the only thing that matters. That those parts of your life, that English final, what your mother said before you went out, your crappy new hair cut, those just... melt away. No, it's like they never even existed. And even if they did, you're the kind of person that lies in grass at one o'clock in the morning, still tipsy on margaritas, so none of it matters. None of it matters.
I look at the stars, weakened by city neon, through my toes, one leg straight up in the air. I close one eye just to see them framed between my big toe and that one next to it.
"I haven't done this in so long," he murmurs beside me, maybe as awed as I am by the magic.
"Me either. But now I want to do it every night." I point my toes at the big dipper and then let my leg flop back into the grass's coolness.
"Ha ha, you said 'do it'," he chuckles and pushes my shoulder.
"You wish," I scoff and make it awkward.
This is Ben beside me. Ben of the negligible wardrobe, too much cologne, high sharp laugh, twinkling eyes and adoration for all things Bruce Lee. Ben of years of late night dinners at Denny's, road trips to places dictated by dice and maps, platonic back, foot and head massages, and cigarettes while watching the people in the rain. And even before that the Ben of catching grasshoppers in crispy fields, constant detentions and picking the ants off of ants-on-a-log.
Ben clears his throat and nudges my leg with his foot. "So does this feel like a 'date' yet to you?"
"Well, you haven't told me all about your conquests in high school, tried to feel me up or taken twenty phone calls, so it's not like any date I've ever been on," I laugh. Traffic goes by around us, us stretching out on this strange little pocket of grass beside some kind of monument to someone who did something. The lights paint us red and white and orange.
"Well there was Pam and Helen and Jasmine and Kylie and Nicole and, well, we all know about Irene..."
"Irene... right... Wow, I haven't thought about her in..." I'm cut short by a hand clamping over one breast. Instinct makes me brush the hand away more than any real disgust.
"What the fuck, Ben?"
"Now I've tried to feel you up, and, well, succeeded. But I don't get that many phone calls. I could if you wanted me to." He tucks hands behind his head, smug look on his face revealed by a station wagon driving past.
"Well then this is officially a date now," I sigh. "So does it feel like one to you?"
He's quiet for quite a while. But it's been so long that we've known each other, so many stages of adolescence to grudging adulthood, that silence isn't a bad thing for us. We know the rhythms of our thoughts.
Tonight is an experiment. Something dreamed up when we were bored, eating bagels, and on our fourth cups of coffee. Ben was whining about the previous night's date... Trista. He was upset because she hadn't understood the kung fu flick they'd gone to see, that she liked Milk Duds, and that her lips had tasted like cheese.
"She kept asking me why those Asian men were pretending to hit each other," he lamented. "And whenever a guy was on the screen, even if she'd seen him a million times before, she asked 'Oh is that Bruce Lee?'. Like it was going to impress me." He sighed. "I finally told her that Bruce Lee is motherfucking dead. He isn't going to rise from the dead and kick ass in a Jet Li movie."
"Why didn't you wait to take me? You know it's not a date movie, dumbass," I had reprimanded him and swatted his hand with the back of a spoon.
"It was the only one out I wanted to see," Ben had pouted.
"Was it at least good?" I licked foam from my cappuccino.
"So good. We should go."
"I'll get Cherry Blasters," I grinned at him.
"Your lips will probably taste like cherries," he grinned back.
"And how exactly do you plan to find that out?"
"Eh, maybe a dumb idea. Forget I asked." He had shrugged and played with his lighter, watching the flame.
"Ben Parker, did you just ask me out on a date?"
"Huh?" He had tried to look all innocent, but I saw that twinkle. And then his mouth had twitched into a grin.
The rain was heavy outside and I knew we would have to run for his car. It squeaked when you got in it, or did anything else with it. I thought about holding his hand while doing it. It made me smile and feel a little silly. I noticed he was watching me.
"So does that mean you want to?" His look was strange, like he was challenging me.
"Yeah okay. But you better buy me flowers," I told him and wiped cappuccino foam from my lips.
He showed up with tulips. I love tulips.
"I think I need to see if you actually do taste like cherries first," he muses now.
"Probably more like margaritas."
"No, I'm still expecting cherries. You just look like you taste like cherries." He props himself up on one elbow. I do the same and it gets awkward again.
I'm not sure where to look so I look at his arm, draped along his profile. Lean, but with the curve of muscle definition just learning to fit right on his body. He'd been working out and I hadn't noticed until now that it had done anything. It had, in fact, been a bit of joke at him.
He's looking at me, but there's no way I can meet his eyes. That would be too much like looking at him and all these years between us, and trying to fit that into some new category.
"I don't kiss on first dates," I say, forgetting how well he knows me.
He scoffs. "Yeah you do."
"Okay yeah I do," I sigh and look at that nice curve peeking underneath his t-shirt sleeve. He seems to be waiting. A patient wait, but it makes me uncomfortable all the same.
"Will you look at me already, Ella? Gosh," he chuckles and I roll my eyes, pick at a spot on his sleeve.
