The One In My Heart

“Come with me.”


He led me upstairs to his man cave, which I hadn’t seen before, with a pool table, a card table, and big, deep leather chairs next to two laden bookshelves. I blinked: At the far end of the room stood two old-fashioned arcade video-game machines. Bennett turned them on. The moment the music started blaring, I was swept back to my childhood: sneaking out of the house on Saturday afternoons in a baggy T-shirt, jeans, and a backward baseball cap—so as not to stand out as a girl—and heading to what Pater dismissively called “that dungeon.”

“My God, what games are they?”

“Everything,” Bennett replied proudly.

For all the machines’ retro appearance, they were not actually vintage—and each came loaded with hundreds of different games.

I scrolled through the list of titles, squealing at regular intervals. Many of the games had become available online as browser emulations—but that wasn’t the same, was it?

“I brought the machines with me all the way from the West Coast,” said Bennett. “Promise me you won’t tell my dad.”

“I won’t tell anybody,” I promised, still scrolling down that magnificent list. “And I’ll sleep with you for playing time.”

“Of course you will.”

I played Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, and Bank Panic—the owner of “that dungeon” had a fondness for older games. I was about to start Galaga when Bennett hooked a finger in the waistband of my pajama bottoms. “Okay, Sam. Time to put out.”

I caressed the screen of my new best friend before I squeezed Bennett’s behind. “All right, you ugly Orc. Take me to your nasty cave and have your way with me.”

We did tremendous justice to interspecies captive sex.

As I was on the verge of falling asleep, Bennett said, “I could be wrong, since I’m barely a hundred pages in, but maybe the reason Zelda loves the story is that in the end, no matter his own fate, Frodo left everything better than he found it.”

I opened my eyes, but in the dark all I heard was his soft, even breathing.


THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, BENNETT and I spent as much time together as our schedules allowed. We played Cards Against Humanity and laughed ourselves stupid. We gave his arcade machines another workout. One evening, when I had to stay late at the office, he came and read The Fellowship of the Ring in a corner. We even met the Material Girls for drinks again, during which Daff and Lara admitted shamefacedly that they’d been to the MoMA exhibit. Carolyn alone abstained from the museum, but not from the online coverage—so Bennett made them all compliment his ass while I choked laughing.

The notable cloud in our silver lining was the lunch with Zelda and his parents. Mr. Somerset didn’t recoil at the sight of him, but the meeting turned out to be as sterile as I’d warned Bennett it might be.

“I thought your dad couldn’t possibly fail to see the exhibit as both ordinary and beautiful,” I said later that day, in his apartment.

We’d been silent for some time, me wondering, with a heavy heart, whether it was possible to recover from this misstep.

“So you think of the exhibit as both ordinary and beautiful?” he asked softly.

Of course I did, but the thought of admitting it outright discomfited me. “Well,” I answered, drawing out that syllable, “actually, I always think of the hens. You were cuddling a pair of them in one of the pictures.”

“Oh, Lulu and Betty?” At my widened eyes, he grinned. “Did you think our egg hens didn’t have names?”

His experience with poultry fascinated me. I had lots of questions, from what the chickens ate to how many eggs they produced to what was done with the chicken poop.

“That went right into the compost.”

“Okay, that does it. Come the apocalypse, I’m sticking with you.”

A lighthearted conversation followed on how we could bunkerize his house in Cos Cob. By the time that wound down, I was almost entirely out of my gloom concerning his chances with his father.

But Bennett fell quiet again. And didn’t say anything else until I’d closed my laptop for good. And then it was only, “Come,” as he led me upstairs to bed.


THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, BENNETT TEXTED, Are you free tonight? I’d like to see you.

The text reached me at a symposium downtown. I studied the words: They seemed much more formal than was usual for him, almost as if he were arranging a business meeting, rather than a sleepover with his girlfriend.

But that didn’t stop me from saying yes. In fact, I was so enthused about seeing him again that on my way back I hopped off at Canal Street and raided Chinatown for takeout.

Bennett had just come out of the shower when I showed up with the loot. “Hmm, what a dilemma,” he said, taking the heavy bag from me. “I want to swoop down on both you and the food.”

“Let’s look at this scientifically: Takeout will be cold after sex, but I’ll still be hot after takeout.”