At twenty-seven, YouTube sensation Ben Leonards is married to his work. If he's not whipping up lasagna with a side of science experiments, he's running statistical analysis of bitcoin during explosive behavior periods.
When a friend asks him to org...
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Tall's reading a book in the armchair by the window when Amelie and I knock on the open door.
"Your weekly delivery is here." Amelie lifts the brown paper bag with the éclair.
Tall smiles at Amelie and raises his eyebrows at me.
"Ben? Didn't expect you today." Tall takes Amelie's offering, opens it up and sniffs it. "Mmm. It smells divine, as always. Thank you, my dear."
Amelie kisses the wrinkles on Tall's cheek and sits down on the chair next to him. "Had to fight Ben over it. I won but you'll have to go walk outside with us today. For thirty minutes."
She won the argument around the dessert but agreed to Tall's new exercise goals. This might be a big difference this time around. We argue. We didn't use to. Last time I gave into her requests, because I wanted her too much. One thing the people I dated over the years taught me is that compromise and not standing up for yourself are not the same thing. Compromise requires both parties to meet in the middle. Or middle-adjacent. If one gets the upper hand all the time—it's not.
"That's elder abuse." Tall's smile grows wider and I know he's joking. "Thirty-minute walks are not a requirement for my release from this institution."
"No one said it was. It's the payment for the dessert." She reaches and mimes taking the eclair back. "Give it back or be ready to walk."
"So you are here to monitor that I don't eat the sugar without exercising?" Tall looks at me and takes his first bite of the pastry.
"I gave Amelie a lift."
"Oh." He wipes a drop of cream off his face. "Something wrong with Mike's bike?" he asks Amelie.
She looks at me, at Tall and me again. Her forehead scrunches and she says nothing.
"Ben?" Tall furrows his brow. Both of them stare at me.
"We broke your bed after we moved it to Amelie's place." I don't add the exact circumstance that happened, but only because Amelie asked me to tell no one how the bed came to be in the state it is. "I offered her to stay at my place. We had breakfast at 'Maison Parisienne', got your eclair there, had an argument over it in my car. I'll drop her at her place after and I'll fix the bed. I have my tools in the trunk."
"This sounds like a lot of information and not enough." Tall tilts his head, puts the half-eaten eclair on the bag on his lap, and asks Amelie. "Are you going to tell me the actual news?"
Amelie covers her face with her hands and shakes her head.
"Now, I see. Someone didn't follow my advice." Tall's back looking at me.
"I did not," I say. "I'm not sorry though. It worked out. We are together and I'm glad I didn't wait." I watch Amelie, but it's even harder to guess at her feelings about my words, when she bends down and buries the already covered by her hands face in her lap. Her hands were quite a sufficient barrier for me and Tall to not be able to guess at her reaction.
