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Call It Off

Sooke Road

Perfect. We’d had sex on a night we weren’t supposed to and now Ben was way too relaxed. A giggle erupted in my throat and he flashed a big grin, all straight teeth, all pearly white. He pulled my right arm until it was rested straight across his chest. He took to tracing over my umbrella tattoo as he usually did before we fell asleep. Tonight there was no Roscoe curled up between us. There was no sign of the kitten; he wasn’t scratching at the door. Presumably, our feline friend had fallen asleep in his own special corner out in the apartment.

“Do you have a favorite tattoo?” Ben wondered as he traced over the peak of the umbrella’s dome.

“Mmmhmm,” I mumbled.

“Is this it?”

Was his favorite tattoo of mine also my favorite, he meant. I shook my head. I took my arm back from him and shifted so I was on my stomach, the entire front side of my naked body pressed to the bed. My opposite arm provided extra cushion for my chin and I used the pointer finger of my free hand, the one that had been draped across Ben, to point at a specific spot, just under my shoulder blade, among a group of tattoos.

“The bird?” he guessed correctly.

“It’s a hummingbird.” I went on to explain while his finger touched the bold lines and dark colours, “There’s a lot of douche bag bullshit so-called tribal art ink out there, but none of it looks like this. The hummingbird means something to the First Nations peoples on both sides of the Georgia Strait. My dad grew up on a reservation on the southern tip of the Vancouver Island, not far from Victoria. When I was a kid, along with my Berenstain Bears books, he told me the stories from his culture that had been told to him as a kid. I always liked the story of the hummingbird the most.”

Hummingbirds usually got a reputation associated with softness and femininity. The hummingbird permanently marked into my skin was anything but. Traditional Coast Salish art never looked soft or cute. It was boldly beautiful with minimalistic rounded patterns and thick lines. The colours always matched the boldness; the pigments were the same shades as those that had been created by my father’s ancestors with the materials that had been available to them.

For my hummingbird, I’d gone with primary colours: deep red and navy blue. It was different than my sailor tattoos or band tattoos. It was my favourite and I was proud of it, a reminder that I—just another mixed heritage kid from Victoria—had roots in a people with a rich history. Nothing was more Canadian than being born of a people who had been the first people in Canada, long before it came to be called a country.

Ben traced over the beak and then to the bird’s more intricate designs. “That’s…that’s really meaningful.”

If only I could say that all my tattoos were like that. I liked all of my ink, and had gotten it for a reason, but I didn’t have the same kind of story for even half of my tattoos as I did for the hummingbird. My left calf was neatly decorated in band logos and images from albums that meant a lot to me. I loved my hummingbird tattoo the most, but of the places I was tattooed, my leg was my favourite and those tattoos had nothing to do with my family history.

Flipping over so I was on my back again, I sat up for a second and pulled at the sheet that was crumpled up and ignored at our feet. My shoulder was pressed up against Ben’s once my head was cushioned by the pillow once more, the sheet pulled up to my chest. I leaned into him and held my right hand up in the air, in front of our faces.

“I have this.” I curled my fingers and hooked my thumb under my index finger, touching the silver jewelry that adorned my middle finger. “This one’s a raven.”

The wrap ring was a Coast Salish interpretation of a raven hand-carved into sterling silver. It was related to the hummingbird both aesthetically and meaningfully. An appropriate tangent to our discussion, I thought. Ben’s palm met mine and he brought my hand closer to his face. The small details were hard to see, especially in low light, and his reading glasses were nowhere to be found.

“I’ve never seen the way the lines curve on here before,” he noted. Of course he had seen the ring before—I only ever took it off when I was in the shower—but not directly in his line of sight. Besides, he was usually preoccupied with the umbrella tattoo.

“My dad knew that he wanted to propose to my mom long before he had the money for a diamond ring. So he gave her this, temporarily, until he could get the one they both wanted,” I told Ben, thinking fondly of my parents. “I almost think this is as valuable as the real thing. An artist put their heart into shaping and carving this. Doesn’t that take more work than popping in a diamond? I know that my mom loved this ring too, even after her real ring and her wedding ring. There’s a picture of her holding me as a baby and I can see it. She just moved it over to her right hand.”

Ben pulled my hand down and held it to his chest. “That’s a really sweet story. So she gave it to you once you were old enough for it to fit?”

“Yes. Well, my dad did,” I replied. “My mom died a few months after my first birthday. My dad kept a lot of her things for me that he thought I might want when I got older.”

A few beats of silence passed, like they always did, when I told a person that I hadn’t had a mother for a long time. It was always an awkward moment, more for the other person than for me, as they figured out what to say next. I tried not to bring it up, to avoid the awkward moment, but sometimes, like with the tattoo and the ring, it was unavoidable.

“Was that rough on you?” Ben asked.

A silent sigh of relief escaped my lips. He might have handled the awkward moment better than anyone I had ever met. Usually it was followed by a profuse apology and a pep talk about how strong I was. But surprisingly Ben knew better. He knew I wasn’t looking for sympathy or an apology for something that he didn’t have anything to do with.

“Not really. I don’t even remember her,” I spoke truthfully. “You can’t miss what you never had, right? My dad never remarried either. He did okay, raising a daughter all by himself.”

I’d never felt the loss of losing my mother. I had no recollection of her ceasing to exist in my life; I’d been too young when it happened. I didn’t remember her and only knew her from pictures and home video. My dad was probably the one who suffered most from losing her. It couldn’t have been easy on him to raise a little girl from diapers to adolescence all by himself. Dating wasn’t at the forefront of his thoughts when he had a child and small business to run. He’d never wanted me to suffer from not having a mother. My dad wasn’t the best father in the world but he did do his best to be both parents for me.

“So you didn’t grow up around the rest of your family?” Ben wondered.

“Not really.” I shook my head against the pillow. “My mom’s family is from the Maritimes. I’ve probably seen them more on tour than I did growing up. And my dad’s side of the family, his immediate family, a lot of them live on the reservation where he grew up. I’ve only been there a few times. He’s not exactly Mr. Popular on ‘the rez’.”

“Oh?”

“He went to university and never moved back home. He married a white woman and raised his daughter on his own,” I shared. “He might be a registered tribal member but...he’s just a run of the mill small businessman. He owns a Second Cup franchise in Victoria.”

Like I said, my dad wouldn’t win any Man of the Year awards, he’d just done what he could. He was proud to be aboriginal, but as I’d once heard my grandmother say to him, not proud enough. There were inherent expectations and responsibilities set on his shoulders by his community in Becher Bay that would remain unfulfilled. He wasn’t supposed to leave the rez forever and he wasn’t supposed to be so distant from the community that gave him life.

But he didn’t care. According to him, his only responsibility was to raise his daughter. He didn’t fail at that. Looking back, I wondered just how far he’d had to dig into his softer side to accommodate having a daughter. When I was a kid he would join me while I played with my dolls and he helped spread the glitter on my craft projects. He paid for my piano lessons and went to the recitals, and he wasn’t angry when I started focusing my energy on the guitar later on. When I was a giggling 13-year-old with my friends, showing interest in boys, he knew how to set boundaries. In high school, when I became a moody teenager, when Rich became my best friend, he just let me be.

My dad let me work part-time at his Second Cup for two years and save enough money to leave Victoria. The first gig The Automatic Flowers ever played was at the café on Open Mic Night. He was okay with it. He wanted me to be happy. Anyway, what could he say when he’d left home, too?

Most of my thoughts I kept to myself. Ben didn’t need to hear all about my parents or my childhood. Instead I made a mental note to call my dad the next day and see how he was doing. I hoped I would remember to do it in the morning. It would be a busy day: the band would be in the studio until dinner time and after that Parker and I were going to the Oilers game.

“Anyway,” I yawned into Ben’s shoulder before pulling my arms under the bed sheet, “I’ve overshared. Your turn now.”

I wasn’t supposed to tell him all that I had. Not when we were just sleeping with each other. But I knew he’d level the field. Ben was fair. For instance, he’d seen my place of work, having seen The Automatic Flowers play gigs twice now around the city. He’d gotten an up and close look at my world. He thought it was only fair, now that he could play hockey again, that I get to see his…if I wanted to.

For the rest of October, all but one of the Oilers’ games would be home games. I’d been hesitant but when I ran the idea by Parker, he said that we absolutely had to go if Ben was offering to get us tickets. After all, Ben had the hook-up for tickets: he was on the team roster. The market price to see a Canadian NHL team (even a bad one) at their home rink was insane. Ben offered to just get us the tickets but we refused—we didn’t want to feel like we owed him anything—so he got us a great deal. We were going to the next night’s game. Ben had seen me on stage, and we were friends, so I would go to see him on the ice. Fair was fair.

I waited for Ben to keep everything even and to tell me something that he probably shouldn’t.

“Well,” he cleared his throat, “what do you want to know?”

Did that make him guarded or an open book? His implication was that he would tell me anything I wanted to know but first I had to ask. I fidgeted under the covers. What he would end up telling me was not important—I just didn’t want to be alone in oversharing. If he participated, then it was okay that I’d crossed the benefits line this time.

Generic were the first kind of questions I could come up with. “Is this what you always pictured for yourself? Living on the 20th floor and getting paid to play your favourite sport?”

He blinked a few times, thinking, before he answered. “I always wanted to be a professional hockey player, to make it to the NHL. I can’t be anything but grateful for what I have.”

“But…” I sensed hesitation.

“But…” he repeated after my encouragement. “I’m not as far along in my vision of myself as I thought I would be.”

“What’s missing?” I wanted to know.

When I’d looked Ben up online, it wasn’t just his age and hometown that popped up. I didn’t just see the videos of his fights and the drunk girl flashing him while he sat in the penalty box. There was something that had made my eyes widen. I saw a picture of him, donning a Chicago Blackhawks jersey and a magnificent beard on his face, smiling proudly as he raised the most recognizable trophy in sports over his head. I even checked what was written on his Wikipedia page to be sure, and sure enough, it was true: he was a Stanley Cup Champion.

Admittedly, I was far from a hockey or NHL expert. But I knew for a fact that that was the culmination of a hockey career. That was what little kids who watched Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday nights dreamed of doing. Ben had already done it. I was very curious to know how he was lacking compared to his vision of what he wanted for himself.

“I want to be a family man,” he revealed. “I want to have a wife and raise kids with her. Honestly, I feel like I’ve been ready to be a father for the last couple of years. At the very least, I kinda thought I’d be married by now.”

There was a good chance that I stopped breathing for a few seconds. I suddenly felt antsy and out of place. Damn. I thought Ben was going to tell me that he wanted to be better at his sport all-around: more ice time and more points. But married? Kids? Ben’s vision of what was missing from his life at 27 didn’t even have anything to do with hockey.

What the hell was he doing wasting his time with me for? We were both very clear on the terms that we were just having sex and our arrangement was temporary. I wasn’t leading him on. We were just killing time.

“Ben, I…” I began but stopped myself.

His aims for as soon as possible were not even in my foreseeable future. I’d been about to tell him that he should stop wasting his time. My own selfishness stopped me. Just because it was going nowhere, it didn’t mean it was worthless. I looked forward to the nights in his bed, an escape, a time to put aside all my work in the studio from earlier in the day. Ben had become part of my Edmonton experience.

It wasn’t always easy to be around my bandmates. Just like every other human being, I needed some ‘me time’, too. We, as a band, spent so much time together and it was great. Being with my best friends wasn’t always what I needed though. Especially now, it was our first week in the studio recording songs that I’d written about Rich, and that Rich had written about me. I felt like I had to be tough and guarded to a certain extent. It was probably stupid of me, because I knew we would be releasing the songs out into the world and we would be playing them on tour, and I was fine with that. But being around the closest people in my life, and laying down my most personal thoughts on track, it was nerve-wracking because they were the ones who knew me best and had to continue to coexist with me every day when it was all over.

That was the complete opposite of my time with Ben. It wasn’t going to last and maybe that was why I felt okay exposing myself to him. He saw all of me, my body and my oversharing, and it was okay. He accepted me.

“It’s okay,” Ben said, as if reading my mind. “Being here with you right now is fun, too.”

Now I understood what his friend Kelsey had meant when she talked to me at Thanksgiving, warning me to be cautious. He was a conundrum. He slept with me because he could, because he liked to, because he hadn’t found The One yet. Ben was the best fuck I’d ever had. But his goals? They were fragile, as he was, because they were of love. And he was a romantic.

Notes

Thank you to everyone that has kept up with the story and kept reading! This is the approximate halfway mark. Your feedback is always appreciated.

If you're reading these notes, then you probably know by now that I love to back-reference. Some of the small details that I introduce in earlier chapters will have meaning as the story goes on. Again, it's my fault if these things seem unfamiliar to you because I usually go two weeks between updates. I do apologize. There are a whole bunch of back references in this chapter. Here's the roundup, a refresher, if you will:

Delia mentions in the first chapter that her father is of Coast Salish descent. She also says where her tattoos are in the first chapter. She talks about working at Second Cup in the sixth/previous chapter. Delia's carved silver ring isn't anything new either. She mentions it very briefly in the third chapter when she is describing her outfit, and she mentions it because I knew that it would mean something when we got to this chapter. Look at what she finds out about Ben by the end of their conversation because of it. :)

Extended Chapter Notes

Comments

So I know these stories are probably never going to be updated but it really isn't fair to this poor reader to hint at sequels and updates and never get them! I know some people like realism in their stories but I read these stories to escape and sad endings make me sad! Jùst thought I would get this off my chest!

Polarvortex Polarvortex
8/31/20

I'm wishing for another story with Ben <3 or even a sequel..

XxcorinnexX XxcorinnexX
8/12/15

Are you still writing a sequel? Please!!!

Tento2 Tento2
6/13/14

I Finally Uploaded my Own Story!
Here is the link!
http://www.hockeyfanfiction.com/Story/36019/How-To-Perform/

Psquared91 Psquared91
2/18/14
So excited for a sequel!
BostonGirl711 BostonGirl711
10/18/13