csinut214, you're a goddess. And not in that creepy, Charlie Sheen-esque way.
"I can almost feel the breeze through the field," Ben says and pops the last of the hamburger into his mouth. He chews around a smile.
She returns his smile, swallowing the last of her pre-dinner dinner. "It's nice out here today. The Wildflowers aren't even affecting my allergies."
"Weird," he says, and does that thing that she loves, juts his chin a little forward and up, like he's somehow volleying the conversation back in her end. An idiosyncrasy, something she's come to know about him, and she finds herself oddly comforted by this knowledge. "Good place for a picnic, huh?"
It hurts her face, the way her cheeks stretch to accommodate the smile that he causes to blossom on her lips. The best kind of pain, she thinks, and runs her fingers against the paper napkin laying limply on her thigh. Her own chin dips towards the hollow of her throat and Leslie finds herself staring down at the specks that are pointillism across the linoleum floor.
This is nice; Ben is... nice. Just being with him, right now, is so nice.
"Burgers in the commissary, then," he adds and rolls his napkin inside of the paper plate; he clutches the tube tightly in his fist.
Leslie nods, and rips part of her paper plate for effect. "Not that they're anywhere near this level of culinary genius." She giggles at her own sarcasm. "But yeah, Ron's pretty happy. His cardiologist... not so much."
"His cardiologist…"
"Dr. Rosenthal, Ron stopped taking calls from him months ago. April forwards them to me."
"Well, that's just not good."
"Not at all. Pretty awkward, really."
"I can imagine."
They are supposed to be discussing something, something real and tangible and pertinent to the city. But this back and forth is so easy, and there's a fluidity there that makes her think that they could talk about absolutely anything together and it would be this easy.
There's this thing between them but there's also the knowledge that this thing between them can't really be anything more. That's a factor, Leslie thinks, that's a factor why everything, this talking is so easy. They're good at it, because it's all they can do. The realization sends a pang of sadness radiating through her body.
She'll take what she can get, though, as far as he's concerned. Ann won't be happy to hear that (and she'll probably be telling Ann all about this later, as Ann will notice her conspicuous absence from the impromptu party) but, tough.
If this, the simplicity of sitting on a bench in a hallway of her workplace makes her this happy, then why should she risk it. And why can't this just be enough. Leslie's good at waiting, and she's not the kind of person who just gives in once she realizes that she's going to fail. The fight, the fight's the thing.
"This is a great mural," he cuts in carefully, a skilled surgeon with a scalpel, prying her delicately away from her thoughts. Surprising how he doesn't want to intrude, when he somehow managed to wind his way past her defenses, turn her assumptions about him completely around.
Sometimes, she forces herself to think about him as a whole, as Ben Wyatt. Because Ben Wyatt is the person who was hired to restructure Pawnee's government, who was brought in to be professional and crunch the numbers and above all else be logical in the choices he made. Ben is a guy she's come to know and like (like like) because he's so smart, and so funny and he cares so muchthat it breaks her, sometimes, when she thinks about it. Ben is a person she knows things about, like that he loves baseball, and that he was going to take a chance with her.
A real chance.
For a moment, she loathes her job. But then, her job is her life, and maybe this, this distance that Chris (the rules, honestly, not Chris; never Chris) has forced between them is for the best.
Leslie thinks about her planner in her office, and her hands itch to write down the plethora of "maybes" in a neat, orderly column.
Leslie glances up, sees it as though she's seeing it for the first time. But this is the thousandth (she can't do that math in her head, not now) time, she's just seeing it for the first time with him. "It is," she sighs taking in the greens, the yellows.
"Aside from the obvious," Ben begins, glancing between the painting and her, "What draws you to this?"
Leslie frowns slightly, but it quickly perks and leaps into a nostalgic smile. "This was painted…" She breathes in deeply, as though she can spell the fresh air. "Actually, it was painted by a high school student back in the eighties, she won an art award and so the city commissioned her to paint this."
"Ah, a local celebrity."
"Yeah. She drowned in the creek in back of the Dairy Queen, anyway, it reminds me of this trail I used to hike, by Tioga Falls. Back in college, I used to pack up all of my study materials and hike up there to be alone, and there was this field... in a clearing..." She glances upwards once more, the yellow flowers smiling down at her.
His face softens in this pleasant way she can't really describe. They remain quiet for a moment as a few offices clear out, having heard the word of the free food in the courtyard. As the footfalls disappear down the stairs, Ben assesses her. "Sounds much better than the library."
"It was. Cleaner, anyway. And a reprieve from the Sociology-Section groper of '96." Her voice is wan, but deadly serious.
He huffs out a bark of a laugh.
Caught up in her memory, she continues. "And, it inspired me. Made me want to figure out how to… keep the public land for public use."
He's intrigued, he bites, "Oh yeah?"
"Well, when I was a little girl," a sigh, and she licks her lips, her memory opening and offering her words to describe her youthful fantasies. "I read a book about John Muir, the naturalist."
"Oh yeah, I know Muir, he had a hand in the early creation of the Forest Service, he was a, uhm, a botanist and an engineer or something…" he adds. "And he had a sweet, sweet old-timey beard."
They both laugh at that, and Leslie adds as an understated afterthought, "Yeah, that was pretty fantastic facial hair."
"Yeah, you know Muir…" that's really, well, awesome. She doesn't know why she's surprised; Ben is a very smart man. She supposes she's always surprised when she finds another thing they have in common, something else they can share. "Any way, I read a book and I had this exceptionally… romantic image about the forest being a living, breathing thing. Something to behold and to nurture and for about three months I stowed away all of my after-school job pay in hopes of building a cabin somewhere out in Hoosier National or the Lolo and just living off the land."
Her cheeks color pink and she can feel heat creeping up her chest, her neck. "Of course, being cut off from civilization, from newspapersand from whipped cream… out of the question for me so it would have made it a little hard to live the real life of a naturalist. Way, way out in the woods…"
"I don't know, nuts and berries can get you a long way. Just ask Chris."
" 'sa good point, he could probably whip be up a low–calorie, no fat quiche out of those weird red berries that you always find growing in front-yard shrubbery. What are those?"
They both shrug.
"Then he'd formulate a cardio work out to sweat it all out." They laugh together, big, real belly laughs that bubble from their throat and cause their eyes to well up in mirth.
Leslie speaks around inhales, "Yeah, no, I could not have been a survivalist, but Muir-his story still resonates with me. Even if I'm just conserving nature on a small scale, it's, you know, it's something." Her words end on the last vestige of laughter and a silence fills the space between them.
The hallway is almost entirely silent, the ambient hum of computers and other technology idling the only backdrop to their conversation. She can hear him breathe and vice versa. They glance at one another for a moment, Ben's cheek jumping with a half smile when they both feel the strange tension seep into the pregnant air between them.
"Well, I'm more of a Gifford Pinchot man, myself." Ben drags his palms across the tops of his thighs and she can't help but wonder if his palms are sweating, too.
Leslie delves into her memory, draws up the image of Pinchot in her head, remembers where he fits into the landscape of the Forest Service and then, out of nowhere, imagines Ben as a Forest Service bureaucrat, taking meetings with Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
"Hah! Wow, really? Is it the beard that does it for you or…?"
"The bureaucracy of it all?" His voice is flat, but purposefully so and Leslie ebbs with the flow of his conversational technique.
"Yeah," she grins, "That."
"Just his constant drive, his absolute devotion," Ben leans back on the bench and crosses his arms across his chest, digging in. "His courage, during the great wildfires of 1910. I just," his voice becomes low, distinctly wistful. "His intentions, his actions are just really inspiring."
Ben looks so young and oddly frightened when he glances over at her. He's open, in the moment, and she wonders if that's what's caused the fear in his gaze. Leslie reflects for a moment on the hardships he's faced in the past; the ones she knows about anyway. Trying and believing in something and failing. She knows he doesn't want to fail again, and she doesn't want him to either.
She doesn't want to see him fall.
"There's something to be said about his passion, too," he adds, quietly. Ben has passion, she sees it in him every day. But she knows that he doubts himself, that his failures surround him, tattoos on his soul he can't seem to shake. Yet, Leslie wants him to know, needs him to know that he isn't lacking in that department. Ben Wyatt isn't lacking in passion.
"Wow," she says, her throat a tad tight. Leslie doesn't know, she had let herself get swept into the moment. "Yeah, that's… that is inspiring. Didn't figure you for such a conservationist sort of guy."
Ben closes his eyes for a moment and his lips creep up into an embarrassed smile slowly; Leslie finds herself powerless and stares at his mouth. It really is quite a nice mouth.; but then it's moving and he's speaking, stuttering out an explanation. "Really, I'm uh, I'm not, I'm…"
"What?"
He says it like it's a disastrous secret, something that could destroy him. "I'm a Teddy Roosevelt nerd."
This shouldn't surprise her, but it does. For someone so regimented and clean-cut she would have taken him for more of a Truman fan. "Are you, now?"
"Since I was, oh, seven, maybe." Ben just nods and undoes his arms, relaxes himself back into the corner of the booth so that they can see one another better. She's staring right at him, a mix of interest and delight and he reads her face, does that thing where he tilts his head and bites on the corner of a smile. "Alllllright, I'm not going to dig myself in any deeper here."
"No, no," Leslie assures, feels light and airy and warm in the most pleasant way. "Come on, imagining you playing Rough Riders, I think it's cute." And she can see him, the image is bright and vivid in her mind. A young Ben, riding a pony-head-on-stick, charging up San Juan Hill.
Ben blinks, his back straightening as he processes her words. "Oh, doyou now?"
"Shut up, cowboy," she smiles and lowers her eyes.
"You're one to talk, hermit," be tosses back immediately and he too lowers his eyes.
When she finally looks up, he staring at her. Tenderly. It's not weird, it should really be a little weird but it's not.
"He wasn't a hermit," she whispers. "He was a visionary. A naturalist."
"I know."
He shifts on the bench, closer to her and she tries to remain calm. But then, their shoulders are touching, they're distinctly leaning against one another. It's kind of great, and totally simple and she sighs a little, lets her eyes fall closed for just a moment, to savor it.
"I'm glad you… decided to stick around."
Ben's head tilts and his eyes soften. For a brief moment she feels awkward, a fourteen-year old who's finally gotten a moment alone with the boy she likes. Yet, in an instant, the pangs of fear vanish, melt into the pit of her stomach and regenerate as butterflies. Leslie's palms prick with sweat and her mouth is starkly, totally dry.
"Yeah," he adds softly, nudging her a little with his shoulder. "I think we work… really well together."
"The Pinchot to your Muir?" It's more complicated than that, but right now, it feels so simple.
"For what it's worth, I think we'd both look fabulous with beards."
"You sir," she thinks about it before she does it, and she thinks about stopping herself. But she doesn't. Leslie's hand reaches over and rests on Ben's knee, softly, solidly. "Are totally onto something."
She really does have some ideas for a healthier city, really great ideas, but the quiet, the stillness of sitting with him is so lovely that she holds off on telling them to him for just a little longer.