chapter eleven: i'll show you mine if you show me yours

Riding with Ben here is even better than in the city, because there are fewer lights and the winding roads through the island allow him to open up the engine. They sail smoothly through neighborhoods and rolling hills. Rey is enchanted by what she sees. It's a strange, charming mix of suburban and rural living, both clustered neighborhoods and sprawling homesteads crammed together in a dense forest. Rey wonders where Luke lives in all this, and what it was like for Ben to spend his late high school and college years here with him.

After a while, they come to a strange little parking lot tucked into a particularly sharp bend in the road. A private drive disappears into the trees on one side of the parking lot, and beyond that there is a little path with a trailhead sign posted beside it. Ben pulls into this lot and parks. Rey climbs off, handing him her helmet, and drifts over to the trailhead sign. There are the expected notices about dogs and cleaning up after them, a warning about being in bear country, and a trail map. She studies this curiously. It's a two mile loop plunging deep into the thick temperate rainforest that tries to creep into every ungroomed piece of land on this island. There are forks branching away from it which lead to other, longer trails. These run off the map, so she has no idea where they lead.

She turns back around to ask Ben about it. He is still at the motorcycle, taking off his light pullover sweater. The day has warmed rapidly, and probably he anticipates the hike warming him further. Whatever the reason, Rey appreciates it. Pulling it up and over his head drags his shirt underneath with it, up to his chest, and she catches a glimpse of a well-toned body beneath, not grotesquely chiseled but defined and very fine. She bites her lip and looks away, stifling the little laugh that bubbles in her chest.

He stows the sweater in the small storage compartment and locks it again, then moseys on over to her, either unaware or unconcerned with the eyeful she got.

"So does the trail look like it's your speed?" he asks.

Right. The trail. She observes the map again, then nods. "Looks easy."

"Good," he says, brushing past her. "Then let's go."

She heels after him, grinning a little to herself. The reddish-brown soil of the trail is littered with damp, mostly decomposed leaves, muffling their footsteps. It doesn't take long for the forest to swallow them up, and Rey can no longer see sign of civilization anywhere. Her whole soul expands under the sun-dappled gloom of the trail. Gnarled trees laced with curtains of moss surround her, and covering the ground between them are endless depths of wide leafy ferns. The pleasant, earthy scent of old trees and damp leaf litter quickens Rey's mind and her blood.

She starts to feel almost giddy, lost in these positively ancient-feeling woods. The forest is so thick it drowns out all other noise. She can't hear the road anymore, or anything at all but the echoing trill of birdsong.

"Ben, this place is straight out of a fairy tale," she says in awe after several minutes of walking together in silence. The way the sunlight filters through the trees sets the hanging moss aglow, and makes her feel like some fae queen is about to appear, or maybe a gnarled old bog witch.

Ben hums a wordless reply, lifting his head from the trail to glance around.

"Did you come here a lot?" she asks. "When you lived with Luke?"

He glances at her. "Sometimes. Luke has his own hiking trails on his property, though, so mostly I'd use those."

"You're kind of pale for an outdoorsman," she says with a grin, "I didn't have you pegged as a hiker."

"I don't live in the sunniest state, in case you've forgotten. And I'm not really an outdoorsman. I just like being where other people aren't."

Rey snorts derisively. "You and Mando would get along, i think. You both have an aversion to other humans. You'll both survive the next plague well."

"You won't. You like people," he says, and there's altogether too much knowing in that observation.

She shrugs. "I do. I mean, I know how to be alone. I'm comfortable being alone. It's like a second language to me. But to be honest, it's actually unbearable. Too much solitude can start to drag you into sadness and hopelessness. Everybody needs a meaningful connection to someone."

He pauses in his step, his mouth pulling down into a tiny frown. But then he shakes his head and resumes walking. After another minute of silence, he says, "So your guardian and I are alike?"

"Not really," she replies automatically, then considers. "I mean, neither of you like people, and you've both got this prickly exterior like you don't want anyone getting close. But that's about as far as the similarities go. You're easier to talk to, for one."

Ben's brows furrow skeptically, but he keeps his attention on the trail. "I'm positive I could never take in orphans, for another."

"He didn't think so either, until I refused to go away," Rey says with amusement.

Ben completely stops then, and Rey gets a pace ahead of him before she realizes it. She turns around and he's staring at her.

"What?" she demands.

"I just — those comments you keep making. About being alone. About refusing to go away. Are you willing to talk about that? Because if you are, I'd like to hear about it."

She blinks at him. "You want my whole life story?"

He nods once. "If you're willing."

"Oh..." she says, casting her eyes about the forest for some kind of rescue. Then her glance darts back to him and she squints. "Why are you asking so nicely?"

He smirks and takes a step towards her. "Would you rather I interrogate you the way we usually do it?"

That sneaky fast hand of his jumps out and closes around her upper arm, the huge wide breadth of it enveloping her bicep. It's a subtle reminder of how easily he maneuvered her around those first few encounters while pinning her with unrelenting investigation, probing her with questions. But even when he wasn't physically manhandling her, he knew how to be incredibly annoying in his curiosity. She remembered how pushy he was in the restaurant when she didn't want to talk about bounty hunting.

She bats him away, and his hand falls from her arm easily.

"No," she says, "I wouldn't."

He nods, and his smirk softens and disappears. "We're moving past that now. If you don't want to talk, I won't make you."

Rey frowns, regarding this perplexing person she has followed into the deep woods. He isn't as relaxed and content as he was in the coffee shop, but he isn't tense and guarded either. It's like he's holding himself back from something, and watching her for cues. He genuinely wants to know everything about her sad sorry story, and much to her own surprise, she discovers that she really does want to tell him.

So finally, she nods. "Okay. I'll tell you — but I expect a fair trade. I get to know about your life, everything you're willing to talk about. And you can't get mad at anything I ask."

Amusement flickers across his face again. "I accept those terms."

So they begin walking again, and Rey begins to tell him. She draws open the curtains she's kept closed around those painful early memories, talking about her abandonment by parents she couldn't recall, her misery in those foster homes she's blocked out, and her years running around the small town as a homeless ghost child, filthy and starving. She tells him about surviving on stolen or scavenged food, about hiding in old cars in the junkyard, stealing things to keep warm and bathing in sprinkler systems at night. She talks about the day a certain fugitive recovery agent showed up into town and parked his beautiful RV in the parking lot of the local grocery store. He spent a few days there, contracting out to a bail bond company, making a quick buck. Rey watched him until she felt brave enough to talk to him. He was nice. She started following him around every day until he inevitably chased her off. Sometimes she stole food from his trailer while he was out. It wasn't hard to get in from the vents up top. She liked his trailer a lot. It was comfy.

"But then one day when I was following him around,' she explains after they consult another trail marker to make sure they haven't strayed off the path, "I heard him tell someone he was leaving town again. I didn't want him to go. I can't explain it, but I felt like he was my person. Like we belonged to each other somehow. So I snuck onto his trailer and hid myself in a cupboard. I stayed in there for hours. Mostly I just slept. Eventually he found me, but by then it was too late and too many hundreds of miles to turn back around."

Ben throws her a concerned look. "That was such a stupid thing to do. What if he'd been some kind of predator?"

Rey bristles. "I was ten years old, my judgement wasn't exactly adult-level. Besides, I didn't get that vibe from him."

'Vibe," Ben says, scoffing softly.

"Yes, vibe," she snaps back. "I'm pretty good at reading people. But more important than that, I was starving to death and desperate."

The air between them is momentarily thrumming with irritation on both sides, but Ben backs down from it almost immediately. He clears his throat, and when he speaks again, there is an air of apology gently woven through his tone. "I cannot fathom what it is like to go through what you have endured. Your survival alone is remarkable. You are not easily defeated, I can see."

"No," she agrees. "I am not."

When he looks at her again, there is a glint of amusement in his eye. "You were never going to back down from my threats, were you? I pitted myself against a formidable opponent from the first breath."

Rey laughs, and her defensiveness fizzles away. "You finally understand."

"So why did he keep you, this bounty hunter of yours?" he asks, prompting her to resume her story.

She shrugs. "At first he just said I would only stay until he found a way to get me back to Arizona. But that got to be complicated, and then one of his religious leaders — he's part of this really old and really intense religion, some holdout from pre-colonial Latin America — told him it was destiny, that I was his foundling and he had a responsibility to me. So he registered as a foster parent and got all the legal stuff worked out, and so I got to stay."

Ben's eyes widen incredulously. "That's a ridiculous amount of obedience to one's faith."

Rey snorts. "You have no idea."

"Forgive me if you find this insulting, but that's a shit reason to take responsibility for a child. You deserved someone who would love you, not someone who endured you for the sake of obligation." There's an iron edge to Ben's words. Rey glances at him, and there is real anger written into his beautiful features. She thinks of Han. Is this how Ben sees his own father? Someone who stuck around merely out of obligation?

Still...she is touched that he would get so worked up on her behalf.

"I think he does care, sort of," she adds quietly. "In his own way. But you're right. I wish he could have been someone who genuinely loved me. I think Dyn is the only person who does."

Ben's hands ball into fists at his side, but he doesn't say anything else.

The trail dips down into a little gully where the trees are more densely tangled. Less sunlight gets through the thick canopy, and so there is less undergrowth. Old mossy trees stand sentinel over a dim cathedral of deep brown earth, lightly littered with leaf detritus and mushrooms. It's so beautiful that Rey leaves the trail, drifting out into the natural temple, her breath catching in her throat.

Behind her, she can hear that Ben has stopped too, no doubt wondering what she's doing.

She touches one of the tree trunks, rubbing her thumb against some of the fuzzy green moss patches growing on the bark. This forest feels content. As if it is at peace with its cohabitating humans.

Eventually Ben draws near, following her offtrail, watching her explore the deep, magic place. He doesn't ask what it's about. Rey doesn't really know herself, only that she wants to melt into these woods and become part of it. These trees are at peace. They don't wonder if they're loved, or if they matter. They sleep and dream deep, slow dreams of sunlight and water.

"I feel like I could stay here forever," she breathes.

A low hum of thought vibrates through him and he glances around. "You haven't been here when it's raining."

She laughs lightly. "Would you believe that I like the rain?"

"You would." He smirks, just a little.

"When I was in Arizona," she says softly, "I would look at pictures in books in the library, or paintings on the walls of buildings, of green places. Of forests. I wondered if they were real. What they smelled like. What it felt like to be there. I never dreamed it would feel like this."

Ben sucks a sharp breath between his teeth and stares at her with a difficult expression. His muscles tense, his hand twitching towards her, but he yanks it back and looks away. Rey wonders what he was going to do. She wonders what she was hoping he'd do. Her pain seems to evoke strong reactions in him, and his reactions make her want to draw him in closer.

He passes a hand over his face and turns away, moving deeper into the trees, towards a little picnic table tucked into the shadows of a close cluster of trees. Clearly he isn't inclined to rush her through this moment of exploration, so Rey takes her time bathing in her soothing surroundings and wondering about this boy who is so soft and so angry and so strangely connected to her own traumas.

He presses his hand to the table to check for moisture. Apparently satisfied, he sits on the tabletop, putting his feet on the bench, and waits for her to be ready.

"Do you like Colorado?'" he asks her after several minutes.

"Some," she says thoughtfully. "I like the mountains, but I'm not a big fan of the snow."

"Too bad," he hums. "I like snow. It makes staying indoors nicer."

She pictures him in a little winter cabin, heaps of fresh powder piled up to the windows, a fireplace glowing merrily, a cat on his lap and a book in his hands. The image comes so easily and with such a strong pulse of longing in her that she has to turn away quickly before he wonder why she's blushing. She's wondering it herself.

"So you're a cat person," she says, changing the topic to rid herself of the cozy image. "That cat back there at the shop really liked you."

He nods. "Taps. He's a friend. I like animals, though. They're easier to understand."

"Do you have any pets?"

"No."

"Me neither," she sighs. "Unless you can count a five year old."

Ben chuckles, and the sound makes Rey want to melt. She drifts closer to the table like a moth to a flame.

"I haven't had any opportunity to be around children, so I have no idea," he says.

"It's probably similar," she laughs.

He regards her curiously. "Does caring for Dyn make you resentful? Like you've been relegated to the role of nanny?"

"No," she says, easing up onto the table beside him. "I don't feel so lonely when I'm taking care of him. He's funny, and good company. It's nice to be needed. Even nicer to be loved. And it's...it's fulfilling somehow. I don't know. Yeah, he can be a real pain the ass sometimes, and it's not always fun, but on some deep level it just feels good. I imagine it'll feel even better when I'm caring for my own baby. Someday."

Ben's brow lifts in surprise, and Rey instantly flushes white-hot, her face burning. She bites her lip and pretends to stare off into the trees, like they're suddenly fascinating. She has never, ever voiced that thought out loud. She's never even articulated it privately, in her own mind.

Ben is silent. He doesn't say anything for so long that she finally risks glancing at him again, only to find that he's watching her with that expression she recognizes so well. Like she's trying to figure something out. Trying to read her — or perhaps successfully doing so.

A nervous laugh escapes her. "Anyway, let's keep going. We've still got more trail to cover."

She tries to jump up, but he grabs her hand and gently tugs her back down.

"Rey," he says gently. "You don't need to be embarrassed about what you hope for. Why do you feel awkward?"

She looks at her hand in his and then away again, unable to meet his gaze. "It's awkward because it's silly and ridiculous and I've never talked about it before with anyone."

"You just expressed your desire to be a mother. That isn't silly, and it isn't ridiculous."

Her cheeks feel hot as embers and she pulls her hand away, wishing he'd just stop talking about it because it's stripping naked her absolute most intimate secrets. Secrets so deeply buried, she didn't even let herself think about them, let alone share them with another person. A trembling breath escapes her.

Ben's voice drops. Where it was gentle before, it's positively tender now. "You want a real family. One who loves you. A family who can't leave you. Trust me, I understand that longing."

She manages to bring herself to look at him, and his gaze is fixed on her, full of heat and compassion. He does understand. In his face is a kind of hunger she well recognizes. The realization leaves her shaken. She has never let these thoughts of a family of her own crystallize before, fearful of the ridicule — even from herself — that she, the unwanted junkyard stray, the barnacle on Mando's life, should ever dream of something so impossible. But now there it sits, thrown out into the open, and there is no ridicule. Not from herself, and not from him.

Here was someone who gently held her feelings in one hand, and showed her his own in the other. They matched.

She lifts her hand tentatively. His gaze holds steady on hers, flicking down to her mouth just briefly. She touches his face, brushing hair back from his forehead in a gesture that is far too intimate. But she can't help it. He shudders.

Now is the right moment to invite him into this vulnerable place with her. To pull out his secrets as he has pulled out hers. Still, Rey hesitates. He promised to tell her, but what if he isn't ready? What if he reacts more defensively to the deliberate extraction of his heart than she did? The moment will be ruined, and she doesn't want that.

Ben's hand finds her wrist and lowers it back to her own lap. He gives her a small nod. "Ask your questions, Rey. Say what you want to know."

Tingles scatter over her skin at being so easily read. She inhales a steadying breath.

"What happened with your parents, Ben? How is it that you understand me so well? What happened with your uncle, and why did you leave your family's company?"

"Luke told you I betrayed my family," he says. It isn't a question. He already knows.

"Yes."

He nods in resignation. "I did."

"Why?" She is careful to not allow any amount of confrontation to color the question, only cautious curiosity.

"I felt like I'd already betrayed them long before ever going to Empire. It didn't seem like a big leap."

"But what does that mean?"

"My family is very..." he sighs, his whole body tensing. "They're very driven. And very committed to their causes. My mother and uncle to their father's company, and my own father to his self-directed enterprises. I was not exactly the son they expected to have. Not the kind of progeny who could fit their ambitions."

Rey remembers overhearing Han try to counsel Chuy on what to get his son. He was a weird kid, Han had said of his own boy. "You liked art, and they didn't?"

Ben stares at her, first in surprise and then unveiled fascination. "How could you possibly know that?"

"Your father."

It takes him a moment to process this, and then he slowly nods. "He's right, I guess. It wasn't that they didn't like art — my mother certain enjoys collecting pieces that evoke some specific emotion in her — but it's more the idea of that sentiment. They didn't understand me. My mother and uncle have many, many social obligations. Fancy parties, strategic social affairs, political and international functions, everything you would expect from a company as big and influential as Skywalker. Luke has since faded out of these public events over the years, but my mother has not. I hated them. They expected me to be there, to represent the family well as the fresh-faced rising future of SI."

"But you don't like people," Rey realizes.

"Exactly. I was quiet and introverted, where they were both extroverted. I liked art, reading, writing, music. Anything I could enjoy by myself. I've always had an appreciation for things that are —" he glances at her, but quickly looks away again, "—things that are beautiful. They say my grandmother was that way too, but she was also an outgoing, charismatic politician and everyone loved her. I definitely felt like the outsider of my family. I couldn't relate to anyone. My mother was gone most of the time, busy running the company my grandfather left to her and Luke. She hired me the best tutors and caretakers, but I was awkward and shy when she hoped to rely on me, and I knew I wasn't the son she always dreamed of. I hated the public eye. I hated that we couldn't be normal. She pushed me hard academically, expecting me to attend the best universities and get the best degrees so that I could come to SI with her. The older I grew, the less my mother and I had in common, and the less she seemed to know that to do with me except push this future she wanted for us. We became strangers living in the same house."

Rey doesn't dare breathe. She didn't expect him to open up this much. It's like he's been waiting to tell someone — to tell anyone — his side of the story for so long, it comes spilling out like water from a dam. He probably needs therapy, honestly, but then who doesn't? And Rey isn't about to ruin it by pointing this out. She wants him to keep going. To purge everything bottled up inside him.

Besides, this song has familiar notes, even if the melody sounds different.

But Ben falls silent. His face is stormy, wreathed in echoes of grief and anger, and Rey is struck with a powerful urge to soothe him. Heart beating nervously in her chest, she touches his hand, sliding her fingers over the back of it, wrapping them around his clenched fist.

"It's alright, Ben," she says softly when he looks down at her touch. "You're allowed to feel hurt by that. It's okay."

He draws in a deep, shuddering breath and turns his hand over, opening his palm so that her fingers slide into the spaces between his. He rubs a thumb over her skin, his lower lip trembling just a little. "I am hurt. She didn't see me. She didn't even try."

Rey could picture him, young and alone in a world of wealth he would happily trade away for a meaningful relationship with his mother. Surrounded by the empty semblance of a family. Her heart squeezes painfully in her chest. Her desert town and his rainy city were the same kind of lonely.

"I see you," she whispers.

His hand in hers tightens. He doesn't look up at her, but just keeps staring at their intertwined fingers as he pushes himself through the story she's asked him for.

"My father was even more distant than she was. Like me, he didn't fit in with her world at all, but he at least had the option to escape it. He always had his side hustle with Chuy. And he wasn't the sort of suave, polished arm candy she could trot out at social functions, so she let him get out of them. When I was little, he was around more to help out. We even liked each other then. We'd do all kinds of things together. But then the warrants started and his criminal activities began to catch up with him, and then he was leaving all the time to escape US jurisdiction. Eventually he stopped coming around altogether. Like he just forgot about me. I might have been willing to help him, but he never gave me the chance. My mother would never have allowed me to go into his particular trade, so he kept me away from it. Not that he wanted me as a partner anyway. For as much as my mother failed to understand me, I think my father was even more baffled. I was too soft for him. Not like you."

His gaze finally meets hers and Rey steels herself for his resentment, but it doesn't come. His dark eyes hold no reproach.

"He likes you. It's clear that you're a natural fit. You belong in his world. I didn't. I still don't."

Rey hasn't really felt like she belongs in anybody's world, so this assessment sends her emotions into an absolute tailspin. But she keeps herself together, lest they both end up a pile of sad goo on this forest floor. Han himself had said the same thing to her the first time she asked him about Ben. he'd said his son wasn't like the two of them.

"Ben," Rey says softly.

He grits his teeth and looks at with with a tormented look. "Rey, I — I want to —" he darts a look at her lips and then shudders again.

"What do you want?" she asks, trying to draw him back.

But he pulls his hand away from hers and gets down off the table. His body is stiff, his jaw tight. He motions back to the trail. "Come on."

She rises and follows. Maybe this is as far as he wants to take his story. Maybe he's done. He already told her that they sent him to live with Luke, and she knows how well that worked out. Maybe it's too scary to keep being this candid with her, and he needs to close off again to feel safe. Or maybe he's scared of whatever it is he wanted. She's a little scared too, if she's being honest with herself. But she wants to run towards it, whatever it is.

He clears his throat after a minute and continues, much to her surprise. "I lived with Luke while I did my undergraduate degree and accepted an internship with him — their idea, of course. While I was completing my master's, however, I was approached by the Director of Operations at Empire. Simeon Snoke is his name. I knew at the time that he only came after me because of what I meant to the Skywalkers, but I didn't care. He offered me a way out, an escape from this stifling life my family had designed for me. Luke and I were arguing all the time at that point. He kept lecturing me on my duty to my mother, because I was starting to make noises about not wanting to go into the family business."

He snorts and his voice is suddenly full of acid. "Duty to a woman who fulfilled only the barest minimum of hers to me."

They're walking side by side now, despite the narrowness of the trail, and their arms keep brushing. Rey doesn't try to avoid it. She wants the contact. She wants more than that too — has the most overwhelming urge to take his hand again, but she can sense clearly that he doesn't want that, so she balls her fists up to keep from doing it on impulse.

"Snoke could give me the power and respect at Empire that I was never going to achieve at Skywalker. Still, however resentful I was, I didn't think I could do that to them. Until Luke."

"What did Luke do?" she asks softly.

"We had a big argument. Bigger than any before. He discovered I'd been corresponding with Snoke, and it sent him into a rage. He told me that Empire had destroyed my grandfather — had driven him to an early grave. They've always been after our business, and they're willing to stoop to any means, however illegal, to acquire our secrets and run us out of the industry. He said the mere fact that I was talking to Snoke meant I'd already turned my back on the family. I was their disappointment." He swallowed. "Their shame."

Rey gasps, a shaft of pain driven into her own heart on his behalf. To say something so cruel to someone who struggled to belong! Ben hears her sound and turns his head towards her. She lets him plainly see the anger and hurt she feels for him and his lonely, rejected life. Is this how he felt earlier when he got angry about Mando on her behalf? Because she gets it now. She feels like she would physically fight anyone who tried to hurt Ben any further.

"Maybe it was petty of me," he says after a minute observing her. "I knew that if I'd never be worthy of them, at least I could have worth somewhere else. So I took Snoke's offer. And I went. I didn't take any company secrets with me, though I know Luke refuses to belief that."

"But now you're miserable," she says. "Do you really feel you are worth something at Empire?'

"Only because of who my family is," he admits.

They've looped almost back to the parking lot by now, and she can start to make out glimpses of the motorcycle through the trees. He draws in a deep breath, as if clearing himself of these painful memories.

"Besides," he says, "That's what today is about, isn't it? Getting out. Being free."

"Yes," she says, smiling, letting some of the earlier excitement creep back in like effervescent sunlight. "Forging your own path. Your own destiny."

"Destiny," he says with amusement. "As if there is any such cosmic plan for our lives."

"You don't know that there isn't," she says, and is surprised to hear herself say it. She's never believed any of that before. "Look at us, for example. Who's to say the universe didn't intend for us to be friends? I certainly wasn't planning on it. Were you?"

"No," he says definitively. "Is that what we are?"

Friends is what she easily applies to Rose, Jannah, Zorri, Poe, and Finn. It doesn't seem to fit Ben very well. But she doesn't know what else to call this, so she just shrugs.

Maybe Mama Maz was onto something after all, when she told Rey her answers lay ahead. Certainly there does seem to be something puzzling and strange about this whole scenario, where she's become a sideline participant in this family drama when she was only supposed to be here to catch a fugitive.

They leave their heavy talk of families and half-families in the woods. Rey feels impossibly closer to him now, and when she gets back on the bike she has no trouble at all with the physical contact.

After their hike they behave a little differently towards one another. They're less guarded, for one, but a sort of…playfulness has arisen now. Not completely, of course. They're both still too keenly aware of the unspoken obstacle between them, so they aren't given over to giggles and carelessness. But still, there is a kind of teasing between them now. The venom has gone out of their jibes and it is replaced with an intimacy that flares up whenever their eyes meet.

Ben takes her down to the main shopping district and they spend the next hour wandering around, poking into shops — particularly the small ones, and trying to compete for who can make the most unusual discovery.

Rey sees him fully smile for the first time during this little game, when she finds a hat with a two-headed stuffed duck sewn onto it. She puts it on and asks him if she wore it, would people think she had quacked?

It's a brilliant thing, his smile. It makes her stomach flip and her heart skip a beat and she marvels.

After that, it's her personal quest to provoke more of those moments and win his smiles like trophies.

It's so easy to be with him now. The tension of their previous interactions fades, and even though neither of them dare brush up against that intense emotional ordeal they just left behind in the woods, the afterglow stays with them. Rey has never been with someone who can relate to her struggle with belonging as much as he has, and there is a kind of freedom in being in his company because of it.

Ben keeps finding reasons to touch her — brushing against her, putting a hand to her back to draw her attention to something, even fully taking her hand again at one moment to pull her up the steps of a tiny ice cream parlor he spots in their wandering. Her fingers fit so perfectly into his. She doesn't want him to let go.

She likes these touches. He does it with the same deftness he used on her before, in the tunnel and the alleyway, but this time it doesn't annoy her. It has the opposite effect.

Possibly all of this is a terrible idea and will come back to hurt her when she inevitably has to leave to go back home, but she doesn't let herself think about any of that just now. Not even about Han, and her mission. She just chases Ben's hard-won smiles and revels in the feeling of rightness that glows happily in her heart and feels good to know that he is experiencing the same carelessness. And all of it is perfect.

—Until they run into Luke.

A/N:

Well this chapter kind of got away from me. Haha sorry, hopefully you don't mind. These two don't want to rush into anything they're not emotionally ready for, so they gotta work through the tangles. (Also I've scoured this for any weird quotation marks, but in case you get a random apostrophe where there should be quote, forgive me. My shift key isn't working well today.)

Also, I wasn't planning on leaving it at a cliffhanger, but what comes next was better suited to the next chapter. I'm planning Monday or Tuesday for the next update.

Comment replies:

Hartmannclan: Heehee, banter is the best. Thanks for your always lovely reviews!

Guest 1: Thank you so much! Cozy is definitely what that mood wanted to be.

Guest 2: Thank you, thank you! That means so much to me.

Phicurious: My dad had motorcycles when I was a teenager. It has been a while, but I'm happy my memories still served. And as for who, that question will be answered in later chapters

Guest 3: Ben's POV! I've been making myself to stick to single viewpoint character with this fic, mostly as a personal challenge. Usually I like to switch back and forth. But I may have to include some bonus scenes from his POV eventually. That's far too tempting.

fireelfmaiden1: Thank you so much! ️️