Ben pooh-poohed my suggestion. “Ma, isn’t Dad at home waiting for us?” Marla nodded yes. “I don’t want to keep him waiting. We can go tomorrow.”
Marla glanced back at me, and I subtly shook my head from side to side, saying,no, now.Ben caught me. He was watching me in the rearview mirror, and he was angry. Man, was he angry. But he schooled his rage, so that it stayed trapped beneath the surface, invisible to his mom. Marla reached over the gear shift to pat Ben’s knee. “Don’t worry about your dad, dear. I can call him. We have these new fandangle contraptions called cell phones. They allow us to communicate in a variety of ways, visually, orally, text-based, or with their tiny graphic faces that express emotional states, called emojis. I can send him a note—perhaps an emoji of a pig, then a butterfly, followed by the words, ‘Taking Jess and Ben to the costume store. Home soon.’”
“A pig and butterfly?” Ben asked, clearly lost.
I cracked up behind him.
He twisted his body around to look at me as I rolled back against the seat in a fit of giggles.
“Yes,” Marla said with a straight face. “Shorthand for pigs are flying.”
Huffing out a frustrated puff of oxygen, Ben rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. Unable to maintain her straight face, Marla started to laugh with me. Shockingly mature, Ben looked out the window and pouted. As if possessed by the performance of being his girlfriend, I inched my body in his direction.
“Come on, Grumpy Gus.” I cooed, walking my fingertips slowly up the flank of his body, feeling the prickly fabric of his sweater and preparing to tickle him. “Costumes will be fun.”
As my hand got closer to his armpit, the tension in his shoulders seemed to dissipate. “I don’t like costumes,” he sulked in a last-ditch effort to make his perspective known.
“I think you’ll like them with me.” I smiled as my fingers reached their target.
He flinched, curling into a bucking ball of laughter and cried out, “Stop, stop, you win.”
Next to us, Marla shook her head. “Always so ticklish. From day one.”
I was laughing and grinning, and for a moment my heart started to swell, forgetting for a second that Ben and I were make-believe.
“Captain Hook?” I asked, holding up a pirate captain’s red velvet coat. I had already suggested fifteen other possibilities and Ben had negated them all.
“Oooooh,” Marla affirmed the Neverland-themed possibility. “Jess could be Wendy or Tinker Bell or even Peter.”
Ben shook his head no, again.
“Ugh. Stop being such a bellyacher,” Marla whined. “It's just a costume.”
“Don’t worry,” I consoled. “We will find something he likes.”
Marla rolled her eyes, and her voice was laced with sarcastic indignation when she announced, “I’m going to go ask the clerk if he has any suggestions for giant boy babies who hate fun and don’t want to bring utter joy to their mothers.”
I choked back a chuckle as she walked away.
Conspiratorially, Ben whispered, “I hate costumes, Jess. I won’t wear one.”
I strolled further down the aisle, grabbed a Mario costume, and held it up suggesting, “Mario and Luigi?”
“Which would I be?” Ben asked. “Dumb or dumber?”
“I don’t know-o,” I replied in a terrible Mario impersonation. “How about fun or funner?”
Ben shook his head again. Then he grabbed a French maid costume from the rack and held it up to me. His smile was sly when he asked, “How about this for you?”
Stepping in his direction, I grabbed the same costume in a larger size and quipped, “For us both.”
“Touché,” Ben said, his voice low in his chest.
I was close to him, face-to-face, only the costume bags between us. Ben was quite tall, so I had to tilt my chin up to see his eyes. Looking up at him, as he conceded that I had won another point, I felt my stomach flip. He was breathtakingly handsome with his perfect shiny hair, his angular features, and his stormy gray eyes. Despite myself and everything I knew about his obnoxious personality, I couldn’t help being attracted to him.
Caught up in the moment, my voice also dropped into a lower register as I flirted. “Are you sure? Those strong legs of yours would really pop beneath a ruffled hem.” The words I said were silly but my tone and the rhythm of my breathing had become brutally sexual.
Heat and hunger flared in Ben’s eyes, blowing his pupils wide. He practically growled, “You really want to see me in a dress, Jess?”