#{instead of the acronym 'please excuse my dear aunt sally' it's 'please excuse my muse' and the math is completely off}

[kylo-wrecked]

@ronmanmob :// { taking a sharp turn from the properly delightful, here }

— ☾ —

Ben's lips struggled between forming 'uh, well' and 'well, uh…' until finally, they came together in a soft, indeterminate line and trembled. 

He then said, "No," his eyes belying a deep-seated mortification he was only made aware of through his sense of looking across the table through Ron and into a mirror. It was as if, for a moment, the man on the other side had embodied, in mind and soul, one great, polished lens. That, combined with a rising, kicking urge to smash it, smash what was in the other man un-smashable, and Ben was very much like a cat confronted with its reflection. 

Once, ten or eleven years ago, during a late-night round of Cards Against Humanity, her wrist turned around a similarly cumbersome whisky glass of old moneyed cut crystal, Miss Marciela Hodgson, as she'd been calling herself all evening, casually remarked on prospective Mister Hodgson's proclivity for manual strangulation. Ben was the only one to comment on it, to lukewarm laughter. There being no safe way to engage in the act was, as it turned out, 'kind of the point?' 

"I'm, sadly, vanilla," Ben admitted with another weak effort at smiling. His pupils oscillated in their bedrock, illuminated briefly by amusement, anger, or a transmogrification of the two. "Is that normal? Too normal? Should I start sex therapy? I hear it really gets the, uh, juices flowing. But why spend the five hundred bucks an hour when we can keep asking each other the same questions right here for free?" 

Ben hesitated, himself leaning over the narrow pub stool of a table, batting at the idea of proffering Ron the whole canape platter of his ever-abundant misery. He even had a little bacon-wrapped hors d'oeuvre for a nigh perfect stranger, Ronald Kray: 'You know, if you sold this conversation, you could slap a solid leg on every chair in the place.' 

He wanted to say it so badly, even if it was a weak point, dumb, hostile, and erroneous, as the chairs were more than fine; they were leatherbound. One couldn't find a sturdier barstool this side of the Hudson that Ben could occupy in relative peace, firstly. And actually, if breathed for maybe five Mississippi seconds and did that thing where he was supposed to remove himself from the details, hadn't he been the one to ask and hence provoke the former? Who couldn't take the dick here, exactly? The guy who wanted to throw a chair across a room and could write it off later to little fanfare and no one's surprise? What was the joke? Who was the joke? And having sufficiently emasculated himself, there no longer seemed a reason to be so defensive. 

Lately, he'd been thinking of calling himself Anti-Hulk. Never before returning to New York had Ben been so put off by the things he shouldn't do or say. That he'd spoken at all candidly in Ron's presence seemed 'kind of cute' when he'd behaved much the same way with his mother, several lawyers, Snoke, and yes, even some sex partners, and, as it had turned out, a Malaysian kingpin, whom Ben truly had no idea about, apart from he'd maybe seen the farm from a motorbike mirror, and two drug task forces later, who could say? 

Still, Ben immediately took back to the relatively safe distance of his seat, relinquishing the emotional canapes with a "Sorry. Sorry, that's uh. My bad." 

"Years of vanilla therapy hasn't gone very far," he said, motioning to his person. "I'm just a taller drink now."

Maybe his real kink had always been masochism.