DVD Commentary: Parallel Lines, Touching
Title: Parallel Lines, Touching: The DVD Commentary
Author: saucydiva
Illustrator: craponaspatula
Word count: 4k for the story, 3k commentary
Rating: PG, with one very NSFW video embedded
Disclaimer: clearly I don’t own it or I would have a tiger on retainer
Timeline: between 3x09 and 3x10.
Author’s Note: Writer’s block is the worst so I wrote a DVD commentary for this thing I wrote. Stay tuned; at the end is a surprise.
Read the original here.
saucydiva: “We had a snowpocalypse earlier this year; the whole city shut down. I totally get why Parks didn’t have a winter… but it did occasionally strike me as incongruous. Like when I was making snow angels shoveling like an adult. (Note to self: write something where B/L make snow angels, and then drink hot chocolate. Mittens are involved.)”
rikyl: “Please write that snow angels story. Mittens. Hot cocoa. You know what I really want is a winter episode where everyone in Pawnee is freaking out over a "snowstorm," and Ben is rolling his eyes because he lived through the Halloween Blizzard of 1991 (which in my experience people from MN will not stop talking about), and southern Indiana's little flurries don't even compare.”
Erika and I were emailing back and forth and I thought this sounded like a terrifically fun idea. I started writing and sketched out the first half of the story. I knew they’d end up in her house, that he’d find her house horrifying, and that he’d spend the night.
I tend not to outline when I write. I dive in, and write, and rewrite. So I knew I’d get there, but I wasn’t sure how it would go after that.
Ben couldn’t explain why he was over at Leslie’s house shoveling.
It was the Great Snowpolapsye of 2011, and work was cancelled due to the fact that no one could get their cars out of their driveways. Leslie calls to tell him work is cancelled (naturally, Leslie had organized the phone tree). One thing led to another, and somehow she talks him into leaving his warm motel and walking a mile to her house to help her shovel.
Luckily, the snow is packed down pretty tight, and he had years of practice walking through Minnesota snow. Since he is staying staying in Pawnee, he had gone back up to his storage unit, and, in a fit of optimism, brought everything to his motel, including his winter-wear. It was fortuitous timing, as the snow had started right after. So far, winter had been mostly mild, but the forecasters had been right, and this is crazy snow, with some drifts going three or four feet up buildings, and a good foot or two covering everything. It is practically the Halloween Blizzard of ’91, and that was saying something. It actually isn’t super cold, though the snow isn’t melting, and the sun is out. Except for the snow, it was a nicer winter day.
I lived through the Snowpolapsye in early 2011. It was ridiculous, and we were buried in snow, but the day wasn’t all that cold, per se. We just couldn’t drive anywhere. For one day, Chicago was mostly shut down. It was glorious
And so when Leslie calls, he puts on his snowpants and winter coat, and trudges to her house through the snow, thinking to himself the whole time. Why do you agree to do these things? Is it her? Is it this town? Of course it’s her. But this is ridiculous.
He almost turns around. But then he saw her, standing on her front step, waving him down. She is wearing a big puffy coat with a faux-fur lined hood, and when he sees her he forgets he is cold.
She throws him a dazzling smile and hands him a shovel, and he wants to gather her in his arms and touch her hood. But he doesn’t, as usual.
The shoveling is hard work, made harder by Leslie’s love of snow. They had barely gotten a quarter of the driveway cleared off when Leslie leans over her shovel, sighing dramatically, and started scooping up snow in her mittens. She pats one into a snowball, and lobs it at him. It splatters on his chest, breaking apart.
Now is as good a time as any to bring up music. I can’t both write and listen to music. If I’m writing, it’s quiet. But I like to listen to music beforehand, to get me in a mindset. Often when I’m writing fic, I listen to Noah and the Whale’s “Five Years Time.” Usually, I have another song that helps, too, that varies by story.
For this song, it was Childish Gambino’s Freaks and Geeks:
I have no idea why. This song- NSFW!- is not thematically similar, and it has several words I don’t use in polite company, and two words I never use at all. But I listened to it a hundred times while writing this story, and listening to it makes me want to write about snowballs.
“You did not just do that,” Ben says, slightly shocked.
In response she sticks out her tongue and scurries to the other side of the driveway.
Ben reaches down and starts scooping snow, packing it into a perfect ball, and as he is patting the snow it occurs to him he hasn’t thrown a snowball since college, and yet somehow this woman is bringing out an entire side of him he would not have thought still existed.
Holy run-on sentences Bat-Ben!
He tosses the snowball lazily at her shoulder, and she ducks, and it lands right on her hood, covering her hood in snowflakes that sparkle in the sun, and for a moment he stares thinking, she’s perfect, until she shakes her head and he blinks and when he looks at her again, she is only human.
That’s my favorite part of this story.
Ben gets back to work almost immediately. Leslie seems reluctant, and she throws another snowball at him, missing him entirely. He ignores her, and she pouts for a moment. He can’t watch her, though, because she is just too much and he has to focus on something else lest he do something very foolish today. There is something nice as well about being able to focus his energy on something physical, to throw that untapped desire like so much snow.
They have a little more than half the driveway cleared when Leslie tosses her shovel aside and collapses dramatically on the lawn. Ben continues to shovel but watches her out of the corner of his eye.
“Ben, Ben, come over here and lay in the snow with me.”
“I would rather retain my status as an adult, so no thanks.”
“You have no sense of fun.”
Ben keeps shoveling.
Leslie lays there for a few moments, and then starts talking. “When I was a kid-“
“I can only imagine what you were like.” Probably pretty close to what you are like now, but tinier.
“-my parents were fighting all the time. They didn’t divorce until I was in high school, but they would fight.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
“My mother has always had a drive to succeed. It got her to where she is today. She always wanted to instill that in me. It wasn’t enough to want to be mayor. I should want to be president.”
“So you didn’t want to be president yourself?”
“Oh no, I did. But when you are eight, you want the things your parents want for you.”
My parents wanted me to stay in Partridge and it killed them when I left. He almost tells her that, but his tongue isn’t cooperating. He lays down his shovel and walks over to her, standing over her.
I choose to believe Ben’s parents-who I assumed were still married, damn it-were upset with how Ice Town went down, but still loved their kid enough that they didn’t want him to leave.
She isn’t making eye contact with him; her eyes are focused somewhere in the past. “My dad, though. He was different. He wanted me to stop worrying about the future and just run around and do cartwheels and make snowmen. He hated the political stumping and the tuba lessons and the student council.”
Leslie has a tuba in her living room… I assume she plays it.
“Is that what they were fighting about?”
“Oh, no, in retrospect it really wasn’t about me. It was them. He wanted to play, she wanted to work. He was happy just doing his nine-to-five, and she wanted to run for office and impact people and be in charge.”
He sits down in the snow next to her, crossing his legs.
“I have always been her daughter, you know? She wanted, and I do too. But sometimes I wonder if I didn’t get enough time to play, you know? I am-was-his daughter too.”
Ben thinks back to the summer, when the government was shut down and there was almost nothing to do, even for the essential government employees. Leslie was still there before him every morning, despite the fact that he was one of the two people in the building who actually had stuff going on, and she still left after him most nights. Whenever he caught a glimpse of her, she was working on something. She had emailed him dozens of ideas a week, even sending them on the weekends. He knew she went out sometimes, but even when she was dancing with Ann at the Snakehole she always seemed to be organizing a proposal or writing a list in her head.
He looks down at his hands, and then looks over at her. She still looks a little lost in the past. Ben lays down, too, and they are parallel lines, going the same direction but never touching.
I hate naming my stories.
I do.
It’s always a struggle. For me, I have to wait until the very last second-I have to be at the point where I might change a line or adjust a word, but nothing more than that-before I can name the story.
This means that while I’m writing, everything’s untitled. This story, for instance, was “untitled mittens fic” when I would email the drafts to Erika. Safety Zone was “untitled water balloon fic.” Who More Englids the Night was “Midsummer Night’s Draft.”
Then once I’m at 99.5% finished, I can reread until an image or line strikes me, and I can name it from there.
“Let’s… let’s make snow angels,” he says, and the words feel foreign on his tongue, but he has to bring her back to the present, has to give her that experience she never indulges in.
She doesn’t answer, but he can hear the snow crunching and the sound of her puffy nylon coat flying over the snow, and she giggles.
He does too, and he starts fanning out his arms and legs, not even caring that the snow is getting all over.
There is one thing he didn’t plan for, though. They are just close enough that when they move their arms their hands cross paths. Even through his leather gloves and her mittens, he can feel a heat, and his hand tingles a little each time. He giggles at the insanity of it all.
Soon they are both laughing in the winter sun, moving fast, their hands flying over the snow but lingering slightly over each other.
When they stand up, they stand back to admire their work. Two snow angels, overlapping slightly, so they look like they are holding hands.
Ben turns to Leslie. The driveway isn’t done, but it is much better, and he is starting to feel it in his muscles. “We should take a break.”
“We did just make snow angels.”
“A break from the snow.”
Leslie shifts her weight from one hip to the other, and he can see a conflict playing out on her face. Biting her lip, she says, “You can come in if you want.”
Ben realizes his mistake, although he isn’t sure how to reassure her he really just wants to take off his snowpants, and is fine with leaving on his actual pants. So he just nods and hopes he doesn’t come off like a creep.
Leslie opens the door, and Ben steps into her house for the first time.
He isn’t sure what he was expecting. Maybe a wall full of binders. Certainly ruthlessly efficient organization covered in home-y knick-knacks, with a big American flag. Her office, with a kitchen and a television. With a green kitchen. And one of those big recliners. He might have given this some thought before.
Leslie’s hording issue makes her very real to me. She’s juggling balls like no one else, but something somewhere has to slip. And in real life, hoarders-and let’s be real, anyone who has twenty-year-old news papers stacked in her living room is a hoarder-don’t change. Not really. They might clean up, but the behavior and impulses are still there.
So Leslie’s not cured, and she’s gone right back to where she was, only now, she’s got everything that was in her living room they removed for her dinner party in a storage unit. This mostly new stuff, though she’s certainly rescued some boxes from that storage unit.
In my head canon, she never deals with the problem, and it drives Ben crazy. They put stuff in storage units, and it bothers him immensely to be paying to store old National Geographics, but that’s the only way they can keep the space livable. It’s never as clean as Ben would like, though.
But what he finds is a little horrifying. Leslie has stuff everywhere, piled throughout the house. It’s all random stuff, too. A ton of newspapers, and then a potted plant on top. A huge framed photo of some politician he doesn’t recognize. Phonebooks. Birdhouses. Birdcages. Bird-themed clocks.
The photo is Marlene, of course!
There is nothing I could possibly say, here. “Do you have any pets?”
She pauses for a moment, then sighs, and says no.
He tries to think of something else to say.
He fails.
“I am a little bit my father’s daughter,” she says, mirthlessly.
He winces. He can’t stand her sad look. “It’s… great. You have everything you need.” All in one spot, in your living room.
“The kitchen is better.” He follows her in to her kitchen to discover better is a relative term. “Do you want something to drink? I have orange juice, beer, and milk.”
Ben sits at the open chair in the kitchen. He fiddles a little, and then pops back out of the seat. “You know, if you have some chocolate and some sugar I could make hot chocolate.”
Leslie looks at him like he is a waffle, which is doing some remarkable things for him. “Do I have… Ben, I have all the chocolate and most of the sugar.”
The second-favorite line
He ends up making hot chocolate on the stovetop using the recipe he used to make in college back when he used to eat like Leslie does now. He pours it into two mugs, and tops them off with whipped cream preemptively. He hands the one with far more whipped cream to Leslie, who spent the time moving things around so that they can both sit at the kitchen table.
The look of bliss on her face when she drinks it makes sitting next to a pile 2004 Time Magazines worth it.
Talking about the election in 2004 leads to a discussion about the election in 1996 which leads to a discussion about Jimmy Carter which leads to them going to the living room to sit on the couch and watch the History Channel. Leslie refills their mugs-Ben really is a healthier eater than this most of the time, but this is a special occasion-and he starts fiddling with the remote. Unfortunately, the History Channel has some reality show-Leslie is outraged-so they put on the Food Network and start discussing food instead. Throughout this discussion Leslie gulps down hot chocolate, as though someone is about to wrench it from her hands. When she finishes her mug, she snakes her hand over casually, grabbing his from the corner of the coffee table, finishing it off. She sticks her finger in to get the whipped cream rimming the glass, and when she sticks that finger in her mouth his heart skips a beat.
When I spoke to craponaspatula about illustrating this fic, I mentioned that I wanted the picture of them touching hands when they made snow angels. She sent me a first draft on that, and it was glorious. I spent several days staring at it on my phone every chance I got. When we got close to posting, she asked me to give her the title (which was undecided at this point) because she had an idea for a title banner. This was the image she chose. And the title banner is so cute.
Rachael Ray is droning on about sandwiches when Leslie gets up to look out the window. She looks concerned, so Ben gets up and looks too. The snow has started to pick up; the wind is howling and the sky has gone gray. Their snow angels are merely faint indents in the lawn, and their shovels are disappearing.
White people love Rachael Ray. I watch her with my grandma; she hates her orange kitchen and wants her to tie her hair back. Grandma has opinions on everyone on the Food Network.
Ben turns to her. “We should have brought in your shovels. They're going to rust now. Do you want me to go get them?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it; I have more in the garage.” Naturally.
“I'm just not sure how I am going to get back tonight,” Ben says, frowning as he watches his snow angel disappear.
“I'm sorry to be taking you away from your life like this.” Ben looks at Leslie, who looks pleased. When she sees him looking, she ducks her head so quickly he wonders if he made the whole thing up.
“No! No, that’s not what I-you know, we should really get something to eat.”
Another trip to the kitchen reveals that while Leslie has sugar and chocolate, she does not have much that would make a meal. She has flour and yeast, though, so Ben sets about making pizza dough. Leslie seems slightly fascinated by the process, and she stares at him while he kneads.
“Surely you have used yeast before, Leslie.”
“No… it was aspirational yeast.”
It is my life goal to make a good pizza crust. I know it’s insane and unnecessary, but I want to do this. And visit Australia. But mostly the pizza crust.
***
They both wake around 2am. They had fallen asleep on the couch in the middle of a Cupcake Wars marathon, and though they had passed out with at least a foot of space between then, they wake up with her arm clutching his and his leg under her thigh. It feels blissful to be tangled up with her, and in that twilight moment when he is both asleep and awake he thinks, I don’t know why I am here, but this feels right. He looks over at her, and he has this overwhelming urge to kiss her temple. Then the thoughts come quickly; you can’t, she is your coworker, she might not feel that way, and you can’t even leave if she doesn’t. They share an embarrassed smile instead, and pull away.
Leslie pops up, and tells him she has an extra toothbrush if he will just follow her this way to the front hall closet. She opens a bulging closet, and pulls out a rainbow of toothbrush options. As Ben grabs a blue one, they both hear a loud noise. Leslie shoves the bundle at him, and runs over to the banister overlooking her living room.
“There’s been a bit of a… landslide,” she says, turning a little pink. “You might not be able to sleep on the couch….”
Ben stands there, connecting the dots a moment before she finishes with “so you are going to have to sleep in my bed.”
Ben licks his lips and starts picturing all the ways this could go south. I could be turned on. She could be turned on and I could be useless. Both of us could be turned on and neither of us will say it. We could sleep-actually sleep-and she could tell everyone I didn’t even try anything. I could snore. Do I snore? Who was the last person who could answer that? Tom. That is the last conversation I ever want to have.
She has apparently no qualms about this idea, because she puts a finger up and runs over to a door. He hears some loud noises, followed by some swearing, a few more noises, and then she sticks her head and an arm out the door and beckons him in.
Ben, who hasn’t been to church since he was fourteen, has the strangest urge to cross himself before entering.
I don’t go to church either, but I sometimes want to cross myself when I get stressed out. It seems like a nice little calming ritual.
One thing I can’t really wrap my head around is what religion anyone on this show would follow. Any thoughts? I’m curious. I can’t picture anyone (except maybe Jerry) participating in religious ceremonies.
Her bedroom is a sunny yellow, and even though it is stacked to windows with crap, she has a vase of yellow flowers on her bedside table. Sunflowers, those most be sunflowers.
She’s standing in front of her closet, back to him, tossing tshirts and pajama pants on the bed. “This isn’t weird, Ben, it's only weird if we make it weird, you know? The bathroom’s right over there, if you want to use it.”
This was as far as I got in my initial writing fit. I got stuck, so I started writing a Christmas story. And then I started The Trouble with Physical Proximity. And a bedroom farce that involved sending everyone to a cabin.
But around this time I started talking to craponaspatula. She posted some fan art, and in the comment section mentioned she wanted to illustrate fan fic.
WHOA.
I started trying to subtly solicit her to draw for my stories, because I felt that her art style was a good match for my writer’s voice because how awesome would that be? I sent her a message, and suggested something already written, Safety Zone, which was fun, and you know maybe she wanted to maybe if she was interested illustrate that? And if not, I had a story I was working on; (actively! Probably!) a story that was funny but took a dark turn.
For me, this is a dark story. I mean, Leslie’s sad! It’s dark.
I sent her my half-written draft, and she liked it. I also sent her photos of the Snowpolcolypse, on the basis that she lives in California and this was an unusual amount of snow for even for my town, much less for someone who lives a Katy Perry song. She liked it, which meant I had to finish it…
Grabbing some clothing, he goes into the bathroom. The bathroom is mostly uncluttered, so he does the only thing he can do, and he gets ready for bed. Oh, and he checks out her medicine cabinets. He’s only human, and he is deeply curious. Facewash, lotions, a few expired prescriptions, birth control pills- don’t even think about that one, Wyatt- and enough toothpaste to fill a shelf. That isn’t what catches his eye, though. Inside the doors to the cabinet, she has post-it notes, dozens of colorful post-it notes, all with motivational quotes and encouraging thoughts. A large number of them are written to her, ‘You can do it, Leslie!’ and ‘I believe in you, Leslie!’ and ‘I love you, Leslie!’ This might be the cutest thing ever.
I’ve written about this on tumblr, but I ship Parks characters/office supplies. This is a continuation of that love, and a way to echo those messages she’d leave herself on her voicemail.
She brushes past him when he leaves the bathroom, and she goes in, leaving him alone in her bedroom with just his thoughts.
His first thought is that he is not going to hit on her. She deserves to feel comfortable in her own bed, and he is not going to be a creep.
His second thought is that it is going to be really hard not to hit on her.
Next he thinks about what would happen if he did hit on her and she was into the idea, and he indulges in that for a few minutes.
Then he realizes he needs to stop that line of thinking because she is coming back any moment now.
His thoughts are interrupted when she reappears. He gestures at the bed. “After you.” Then he cringes, because what the hell was that? “Leslie, I just want you to know I am not-I would never-you don’t have to worry that I am going to-I respect you.”
Leslie peers at him, puzzled. Then nods and smiles at him. “I'm going to go check on the furnace. It always seems to have problems in the winter. I should get it replaced but then I…” Leslie was already down the hall, leaving Ben to agonize some more about this. Also, how long can he stand next to a bed without it starting to look weird?
Leslie never planned to invite Ben in. Had she thought through her plan, she would have realized it’s perfectly reasonable for him to come in, because at some point he’d get wet/ need to use the bathroom/ want a drink. But she was impulsive, and then she had to show him the inside of her house, something she prefers not to do.
Having gotten him over that shock, she pleased when the snow forced him to stay-she likes the company-but really was planning on letting him sleep on the couch.
When her living room made that impossible, she decided they were going to share a bed, and really, this was ideal. But then when he started talking about how he wasn’t going to try anything, really, she took the opportunity to turn down the thermostat, because if she was going to have him in her house, and he was spending the night, and he was going to stay over in her bed, it’d be a crime not to at least attempt to seduce him.
“Alright, bad news, Ben. The furnace is on the fritz, again. It might get kind of cold.” She pulls back the covers. “Come on. You don’t have to be afraid.”
He yanks back his covers. “I am not afraid, Leslie.”
She climbs in from her side, and he does the same.
She immediately buries herself in the covers, and then pops her head out. Then she sticks out her arms and claps her hands.
The lights go out.
“You have The Clapper?”
“You should be jealous. The Clapper is great. Sometimes I like to pretend I have magic powers.”
This was the most beloved line from this fic.
Incidentally, I have wanted a Clapper since I was six. Clap on clap off!
Ben laughs. “I bet you do. All the same, I am going to stick with my lamp.”
“You mean the Super Suites’ lamp?”
“Well. Sure. It’s a great lamp though. Great for reading before bed and not tripping over my slippers in the morning.”
Leslie shifts in the bed, and turns to face him, her face illuminated by the moon. “Don’t you ever get lonely at that motel? It seems like the worst.”
Ben turns toward her, and props himself up on his arm. “It’s not so bad. I have stayed at some really terrible places over the years. My current room is practically a palace. Once, I had to share a bathroom with my entire floor. I stayed there for a month, and it was the worst.”
“You didn’t! What hotel has public bathrooms for guests?”
“A hotel in a town called ‘Burda.’ Lots of corruption in that one. Everyone had their hands in everyone else’s pockets. You needed bribes to get anything done.” He tells her a few stories about Burda, and is in the middle of explaining how the school board spent the textbook funds on a trip to Bermuda when he feels Leslie’s foot on his leg. He yelps from the cold and the surprise.
Burda, in case you are wondering, is a sewing patterns company. They have a magazine, which happened to be right next to me when I was typing this out. I usually look up actual small Indiana towns, but if I’m going to imply massive corruption, I’m going to make one up.
Leslie shivers. “It’s really cold. I don’t understand how you are so warm.”
“Do you want me to go get more blankets or-”
“No, if you leave the warmth of the blanket, you are just going to get cold. Here, let me-” And she shifts closer to him. They are practically touching.
Don’t panic.
She has never seemed calmer. “Pawnee is awesome compared to that place. Or compared to any place, really.”
Don’t look at her.
Ben tries to sound calm. “Pawnee is pretty special.”
But don’t be weird about it. Maybe look at her for a minute and then look away.
She meets his gaze and he can feel his resolve melt. “I am glad you decided to stay. It means a lot to me that you did. And I am glad you did something impulsive. If there is one thing I have learned recently, it is that there is value in being impulsive.”
Sometimes, life provides you with unexpected opportunities. Personally, everything awesome I’ve ever done I haven’t thought through at all.
Look away before you do something stupid.
“Leslie, I-”
He can’t talk anymore, though, because Leslie has pressed her mouth to his.
He kisses her back for a few heart-stopping moments. Then he pulls away. “Leslie, are you sure? We work together and there are rules…”
“Right. I know that. But this will keep us warm so that we can go back to work in the future. Otherwise we might freeze to death. Bad furnace, you know.” She gives him a serious look.
“It would be bad for Pawnee if we froze to death.”
“Not to mention the scandal when they find our bodies. This is really just preventing scandal in the future.”
She has a point.
Really, when you are invested in believing something, you’ll grasp for straws and rationalize the hell out of it.
For the second time since he has been in Pawnee, Ben takes a chance for a beautiful woman.
Freddie Spaghetti being the other time, of course
***
Ben, just barely awake, reaches for Leslie. She isn’t there, and he is disappointed, but she can’t have gone far in this weather.
He takes a moment to contemplate the night before.
And he smiles.
Climbing out of bed, he winces, feels sore, but after everything he had done with Leslie-helping her shovel, helping her in some other ways- that’s probably to be expected. He changes into yesterday’s plaid in the bathroom. He isn’t sure why he does it, since he is alone in the room and she saw him naked anyway, but he does.
Originally, I intended to write a love scene here.
Let’s talk about why that didn’t happen.
I made an artistic choice that writing about sex is embarrassing. Wait, what?
I don’t get anxiety about much. Strangers, planes… I can give a speech on any topic, often without practicing first, and I’ll karaoke with strangers and friends with no shame, despite being terrible.
But writing about sex kills me. I’m always worried I’ve given them too many hands.
I feel like writing sex puts more of me on the page than I’m comfortable with. It’s a little silly, as the rest of the story is really very much me on the page. But the sex feels different.
He walks into the kitchen, where coffee is percolating on the counter. Leslie is at the table, pouring over some files with a highlighter.
“Good morning, Ben! I wasn’t sure if I should wake you or not. We have another day off of work due to snow, so I let you sleep in-”
Chicagoans only got one day off, but this is Pawnee.
Ben glances at the clock. 7:30 a.m.
“And now that you're up I'm going to make breakfast. You like eggs, right? I make a killer omelet.”
She walks over to him, and gives him a hug. He pulls back and touches her cheek, and they are kissing again. They pull back and smile at each other, and he presses his forehead to hers. She ushers him to a seat at the table and starts rummaging in the fridge.
I love the forced-to-share-a-bed trope. Now, once I decided that Ben went in Leslie’s house, they were going to share a bed, and it was going to be because Leslie screwed with the heat, because I love devious Leslie. But I wasn’t sure how to reveal to Ben (and the audience) that it was Leslie. I considered bringing Ron in, because Ron knows how to fix furnaces, and then he could say something in front of Ben. But why would Leslie call him over if she knew why the furnace wasn’t working? So then Ron was going to surprise Leslie by stopping by, to see how she was doing due to the weather, and Ben was going to pop up and suggest he fix the furnace, but really, I think Ben would hide if Ron came over, because askward.
But then I realized, Ben might not own property, but he’s not unaware of furnaces.
While Leslie makes omelets, Ben excuses himself, and goes down to the basement to check out the furnace. True, he has never owned a home, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t helped out his grandfather back in the day. His grandfather had tried to instill in all his grandchildren an ability to take care of things around the house. “No point in paying someone else to do what you can do for yourself,” he would say, smoking a cigar and smacking his newspaper on the table for emphasis. Ben smiles at the thought, and finds the furnace, which is in the laundry room. Leslie has piles of clothes everywhere, and at least six different bottles of laundry soap. Ben is struck with the sudden urge to do her laundry, which is nuts. He isn’t going to do that, but maybe now that they are… well, maybe he can help her get this house organized.
Alright, furnaces. He racks his brain, trying to find the binder in there full of furnace information.
We all imagine our brain’s information being stored according to the technology of the time. Ben imagines his arranged with his favorite office supply. And this show loves binders.
The pilot light is on.
The filter is in place.
The fan is running smoothly.
I know nothing about anything, so I had to google information on furnaces.
Ben continues to look around for possible issues. And then he realizes what’s wrong with the furnace-
The thermostat is turned all the way down.
Let’s address the ending in two different ways.
To start with, I love Devious Leslie. It’s how I like to write her. She’s not going to come out and ask her coworker to sleep with her. But she’s going to go ahead and make the best of the situation that’s fallen into her lap.
But on a larger scale, I want to address what happens to them after this story ends. Obviously, they’ve slept together and they have all these feelings for each other and sex is forbidden to them.
I love writing stories where people get together. It’s my history of reading romance novels; I love them, and take a lot of my cues from them. And when you have 300 pages to write a story, you have plots and subplots and the two main characters dealing with friends and family issues and work subplots and a million other things. But for me, the interesting part was the getting together, either into the same bed/ getting married/ opening up to each other, sometimes long after they sleep together and/or get married. Often times, the fact that there’s also a killer on the loose/ she has to learn to sing again/ he meets his real father/ vampires bores me. Not always, of course, and I like that my books feature real people who do more than just fall in love, but for me, when I read romance, I want to read romance.
So when I write a story, I usually end it at the point where they get together. What happens after that? It all works out. They sneak around, there’s some strife, maybe they break up and it echoes the canon break-up, but in the end, it works out.
But generally, while I enjoy reading other people’s stories that detail exactly how they make it work, just like I enjoy reading angsty stories, I’m probably not going to write them myself.
Someone said I should write a sequel to this. And I kind of shrugged, because what the heck would that sequel look like? Ben knows, but doesn’t say anything to Leslie. They get in a fight one day down the road, when arguing about something inane, and he blurts out that he knows why they started dating. She’s embarrassed, but feels fine with her decisions. The argument turns to how they make it work. Do they go public? She thinks they shouldn’t, because she’s starting to consider running for City Council. He thinks they should, and let the cards fall where they may. He resents his job anyway, for keeping him from getting to be a publically acknowledged relationship. He feels weird and slightly ashamed of the whole thing, because who wants to be a relationship with the prom queen and not tell the world? Leslie is touched he thinks of her as the prom queen, when she was merely class treasurer. But at the same time she doesn’t want to quit her job, or make Ben quit his job, and she loves him too much to ruin his life! Ben is shocked… and so is Chris, who was working late and stopped by to see what was going on in the Parks Department and overheard everything. It would be cute, but I still don’t know to end that.
Thanks for reading, everyone! In the next day or two, I’m going to post a second commentary, because I decided to do two of them to work my way through my writer’s block.
Author: saucydiva
Illustrator: craponaspatula
Word count: 4k for the story, 3k commentary
Rating: PG, with one very NSFW video embedded
Disclaimer: clearly I don’t own it or I would have a tiger on retainer
Timeline: between 3x09 and 3x10.
Author’s Note: Writer’s block is the worst so I wrote a DVD commentary for this thing I wrote. Stay tuned; at the end is a surprise.
Read the original here.
saucydiva: “We had a snowpocalypse earlier this year; the whole city shut down. I totally get why Parks didn’t have a winter… but it did occasionally strike me as incongruous. Like when I was making snow angels shoveling like an adult. (Note to self: write something where B/L make snow angels, and then drink hot chocolate. Mittens are involved.)”
rikyl: “Please write that snow angels story. Mittens. Hot cocoa. You know what I really want is a winter episode where everyone in Pawnee is freaking out over a "snowstorm," and Ben is rolling his eyes because he lived through the Halloween Blizzard of 1991 (which in my experience people from MN will not stop talking about), and southern Indiana's little flurries don't even compare.”
Erika and I were emailing back and forth and I thought this sounded like a terrifically fun idea. I started writing and sketched out the first half of the story. I knew they’d end up in her house, that he’d find her house horrifying, and that he’d spend the night.
I tend not to outline when I write. I dive in, and write, and rewrite. So I knew I’d get there, but I wasn’t sure how it would go after that.
Ben couldn’t explain why he was over at Leslie’s house shoveling.
It was the Great Snowpolapsye of 2011, and work was cancelled due to the fact that no one could get their cars out of their driveways. Leslie calls to tell him work is cancelled (naturally, Leslie had organized the phone tree). One thing led to another, and somehow she talks him into leaving his warm motel and walking a mile to her house to help her shovel.
Luckily, the snow is packed down pretty tight, and he had years of practice walking through Minnesota snow. Since he is staying staying in Pawnee, he had gone back up to his storage unit, and, in a fit of optimism, brought everything to his motel, including his winter-wear. It was fortuitous timing, as the snow had started right after. So far, winter had been mostly mild, but the forecasters had been right, and this is crazy snow, with some drifts going three or four feet up buildings, and a good foot or two covering everything. It is practically the Halloween Blizzard of ’91, and that was saying something. It actually isn’t super cold, though the snow isn’t melting, and the sun is out. Except for the snow, it was a nicer winter day.
I lived through the Snowpolapsye in early 2011. It was ridiculous, and we were buried in snow, but the day wasn’t all that cold, per se. We just couldn’t drive anywhere. For one day, Chicago was mostly shut down. It was glorious
And so when Leslie calls, he puts on his snowpants and winter coat, and trudges to her house through the snow, thinking to himself the whole time. Why do you agree to do these things? Is it her? Is it this town? Of course it’s her. But this is ridiculous.
He almost turns around. But then he saw her, standing on her front step, waving him down. She is wearing a big puffy coat with a faux-fur lined hood, and when he sees her he forgets he is cold.
She throws him a dazzling smile and hands him a shovel, and he wants to gather her in his arms and touch her hood. But he doesn’t, as usual.
The shoveling is hard work, made harder by Leslie’s love of snow. They had barely gotten a quarter of the driveway cleared off when Leslie leans over her shovel, sighing dramatically, and started scooping up snow in her mittens. She pats one into a snowball, and lobs it at him. It splatters on his chest, breaking apart.
Now is as good a time as any to bring up music. I can’t both write and listen to music. If I’m writing, it’s quiet. But I like to listen to music beforehand, to get me in a mindset. Often when I’m writing fic, I listen to Noah and the Whale’s “Five Years Time.” Usually, I have another song that helps, too, that varies by story.
For this song, it was Childish Gambino’s Freaks and Geeks:
Click to viewI have no idea why. This song- NSFW!- is not thematically similar, and it has several words I don’t use in polite company, and two words I never use at all. But I listened to it a hundred times while writing this story, and listening to it makes me want to write about snowballs.
“You did not just do that,” Ben says, slightly shocked.
In response she sticks out her tongue and scurries to the other side of the driveway.
Ben reaches down and starts scooping snow, packing it into a perfect ball, and as he is patting the snow it occurs to him he hasn’t thrown a snowball since college, and yet somehow this woman is bringing out an entire side of him he would not have thought still existed.
Holy run-on sentences Bat-Ben!
He tosses the snowball lazily at her shoulder, and she ducks, and it lands right on her hood, covering her hood in snowflakes that sparkle in the sun, and for a moment he stares thinking, she’s perfect, until she shakes her head and he blinks and when he looks at her again, she is only human.
That’s my favorite part of this story.
Ben gets back to work almost immediately. Leslie seems reluctant, and she throws another snowball at him, missing him entirely. He ignores her, and she pouts for a moment. He can’t watch her, though, because she is just too much and he has to focus on something else lest he do something very foolish today. There is something nice as well about being able to focus his energy on something physical, to throw that untapped desire like so much snow.
They have a little more than half the driveway cleared when Leslie tosses her shovel aside and collapses dramatically on the lawn. Ben continues to shovel but watches her out of the corner of his eye.
“Ben, Ben, come over here and lay in the snow with me.”
“I would rather retain my status as an adult, so no thanks.”
“You have no sense of fun.”
Ben keeps shoveling.
Leslie lays there for a few moments, and then starts talking. “When I was a kid-“
“I can only imagine what you were like.” Probably pretty close to what you are like now, but tinier.
“-my parents were fighting all the time. They didn’t divorce until I was in high school, but they would fight.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
“My mother has always had a drive to succeed. It got her to where she is today. She always wanted to instill that in me. It wasn’t enough to want to be mayor. I should want to be president.”
“So you didn’t want to be president yourself?”
“Oh no, I did. But when you are eight, you want the things your parents want for you.”
My parents wanted me to stay in Partridge and it killed them when I left. He almost tells her that, but his tongue isn’t cooperating. He lays down his shovel and walks over to her, standing over her.
I choose to believe Ben’s parents-who I assumed were still married, damn it-were upset with how Ice Town went down, but still loved their kid enough that they didn’t want him to leave.
She isn’t making eye contact with him; her eyes are focused somewhere in the past. “My dad, though. He was different. He wanted me to stop worrying about the future and just run around and do cartwheels and make snowmen. He hated the political stumping and the tuba lessons and the student council.”
Leslie has a tuba in her living room… I assume she plays it.
“Is that what they were fighting about?”
“Oh, no, in retrospect it really wasn’t about me. It was them. He wanted to play, she wanted to work. He was happy just doing his nine-to-five, and she wanted to run for office and impact people and be in charge.”
He sits down in the snow next to her, crossing his legs.
“I have always been her daughter, you know? She wanted, and I do too. But sometimes I wonder if I didn’t get enough time to play, you know? I am-was-his daughter too.”
Ben thinks back to the summer, when the government was shut down and there was almost nothing to do, even for the essential government employees. Leslie was still there before him every morning, despite the fact that he was one of the two people in the building who actually had stuff going on, and she still left after him most nights. Whenever he caught a glimpse of her, she was working on something. She had emailed him dozens of ideas a week, even sending them on the weekends. He knew she went out sometimes, but even when she was dancing with Ann at the Snakehole she always seemed to be organizing a proposal or writing a list in her head.
He looks down at his hands, and then looks over at her. She still looks a little lost in the past. Ben lays down, too, and they are parallel lines, going the same direction but never touching.
I hate naming my stories.
I do.
It’s always a struggle. For me, I have to wait until the very last second-I have to be at the point where I might change a line or adjust a word, but nothing more than that-before I can name the story.
This means that while I’m writing, everything’s untitled. This story, for instance, was “untitled mittens fic” when I would email the drafts to Erika. Safety Zone was “untitled water balloon fic.” Who More Englids the Night was “Midsummer Night’s Draft.”
Then once I’m at 99.5% finished, I can reread until an image or line strikes me, and I can name it from there.
“Let’s… let’s make snow angels,” he says, and the words feel foreign on his tongue, but he has to bring her back to the present, has to give her that experience she never indulges in.
She doesn’t answer, but he can hear the snow crunching and the sound of her puffy nylon coat flying over the snow, and she giggles.
He does too, and he starts fanning out his arms and legs, not even caring that the snow is getting all over.
There is one thing he didn’t plan for, though. They are just close enough that when they move their arms their hands cross paths. Even through his leather gloves and her mittens, he can feel a heat, and his hand tingles a little each time. He giggles at the insanity of it all.
Soon they are both laughing in the winter sun, moving fast, their hands flying over the snow but lingering slightly over each other.
When they stand up, they stand back to admire their work. Two snow angels, overlapping slightly, so they look like they are holding hands.
Ben turns to Leslie. The driveway isn’t done, but it is much better, and he is starting to feel it in his muscles. “We should take a break.”
“We did just make snow angels.”
“A break from the snow.”
Leslie shifts her weight from one hip to the other, and he can see a conflict playing out on her face. Biting her lip, she says, “You can come in if you want.”
Ben realizes his mistake, although he isn’t sure how to reassure her he really just wants to take off his snowpants, and is fine with leaving on his actual pants. So he just nods and hopes he doesn’t come off like a creep.
Leslie opens the door, and Ben steps into her house for the first time.
He isn’t sure what he was expecting. Maybe a wall full of binders. Certainly ruthlessly efficient organization covered in home-y knick-knacks, with a big American flag. Her office, with a kitchen and a television. With a green kitchen. And one of those big recliners. He might have given this some thought before.
Leslie’s hording issue makes her very real to me. She’s juggling balls like no one else, but something somewhere has to slip. And in real life, hoarders-and let’s be real, anyone who has twenty-year-old news papers stacked in her living room is a hoarder-don’t change. Not really. They might clean up, but the behavior and impulses are still there.
So Leslie’s not cured, and she’s gone right back to where she was, only now, she’s got everything that was in her living room they removed for her dinner party in a storage unit. This mostly new stuff, though she’s certainly rescued some boxes from that storage unit.
In my head canon, she never deals with the problem, and it drives Ben crazy. They put stuff in storage units, and it bothers him immensely to be paying to store old National Geographics, but that’s the only way they can keep the space livable. It’s never as clean as Ben would like, though.
But what he finds is a little horrifying. Leslie has stuff everywhere, piled throughout the house. It’s all random stuff, too. A ton of newspapers, and then a potted plant on top. A huge framed photo of some politician he doesn’t recognize. Phonebooks. Birdhouses. Birdcages. Bird-themed clocks.
The photo is Marlene, of course!
There is nothing I could possibly say, here. “Do you have any pets?”
She pauses for a moment, then sighs, and says no.
He tries to think of something else to say.
He fails.
“I am a little bit my father’s daughter,” she says, mirthlessly.
He winces. He can’t stand her sad look. “It’s… great. You have everything you need.” All in one spot, in your living room.
“The kitchen is better.” He follows her in to her kitchen to discover better is a relative term. “Do you want something to drink? I have orange juice, beer, and milk.”
Ben sits at the open chair in the kitchen. He fiddles a little, and then pops back out of the seat. “You know, if you have some chocolate and some sugar I could make hot chocolate.”
Leslie looks at him like he is a waffle, which is doing some remarkable things for him. “Do I have… Ben, I have all the chocolate and most of the sugar.”
The second-favorite line
He ends up making hot chocolate on the stovetop using the recipe he used to make in college back when he used to eat like Leslie does now. He pours it into two mugs, and tops them off with whipped cream preemptively. He hands the one with far more whipped cream to Leslie, who spent the time moving things around so that they can both sit at the kitchen table.
The look of bliss on her face when she drinks it makes sitting next to a pile 2004 Time Magazines worth it.
Talking about the election in 2004 leads to a discussion about the election in 1996 which leads to a discussion about Jimmy Carter which leads to them going to the living room to sit on the couch and watch the History Channel. Leslie refills their mugs-Ben really is a healthier eater than this most of the time, but this is a special occasion-and he starts fiddling with the remote. Unfortunately, the History Channel has some reality show-Leslie is outraged-so they put on the Food Network and start discussing food instead. Throughout this discussion Leslie gulps down hot chocolate, as though someone is about to wrench it from her hands. When she finishes her mug, she snakes her hand over casually, grabbing his from the corner of the coffee table, finishing it off. She sticks her finger in to get the whipped cream rimming the glass, and when she sticks that finger in her mouth his heart skips a beat.
When I spoke to craponaspatula about illustrating this fic, I mentioned that I wanted the picture of them touching hands when they made snow angels. She sent me a first draft on that, and it was glorious. I spent several days staring at it on my phone every chance I got. When we got close to posting, she asked me to give her the title (which was undecided at this point) because she had an idea for a title banner. This was the image she chose. And the title banner is so cute.
Rachael Ray is droning on about sandwiches when Leslie gets up to look out the window. She looks concerned, so Ben gets up and looks too. The snow has started to pick up; the wind is howling and the sky has gone gray. Their snow angels are merely faint indents in the lawn, and their shovels are disappearing.
White people love Rachael Ray. I watch her with my grandma; she hates her orange kitchen and wants her to tie her hair back. Grandma has opinions on everyone on the Food Network.
Ben turns to her. “We should have brought in your shovels. They're going to rust now. Do you want me to go get them?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it; I have more in the garage.” Naturally.
“I'm just not sure how I am going to get back tonight,” Ben says, frowning as he watches his snow angel disappear.
“I'm sorry to be taking you away from your life like this.” Ben looks at Leslie, who looks pleased. When she sees him looking, she ducks her head so quickly he wonders if he made the whole thing up.
“No! No, that’s not what I-you know, we should really get something to eat.”
Another trip to the kitchen reveals that while Leslie has sugar and chocolate, she does not have much that would make a meal. She has flour and yeast, though, so Ben sets about making pizza dough. Leslie seems slightly fascinated by the process, and she stares at him while he kneads.
“Surely you have used yeast before, Leslie.”
“No… it was aspirational yeast.”
It is my life goal to make a good pizza crust. I know it’s insane and unnecessary, but I want to do this. And visit Australia. But mostly the pizza crust.
***
They both wake around 2am. They had fallen asleep on the couch in the middle of a Cupcake Wars marathon, and though they had passed out with at least a foot of space between then, they wake up with her arm clutching his and his leg under her thigh. It feels blissful to be tangled up with her, and in that twilight moment when he is both asleep and awake he thinks, I don’t know why I am here, but this feels right. He looks over at her, and he has this overwhelming urge to kiss her temple. Then the thoughts come quickly; you can’t, she is your coworker, she might not feel that way, and you can’t even leave if she doesn’t. They share an embarrassed smile instead, and pull away.
Leslie pops up, and tells him she has an extra toothbrush if he will just follow her this way to the front hall closet. She opens a bulging closet, and pulls out a rainbow of toothbrush options. As Ben grabs a blue one, they both hear a loud noise. Leslie shoves the bundle at him, and runs over to the banister overlooking her living room.
“There’s been a bit of a… landslide,” she says, turning a little pink. “You might not be able to sleep on the couch….”
Ben stands there, connecting the dots a moment before she finishes with “so you are going to have to sleep in my bed.”
Ben licks his lips and starts picturing all the ways this could go south. I could be turned on. She could be turned on and I could be useless. Both of us could be turned on and neither of us will say it. We could sleep-actually sleep-and she could tell everyone I didn’t even try anything. I could snore. Do I snore? Who was the last person who could answer that? Tom. That is the last conversation I ever want to have.
She has apparently no qualms about this idea, because she puts a finger up and runs over to a door. He hears some loud noises, followed by some swearing, a few more noises, and then she sticks her head and an arm out the door and beckons him in.
Ben, who hasn’t been to church since he was fourteen, has the strangest urge to cross himself before entering.
I don’t go to church either, but I sometimes want to cross myself when I get stressed out. It seems like a nice little calming ritual.
One thing I can’t really wrap my head around is what religion anyone on this show would follow. Any thoughts? I’m curious. I can’t picture anyone (except maybe Jerry) participating in religious ceremonies.
Her bedroom is a sunny yellow, and even though it is stacked to windows with crap, she has a vase of yellow flowers on her bedside table. Sunflowers, those most be sunflowers.
She’s standing in front of her closet, back to him, tossing tshirts and pajama pants on the bed. “This isn’t weird, Ben, it's only weird if we make it weird, you know? The bathroom’s right over there, if you want to use it.”
This was as far as I got in my initial writing fit. I got stuck, so I started writing a Christmas story. And then I started The Trouble with Physical Proximity. And a bedroom farce that involved sending everyone to a cabin.
But around this time I started talking to craponaspatula. She posted some fan art, and in the comment section mentioned she wanted to illustrate fan fic.
WHOA.
I started trying to subtly solicit her to draw for my stories, because I felt that her art style was a good match for my writer’s voice because how awesome would that be? I sent her a message, and suggested something already written, Safety Zone, which was fun, and you know maybe she wanted to maybe if she was interested illustrate that? And if not, I had a story I was working on; (actively! Probably!) a story that was funny but took a dark turn.
For me, this is a dark story. I mean, Leslie’s sad! It’s dark.
I sent her my half-written draft, and she liked it. I also sent her photos of the Snowpolcolypse, on the basis that she lives in California and this was an unusual amount of snow for even for my town, much less for someone who lives a Katy Perry song. She liked it, which meant I had to finish it…
Grabbing some clothing, he goes into the bathroom. The bathroom is mostly uncluttered, so he does the only thing he can do, and he gets ready for bed. Oh, and he checks out her medicine cabinets. He’s only human, and he is deeply curious. Facewash, lotions, a few expired prescriptions, birth control pills- don’t even think about that one, Wyatt- and enough toothpaste to fill a shelf. That isn’t what catches his eye, though. Inside the doors to the cabinet, she has post-it notes, dozens of colorful post-it notes, all with motivational quotes and encouraging thoughts. A large number of them are written to her, ‘You can do it, Leslie!’ and ‘I believe in you, Leslie!’ and ‘I love you, Leslie!’ This might be the cutest thing ever.
I’ve written about this on tumblr, but I ship Parks characters/office supplies. This is a continuation of that love, and a way to echo those messages she’d leave herself on her voicemail.
She brushes past him when he leaves the bathroom, and she goes in, leaving him alone in her bedroom with just his thoughts.
His first thought is that he is not going to hit on her. She deserves to feel comfortable in her own bed, and he is not going to be a creep.
His second thought is that it is going to be really hard not to hit on her.
Next he thinks about what would happen if he did hit on her and she was into the idea, and he indulges in that for a few minutes.
Then he realizes he needs to stop that line of thinking because she is coming back any moment now.
His thoughts are interrupted when she reappears. He gestures at the bed. “After you.” Then he cringes, because what the hell was that? “Leslie, I just want you to know I am not-I would never-you don’t have to worry that I am going to-I respect you.”
Leslie peers at him, puzzled. Then nods and smiles at him. “I'm going to go check on the furnace. It always seems to have problems in the winter. I should get it replaced but then I…” Leslie was already down the hall, leaving Ben to agonize some more about this. Also, how long can he stand next to a bed without it starting to look weird?
Leslie never planned to invite Ben in. Had she thought through her plan, she would have realized it’s perfectly reasonable for him to come in, because at some point he’d get wet/ need to use the bathroom/ want a drink. But she was impulsive, and then she had to show him the inside of her house, something she prefers not to do.
Having gotten him over that shock, she pleased when the snow forced him to stay-she likes the company-but really was planning on letting him sleep on the couch.
When her living room made that impossible, she decided they were going to share a bed, and really, this was ideal. But then when he started talking about how he wasn’t going to try anything, really, she took the opportunity to turn down the thermostat, because if she was going to have him in her house, and he was spending the night, and he was going to stay over in her bed, it’d be a crime not to at least attempt to seduce him.
“Alright, bad news, Ben. The furnace is on the fritz, again. It might get kind of cold.” She pulls back the covers. “Come on. You don’t have to be afraid.”
He yanks back his covers. “I am not afraid, Leslie.”
She climbs in from her side, and he does the same.
She immediately buries herself in the covers, and then pops her head out. Then she sticks out her arms and claps her hands.
The lights go out.
“You have The Clapper?”
“You should be jealous. The Clapper is great. Sometimes I like to pretend I have magic powers.”
This was the most beloved line from this fic.
Incidentally, I have wanted a Clapper since I was six. Clap on clap off!
Ben laughs. “I bet you do. All the same, I am going to stick with my lamp.”
“You mean the Super Suites’ lamp?”
“Well. Sure. It’s a great lamp though. Great for reading before bed and not tripping over my slippers in the morning.”
Leslie shifts in the bed, and turns to face him, her face illuminated by the moon. “Don’t you ever get lonely at that motel? It seems like the worst.”
Ben turns toward her, and props himself up on his arm. “It’s not so bad. I have stayed at some really terrible places over the years. My current room is practically a palace. Once, I had to share a bathroom with my entire floor. I stayed there for a month, and it was the worst.”
“You didn’t! What hotel has public bathrooms for guests?”
“A hotel in a town called ‘Burda.’ Lots of corruption in that one. Everyone had their hands in everyone else’s pockets. You needed bribes to get anything done.” He tells her a few stories about Burda, and is in the middle of explaining how the school board spent the textbook funds on a trip to Bermuda when he feels Leslie’s foot on his leg. He yelps from the cold and the surprise.
Burda, in case you are wondering, is a sewing patterns company. They have a magazine, which happened to be right next to me when I was typing this out. I usually look up actual small Indiana towns, but if I’m going to imply massive corruption, I’m going to make one up.
Leslie shivers. “It’s really cold. I don’t understand how you are so warm.”
“Do you want me to go get more blankets or-”
“No, if you leave the warmth of the blanket, you are just going to get cold. Here, let me-” And she shifts closer to him. They are practically touching.
Don’t panic.
She has never seemed calmer. “Pawnee is awesome compared to that place. Or compared to any place, really.”
Don’t look at her.
Ben tries to sound calm. “Pawnee is pretty special.”
But don’t be weird about it. Maybe look at her for a minute and then look away.
She meets his gaze and he can feel his resolve melt. “I am glad you decided to stay. It means a lot to me that you did. And I am glad you did something impulsive. If there is one thing I have learned recently, it is that there is value in being impulsive.”
Sometimes, life provides you with unexpected opportunities. Personally, everything awesome I’ve ever done I haven’t thought through at all.
Look away before you do something stupid.
“Leslie, I-”
He can’t talk anymore, though, because Leslie has pressed her mouth to his.
He kisses her back for a few heart-stopping moments. Then he pulls away. “Leslie, are you sure? We work together and there are rules…”
“Right. I know that. But this will keep us warm so that we can go back to work in the future. Otherwise we might freeze to death. Bad furnace, you know.” She gives him a serious look.
“It would be bad for Pawnee if we froze to death.”
“Not to mention the scandal when they find our bodies. This is really just preventing scandal in the future.”
She has a point.
Really, when you are invested in believing something, you’ll grasp for straws and rationalize the hell out of it.
For the second time since he has been in Pawnee, Ben takes a chance for a beautiful woman.
Freddie Spaghetti being the other time, of course
***
Ben, just barely awake, reaches for Leslie. She isn’t there, and he is disappointed, but she can’t have gone far in this weather.
He takes a moment to contemplate the night before.
And he smiles.
Climbing out of bed, he winces, feels sore, but after everything he had done with Leslie-helping her shovel, helping her in some other ways- that’s probably to be expected. He changes into yesterday’s plaid in the bathroom. He isn’t sure why he does it, since he is alone in the room and she saw him naked anyway, but he does.
Originally, I intended to write a love scene here.
Let’s talk about why that didn’t happen.
I made an artistic choice that writing about sex is embarrassing. Wait, what?
I don’t get anxiety about much. Strangers, planes… I can give a speech on any topic, often without practicing first, and I’ll karaoke with strangers and friends with no shame, despite being terrible.
But writing about sex kills me. I’m always worried I’ve given them too many hands.
I feel like writing sex puts more of me on the page than I’m comfortable with. It’s a little silly, as the rest of the story is really very much me on the page. But the sex feels different.
He walks into the kitchen, where coffee is percolating on the counter. Leslie is at the table, pouring over some files with a highlighter.
“Good morning, Ben! I wasn’t sure if I should wake you or not. We have another day off of work due to snow, so I let you sleep in-”
Chicagoans only got one day off, but this is Pawnee.
Ben glances at the clock. 7:30 a.m.
“And now that you're up I'm going to make breakfast. You like eggs, right? I make a killer omelet.”
She walks over to him, and gives him a hug. He pulls back and touches her cheek, and they are kissing again. They pull back and smile at each other, and he presses his forehead to hers. She ushers him to a seat at the table and starts rummaging in the fridge.
I love the forced-to-share-a-bed trope. Now, once I decided that Ben went in Leslie’s house, they were going to share a bed, and it was going to be because Leslie screwed with the heat, because I love devious Leslie. But I wasn’t sure how to reveal to Ben (and the audience) that it was Leslie. I considered bringing Ron in, because Ron knows how to fix furnaces, and then he could say something in front of Ben. But why would Leslie call him over if she knew why the furnace wasn’t working? So then Ron was going to surprise Leslie by stopping by, to see how she was doing due to the weather, and Ben was going to pop up and suggest he fix the furnace, but really, I think Ben would hide if Ron came over, because askward.
But then I realized, Ben might not own property, but he’s not unaware of furnaces.
While Leslie makes omelets, Ben excuses himself, and goes down to the basement to check out the furnace. True, he has never owned a home, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t helped out his grandfather back in the day. His grandfather had tried to instill in all his grandchildren an ability to take care of things around the house. “No point in paying someone else to do what you can do for yourself,” he would say, smoking a cigar and smacking his newspaper on the table for emphasis. Ben smiles at the thought, and finds the furnace, which is in the laundry room. Leslie has piles of clothes everywhere, and at least six different bottles of laundry soap. Ben is struck with the sudden urge to do her laundry, which is nuts. He isn’t going to do that, but maybe now that they are… well, maybe he can help her get this house organized.
Alright, furnaces. He racks his brain, trying to find the binder in there full of furnace information.
We all imagine our brain’s information being stored according to the technology of the time. Ben imagines his arranged with his favorite office supply. And this show loves binders.
The pilot light is on.
The filter is in place.
The fan is running smoothly.
I know nothing about anything, so I had to google information on furnaces.
Ben continues to look around for possible issues. And then he realizes what’s wrong with the furnace-
The thermostat is turned all the way down.
Let’s address the ending in two different ways.
To start with, I love Devious Leslie. It’s how I like to write her. She’s not going to come out and ask her coworker to sleep with her. But she’s going to go ahead and make the best of the situation that’s fallen into her lap.
But on a larger scale, I want to address what happens to them after this story ends. Obviously, they’ve slept together and they have all these feelings for each other and sex is forbidden to them.
I love writing stories where people get together. It’s my history of reading romance novels; I love them, and take a lot of my cues from them. And when you have 300 pages to write a story, you have plots and subplots and the two main characters dealing with friends and family issues and work subplots and a million other things. But for me, the interesting part was the getting together, either into the same bed/ getting married/ opening up to each other, sometimes long after they sleep together and/or get married. Often times, the fact that there’s also a killer on the loose/ she has to learn to sing again/ he meets his real father/ vampires bores me. Not always, of course, and I like that my books feature real people who do more than just fall in love, but for me, when I read romance, I want to read romance.
So when I write a story, I usually end it at the point where they get together. What happens after that? It all works out. They sneak around, there’s some strife, maybe they break up and it echoes the canon break-up, but in the end, it works out.
But generally, while I enjoy reading other people’s stories that detail exactly how they make it work, just like I enjoy reading angsty stories, I’m probably not going to write them myself.
Someone said I should write a sequel to this. And I kind of shrugged, because what the heck would that sequel look like? Ben knows, but doesn’t say anything to Leslie. They get in a fight one day down the road, when arguing about something inane, and he blurts out that he knows why they started dating. She’s embarrassed, but feels fine with her decisions. The argument turns to how they make it work. Do they go public? She thinks they shouldn’t, because she’s starting to consider running for City Council. He thinks they should, and let the cards fall where they may. He resents his job anyway, for keeping him from getting to be a publically acknowledged relationship. He feels weird and slightly ashamed of the whole thing, because who wants to be a relationship with the prom queen and not tell the world? Leslie is touched he thinks of her as the prom queen, when she was merely class treasurer. But at the same time she doesn’t want to quit her job, or make Ben quit his job, and she loves him too much to ruin his life! Ben is shocked… and so is Chris, who was working late and stopped by to see what was going on in the Parks Department and overheard everything. It would be cute, but I still don’t know to end that.
Thanks for reading, everyone! In the next day or two, I’m going to post a second commentary, because I decided to do two of them to work my way through my writer’s block.