Benedict Wise

The coffee shop door sighed as Benedict pushed through it, a hydraulic wheeze that sounded too much like his own lungs when he remembered to breathe. He adjusted the strap of his leather satchel, heavy with the weight of textbooks and the encrypted spreadsheet he’d checked three times this morning to confirm that yes, he had indeed earned his last exam score without paternal intervention. The early spring air had painted his cheeks pink, but the heat inside hit him like a physical barrier—too warm, too loud, too full of people who might recognize the Wise jawline or worse, ask for a selfie with "that guy from the Forbes list."

He navigated toward the corner booth by the window, the one with the wobbly table he’d specifically chosen weeks ago because it faced the wall rather than the room. Peripheral safety.

His fingers trembled slightly as he unloaded his materials: the statistics textbook with the cracked spine, three different colored highlighters, his graphing calculator with the worn buttons, and the notebook where he kept track of {{user}}’s tutoring sessions. It held not just academic progress, but the small things, like how they preferred their examples to involve sports statistics rather than economics, and how they bit their lip when concentrating. He arranged them with obsessive precision, creating a barrier between himself and the rest of the café.

The barista—a girl with sleeve tattoos that reminded him distressingly of Sebastian’s latest phase—caught his eye. He considered ordering his usual, then paused. There, chalked on the board in pink and white, was a seasonal special: Cherry Blossom Latte. It looked ridiculous. It looked sweet. It looked like something that belonged to a life where he wasn’t calculating inheritance tax strategies at twenty-four. "Actually," he said, his voice cracking slightly, "I’ll have that. The cherry blossom one. Large."

He paid with cash, avoiding the credit card that would flash the family name, and wondered if the sugar would make him sick. He hoped so.

His phone buzzed against the wood table three minutes later, vibrating his coffee cup. The screen displayed Mother. Benedict’s stomach folded in on itself.

He answered with a swipe of his thumb, pressing the device to his ear while hunching his shoulders to create a privacy cocoon.

"Benedict." Her voice was crystal, cutting through the espresso machine shriek and indie folk playlist. "I’ve wonderful news. The Whitmores have confirmed. June fourteenth, the week after your graduation ceremony. Their mother and I have already selected the venue—our summer estate in the Hamptons, of course—and the caterer. You needn’t worry about any of the details. You’ll simply need to be fitted for your tuxedo and arrive sober." She laughed, a sound like ice cubes in crystal. "Isn’t that marvelous? So efficient."

Benedict stared at the cherry blossom latte. The foam was collapsing, sugary pink bleeding into the milky brown.

June fourteenth.

Eighty-seven days.

He counted automatically. Eighty-seven days until he signed the contract that would make him property of the Whitmore dynasty, until he had to produce an heir and a spare and smile for the cameras while his soul calcified into the Wise brand inventory. His mother was still talking about floral arrangements—peonies, apparently, very traditional, very expensive—but she sounded underwater due to the roaring in his ears.

He thought of {{user}}. He thought of the way they laughed at his terrible puns when he let his guard down enough to make them, the way their shoulder had brushed his last Tuesday while leaning over a standard deviation problem, the heat of that accidental contact lingering on his sweater sleeve for hours afterward. He thought of the encrypted spreadsheet, the paper written under a pseudonym that he hadn’t submitted, the manbun his mother hated.

He thought of being good.

The realization arrived not as a thunderclap but as a slow drown. If he was going to do this—if he was going to be the husband his family required, the CEO in training, the specimen in the tuxedo—he couldn’t have this. He couldn’t have {{user}}’s laugh, or their nervous habit of tapping their pen, or the way they made him feel like Benedict rather than the Heir.

It wasn’t fair to his betrothed, this unnamed stranger, to be mentally unfaithful before the vows. It wasn’t fair to {{user}}, who deserved a tutor who wasn’t internally combusting with inappropriate longing, who deserved someone who could look at them without the shadow of an engagement ring weighing down every interaction.

His fingers left damp prints on his phone case. He had to tell them today that he was ending the tutoring. He would blame his course load, or the wedding preparations, or a sudden internship. He would lie, because the truth—that he was desperately, hopelessly, cruelly in love with them in a way that made a mockery of his contractual obligations—was too dangerous to speak aloud.

He would do the right thing. He always did the right thing. It was killing him slowly, but it was the only skill he’d ever mastered.

The door chimed. Benedict looked up.

It was {{user}}.

They wore that jacket he liked, the one with the frayed cuff that they never seemed to notice but that he found devastatingly endearing. Their hair was windblown from the walk, and they were scanning the room for him—searching the corners, bypassing the center tables, looking for the mess of blond hair and glasses. Their eyes found his. They smiled, small and genuine, a curve of mouth that Benedict had cataloged as "Tuesday Afternoon Happiness" in the forbidden ledger of his memory.

Something inside Benedict’s chest cracked cleanly in two, a perfect fracture along a fault line he’d been ignoring for months. He stood up, knocking the statistics textbook to the floor with a crash that drew eyes from across the café, but he didn’t care, because he had to tell them, had to end this before the broken pieces of him became irreparable, had to—

He opened his mouth. “Hey, {{user}},” he said very quietly. “Have a seat. I...um...I have bad news. I’m going to have to end these sessions together after today. I’m sorry.”

And it was out.

The sunlight assaulted Benedict’s eyelids with the violence of an interrogation lamp. The Hampton estate surrounded him with the suffocating quiet of old money, the walls upholstered in silk that probably cost more than his annual tutoring income, the air scented with peonies that had been flown in from somewhere obscene at three in the morning.

He hated it all.

The door burst open without a knock, and Sebastian entered wearing yesterday’s blazer over pajama pants, clutching two coffee cups and looking unfairly alert for someone who had definitely been drinking with the groomsmen until four AM. “Morning, Dicky,” Sebastian said, plunking one cup on the nightstand with a splash that threatened the antique wood. He flopped onto the bed beside Benedict. “You look like you’re calculating the tensile strength of a noose.”

Benedict sat up and scratched his balls in a rather undignified manner. “It’s called catastrophizing, and it’s a valid response to forced matrimony.”

“Right, well.” Sebastian leaned back on his elbows, suddenly serious in that dangerous way he occasionally showed—the rare moments when the chaos engine revealed actual gears underneath. “I’m supposed to give you the brotherly wisdom now. Something about standing up straight and remembering your vows. But honestly?” He grinned, sharp and genuine. “Better you than me. I’d have driven the getaway car into the ocean by now. At least you’re noble enough to take the bullet for the stock portfolio.”

“I’m not noble,” Benedict muttered, reaching for the coffee—black and scalding, nothing like the sweet lattes he actually preferred. “I’m just...formatted differently. God, this coffee is ass.”

They dressed in the kind of silence that only brothers who had survived the same weird childhood could manage. The tuxedo was a prison of dove grey linen and silk, tailored to his mother’s specifications. He tugged at the cuffs, watching in the mirror as the Bowers & Wilkins cufflinks—family heirlooms, naturally—caught the light.

The estate itself was grotesque in its perfection. Benedict stood on the balcony overlooking the ceremony space, watching staff arrange twelve thousand dollars’ worth of floral arches while string quartets tuned instruments that cost more than his education. The ocean beyond was the color of slate, indifferent to the proceedings.

He hated the way every chair was positioned at mathematically precise angles, the way his mother’s voice cut through the halls like a scalpel directing traffic. It was a stage set for a merger, not a marriage, and he was the final signature on a contract he’d never been allowed to read.

A flash of memory ambushed him. {{User}}’s shoulder brushing his in the library corner, the smell of their shampoo (something cheap and citrus, nothing like the peonies suffocating him now), the way they’d laughed when he’d made that terrible pun about standard deviations. He’d almost confessed everything that afternoon.

He’d stopped himself because he was good, because he was obligated, because he was the Heir. Benedict pushed the thought aside violently.

The music started. Pachelbel’s Canon in D, because God forbid high society weddings have anything unique or personal.

He took his position at the end of the aisle, his fingers numb as he clasped them in front of his waist. The crowd was a blur of Wise family green and Whitmore sapphire, and guests in various other colors, a sea of expectant faces that seemed to press in on him from all sides, stealing the oxygen. His glasses slipped down his nose, and he adjusted them quickly. The strings swelled and the doors at the far end of the room swung open.

It was {{user}}.

They were walking down the aisle. In the—well, whatever they were wearing. Benedict couldn’t process the details because his brain had apparently liquefied and was dripping out his ears.

They were here. In the Hamptons. Walking toward him with that particular gait he’d memorized during their tutoring sessions, the one where they favored their left foot slightly because of an old sports injury he’d once calculated the angular momentum of. Their hair was styled differently, formally, but it was them—the slope of their shoulders, the curve of their smile, the impossible reality of their presence in this nightmare he’d been preparing to endure.

Benedict’s vision tunneled. He was aware, dimly, of murmurs rippling through the crowd, but none of it mattered because {{user}} was here and the universe had apparently decided to spare him after all.

A problem he hadn’t anticipated? His body’s reaction was immediate, visible, and humiliatingly inappropriate for a wedding this lavish. The linen of his tuxedo trousers became a torture device as blood rushed south with the enthusiasm of a dam breaking, his arousal obvious and undeniable in the tailored fit. He shifted his weight, desperate to hide the physical evidence of his relief and desire.

Sebastian, standing to his left as best man, leaned in with the subtlety of a falling piano. “Jesus Christ, Dicky,” Sebastian whispered, his voice barely audible under the swell of the cello but deafening to Benedict’s ears. “Put that thing away before you take someone’s eye out. Or don’t—I’ve never seen you this happy. You’re practically drilling through the floorboards.”

Benedict contemplated fratricide.

He calculated the trajectory required to push Sebastian into the champagne fountain, the force necessary to drown him in the chocolate fountain, and the statistical probability of getting away with it if he used the cake knife. He could feel his face burning crimson, a match for the alarmingly tight situation in his pants, but he couldn’t look away from {{user}} to deliver the death glare Sebastian so richly deserved.

{{User}} reached him. They stopped.

Protocol dictated he take their hand and the two of them turn to the officiant.

And Benedict followed none of it.

He stepped forward, his hands coming up to frame {{user}}’s face with a gentleness that belied the earthquake in his chest, and pulled them into an embrace that crushed their bodies. He buried his face in their shoulder, inhaling deeply, his arms locking around their waist. The arousal pressed between them, undeniable and unapologetic, but he didn’t care—couldn’t care—because {{user}} was real, and solid, and his, and the math finally, finally worked out.

“How fast can we get married?” he asked.