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Sometime around the one-year anniversary of her arrival at Kenobi, Skywalker, & Partners, Rey finally catches the attention of Luke Skywalker himself.
Well, it’s not the first time she’s spoken to Skywalker, but all of their previous interactions have been strictly work-related, with him acknowledging her only when she speaks during a meeting or hands him pertinent information. This time, she’s just quietly minding her business at 4PM on a Friday, coming back from the break room with a warm mug of coffee to get her through the last hours of work, when Skywalker decides to call out to her from down the hall.
“Rey!”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Skywalker-” she says, immediately rooted to the spot as he approaches her. Her boss isn’t that scary, despite the bullshit Ben tried to fill her head with when she first started working here, but it is unusual for him to talk to anyone outside of his usual circle. In the fifteen seconds that it takes for Skywalker to reach her, Rey goes through every case she’s worked in the last month, every single task she’s been assigned, and tries to figure out just what she could’ve possibly done to draw attention from the big boss himself.
Nothing good, most likely.
“Luke, please,” the older man says with a wave, his features scrunching up in distaste for all of two seconds before he’s smiling at her. “So, Leia tells me it’s been nearly a year since you joined us.”
“One year next month, sir.”
“So… next week, pretty much,” Luke shrugs. “You know, between my sister and my nephew, I feel like you’re all I hear about. And yet I barely know you!”
It warms her heart to know that Leia talks about her that much. To know that Ben does the same leaves her feeling something slightly more difficult to define but then again, everything’s more complex when Ben’s involved. She’s just learned to live with that over the past few years.
To Luke, she says, “Well, you’re a very busy man, sir, we don’t expect you to-”
“What’s with this ‘sir’ business?” Luke frowns. “I told you, just call me Luke. And we’re all busy here, that’s no excuse for me not to get to know my staff. There’s actually this dinner tonight – just a weekly thing some of us here at the office have been doing for years now to hide the fact that we have no social lives outside of work. Have you heard of it?”
Luke and Leia’s Friday dinners are legendary in this city, not just at the firm. When Luke says ‘some of us here at the office’, what he fails to mention is that people who used to work in this office but have since moved on to even bigger things continue to attend dinner, so that it’s become somewhat of a ‘who’s who in the legal world’ gathering. Rey would know – Ben’s told her all about it, and seemingly every other Monday morning Rose runs into their office and breathlessly shares a secondhand account of some insane story Luke and Leia regaled their friends with at dinner that week.
No one on their floor – with the exception of Ben, of course, but when isn’t Ben the exception? – has ever been invited to Friday dinner.
“Um, Ben’s mentioned it a couple of times,” Rey says, trying to play it cool.
A twinkle in Luke’s eyes tells her he knows exactly what she’s doing. “Well, Leia and I would love it if you could join us this week. Ben is always welcome too, of course, but pigs will fly before that boy ever joins us at another family dinner.”
For a moment she’s taken aback by the openness with which Luke mentions his family’s issues, but if Leia and Ben truly talk about her that much then he's probably aware of the fact that she knows all about the family’s rocky road to reconciliation.
Besides, she’s got bigger things to focus on. “Oh,” Rey hears herself saying distantly before she snaps herself out of it. “Oh! Yes, of course, I’d be honored to join you and Leia-”
“Great!” Luke smiles, mercifully cutting her off before she can start rambling about how appreciative she is of this opportunity. “We usually meet at Maz’s around seven, just tell them you’re with the lawyers if you can’t find our table. I’ll see you then, Rey.”
He turns around without waiting for a reply, and Rey stammers out a quick “see you then, sir- um, Luke, uh-” before she scurries down the hallway and bursts into the office she shares with Rose.
“Rey? Is everything-?”
“I just got invited to Friday dinner!” she hisses in disbelief, and Rose’s jaw literally drops open as the both of them process the magnitude of this development.
“Holy shit,” Rose gasps. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy fucking shit!” Her voice rises steadily with each subsequent holy shit, so that the last one is loud enough to attract Ben’s attention as he passes by their open door.
“What’s going on here?” he asks with a wary look, trying to get a read on the room as Rose jumps up from her chair just as Rey throws herself down on the small couch in the corner of the office.
“Your uncle just invited me to Friday dinner!” Rey announces as Ben closes the door behind him, ever one for discretion, and saying it out loud once again helps her finally process the situation enough to realize– “Oh fuck. I can’t go to Maz’s like this!”
Ben gives her a blank look as she gestures at her nice-ish top, skinny jeans, and clean but ancient sneakers, but Rose – bless her – instantly realizes the issue with Rey’s outfit. It’s nice enough for the office’s casual Friday, but definitely not the kind of first impression she wants to leave on the city’s top legal experts.
“Hold up, I’ve got-” Rose disappears under her desk, and emerges seconds later with a pair of black pumps. “They’re a bit big for me, should be fine for you,” she comments as she drops them by Rey’s feet on her way to the coat rack they keep near the door. Ben, clearly intent on watching this play out, comes to sit next to Rey as they watch Rose push aside her and Rey’s coats to yank a fitted blazer off a hanger.
“What?” Rose shrugs when she turns to find Rey and Ben staring at her. “One time Finn spilled coffee all over my jacket five minutes before a meeting with a client. I learned my lesson.”
“Rose, you’re a lifesaver,” Rey says fervently as Rose gestures for her to get up and try on the jacket and shoes. The pumps fit just fine – “I usually wear them with really thick insoles,” Rose explains – and the blazer isn’t too loose once she buttons it up. “How do I look?”
“Great!” Rose says enthusiastically just as Ben murmurs a quiet beautiful, and if it weren’t for the fact that he’s been calling her that ever since college because it’s what Poe used to call her when he had yet to remember her name, Rey would probably blush.
As it is, her heart still skips a beat.
Rose steps closer for a more detailed inspection. “You don’t need any make-up, so that’s fine,” she assures Rey, “but we’ve got to do something about your hair.”
Of course Fridays would be the one day in the week that Rey wears her hair in the three-bun style she was known for throughout her college years. Her hair, already wavy on any given day, will be unruly once she takes it out of the buns, and her best bet will probably be a simple ponytail.
“I could help with that,” Ben says quietly before she can ask Rose for her opinion on ponytail height, and Rey thinks she sees the tip of one exposed ear turning the slightest bit red as he clears his throat under her and Rose’s skeptical looks.
“Since when are you a hairstylist?” Rey asks teasingly as Ben crosses the room and wheels her chair over to the couch.
“You’re forgetting who my mom is,” he reminds them, and Rose emits a little ah as Ben’s words conjure up images of the beautifully intricate braided up-dos Leia is known for. “Do either of you have any bobby pins?” Ben asks, already carefully removing the thin, clear elastics holding Rey’s buns up. Those he places on the low side table near the couch for later use, and Rose adds a handful of pins scrounged up from the depths of her bag and drawers before she stands back to watch Ben work.
Ben gently runs his hands through her hair before he starts to section it, and Rey thinks she could just close her eyes and stay like this forever. In what feels like the blink of an eye, however, Ben is wrapping two of her elastics around a braid and pinning it in place.
“There you go,” he says quietly, still sitting close enough for her to feel his body heat. If they were alone, if they were back in college or at either of their places, she could just lean back, fall into him; they’ve been friends for long enough that she can get away with that now. But they’re at work, Rey abruptly remembers when Rose comes closer to snap a few pictures of her hair and show them to her.
“Holy crap, Ben, this is amazing!” Rose tells him as Rey flips through pictures of an expertly-done crown braid that wraps around her head.
“It really is,” she agrees with Rose, and hands the phone back before she turns around. “Thanks, Ben.”
“Anytime,” he shrugs, gives her a little smile and tucks a wisp of escaped hair behind her ear before he gets up and returns the chair to its rightful place behind her desk. “I’ll leave you two to it, then. We’ve still got an hour of work to go.”
Rose groans at the reminder and trudges back to her desk, but Rey remains seated on the couch near the door until Ben approaches. “Have fun at dinner,” he tells her with one last smile before he leaves.
Ben is always welcome too, of course, Rey remembers a second too late.
It’s not like he would’ve joined her anyway… right?
The next Friday she bumps into Holdo in the break room and the woman says she’ll see her at dinner later, and that’s when Rey realizes that any invitation to Friday dinner is a standing invitation. Thankfully she’d come prepared for that possibility, and casual Fridays cease to exist for Rey from that point onward.
Which is too bad, really, because she would’ve loved to have an excuse for Ben to do her hair again. It’s not like she needs an excuse to see him or talk to him – they pop by each other’s offices all the time, and every other weekend or so they meet up with Finn and Poe, and she goes to lunch with him at least twice a week – but there’s something about the experience of having him braid her hair that just felt… different. Nice and soothing and right.
Maybe Ben felt it too, because two months later the gang goes to his place to watch a movie after their usual dinner, and shortly after Finn and Poe have left he starts absentmindedly playing with her hair while they’re watching TV.
Rey ignores every single nerve in her body urging her to react to his touch, and goes on as naturally as possible to draw out the moment. Ben moves closer, seemingly encouraged by her silence, and an hour later she leaves his apartment with her hair in a French braid.
That night she runs her hands over the grooves of the braid and smiles to herself like the lovesick fool that she is.
Two weeks later, Ben knocks on her door an hour before Friday dinner. “Hey, want me to braid your hair?”
She’d actually gone through the trouble of straightening it earlier this morning, but Rey’s not about to tell him that. “Yeah, sure.”
Rose left hours ago – she’d taken a half-day today, with plans to drive home to her family for the weekend – and Rey allows herself to wonder if maybe that’s why Ben chose this Friday of all Fridays, if the experience feels as intimate and private and precious to him as it does to her.
“So!” she says a little too loudly as they settle into their positions, eager to put a stop to her misbehaving thoughts before they can go too far. “You learned from your mom, right?”
“Yeah,” Ben replies, fingers in her hair never once faltering even as he carries on conversation. “In Alderaan – my mom’s home state – braids have huge cultural significance. I never really paid much attention to that part of it, but as a kid I used to watch her take out her braids at the end of each day like some kind of ritual.”
The image of little Ben, perched on his parents’ bed as he patiently watched Leia undo her braids at her vanity stand, swinging his little legs and babbling away as his mother worked, climbing into her lap and trying to help… Rey smiles to herself even as it feels like her heart is being squeezed by some unseen entity.
“Did she offer to teach you, or did you ask to learn?”
“I asked,” he admits easily. “At first I just wanted to help her take them out, but pretty soon I wanted to know how to actually do them too. Watching her felt like… magic, I guess. The way she could weave all of these complicated braids into her hair with barely one look at the mirror. It became our little moment,” Ben says, a smile in his voice even as it takes on a distant quality, lost in time. “No matter how busy the rest of our day was, in the mornings I’d help her with her hair while she caught up on the news.”
“That’s nice,” Rey says after a beat, and winces at the inadequacy of it. If she weren’t facing away from him she’d give him a smile, and squeeze his hand, and Ben would understand instantly what it is she’s trying to convey. He always does, always has.
“Yeah, it was,” he tells her now, and Rey doesn’t think she’s ever heard him sound this wistful in all her years of knowing him. They lapse into comfortable silence after that, and minutes later she hears the muted movement of chair wheels against worn-down carpeting right before Ben announces, “All done.”
Rey turns around and smiles at him as one hand rises to lightly, carefully pat the braids he’s woven into her hair. A crown again – he seems to like those – but much more intricate this time.
“You know you could probably go around the office making a fortune off this,” Rey jokes, even as her heart rejects the idea of Ben doing this, sharing this, with anyone else.
Ben gives her a soft smile, shakes his head just once. “Nah, I’m good with just you.”
God, he really has no idea, does he?
“All right, have fun–”
He makes to leave, and Rey’s hand immediately darts out to wrap around his wrist. “Ben, wait.”
“What is it?”
I’m good with just you, too, Rey thinks. She’d be good with just him for the rest of her life, really, but that’s the kind of thing you're supposed to tell someone within the first year or so of knowing them, not after six years of solid friendship. So instead she says, “Luke told me you have a standing invitation to Friday dinner too.”
Ben shrugs, but makes no move to take his hand away from hers. “Yeah, I do.”
“Why…” Rey falters, tries to think of a way to navigate the landmine she’s cornered herself into. Things have been getting better ever since Ben started working with his family, but she thinks of what Luke said all those months ago, about family dinners and pigs flying, and wonders what she’s gotten herself into.
“Do you…” she pushes on, because Ben’s still looking at her and he’s got his head slightly tilted to the side in a silent question. “Do you not like it?”
“I tried going a few times,” Ben admits, “back when I first started working here. But I didn’t really know anyone else so…”
A part of Rey wonders how he could possibly feel that way while seated at a table with his mother and uncle, but they’ve traded enough bits and pieces of their pasts throughout the years for her to somewhat understand him. So instead of pointing that out, she finds the courage to look him in the eye and say, “I’d be there. If you tried going again, I mean. You’d know me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ben murmurs after a beat, smiles and slides his hand up to lace their fingers together and give her a small squeeze before he leaves.
She doesn’t expect much, but an hour later Ben shows up in her office again and wordlessly offers her his arm, and they remain linked the whole walk to Maz’s.
Decades seem to melt off Leia’s face when she looks up to find Ben hovering by the table, and a teasing glimmer enters Luke’s eyes when he takes note of Ben and Rey’s linked arms, but no one says a word as Rey takes her usual seat and motions for Ben to take the one next to her.
“So, who’s ready to order?” Luke booms as soon as they’re seated, and the moment passes.
Ben relaxes, starts smiling at her and even answering questions when their colleagues ask for his opinion.
And the next week, he shows up at her office right on time.
Another four months pass.
Four months of Ben occasionally popping by to do her hair because it soothes him as much as it relaxes her, four months of them walking arm-in-arm to dinner and sitting a little too close together.
The night Ben’s father unexpectedly joins the gang for dinner, she holds his hand under the table the entire time and keeps a watchful eye on him as he orders something much stronger than his usual drink. Some things never change, Rey realizes as she’s transported back in time to an uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner at Ben’s house her senior year of college, the one he invited her to because he knew Finn was spending the holidays with Poe’s family that year and he didn’t want her to be alone.
At the end of the night Ben is only the slightest bit tipsy, thanks mainly to his large frame, but Rey insists on bundling him into her car and driving him home anyway.
They’re silent the whole drive, Rey focused on the dark streets and Ben consumed by his thoughts. When she finally pulls up to his building though, Ben surprises her by leaning over and whispering a thank you into her neck, his lips close enough to brush against her skin in some hellish mockery of a kiss.
Then Ben pulls back slightly, plants an actual kiss on the corner of her mouth, and stumbles out of her car before she can even react.
On Monday, she locks the door behind her the second she enters her office and immediately tells Rose everything.
“I told you!” Rose squeals, kicking her feet together in unrestrained delight. “I told you he likes you back!”
“It doesn’t mean anything, Rose,” Rey protests half-heartedly as she sits down at her desk. “He was tipsy, it was dark… he probably just meant to kiss my cheek and missed.”
Rose gets up from her chair and perches herself on the corner of Rey’s desk. “First of all, you don’t just miss someone’s cheek and almost get their lips instead. Second, this isn’t even about the kiss, Rey! I mean, sure, it’s the cherry on top, but come on. Have you seen yourselves these past few months? I know you’ve always been close, but you’re practically joined at the hip these days. And don’t even get me started on the hair–”
Rey keeps her eyes on her computer screen as she mumbles, “What about the hair? He’s just being a helpful friend, that’s all. Besides, he braids Leia’s hair all the time.”
“Yeah, Leia. His mom. The most important woman in his life,” Rose points out flatly. “And now you. Rey, come on. It doesn’t take a genius to put one and one together, but you actually are a genius so this is bordering on ridiculous.”
“If there’s anything to put together,” Rey says quietly, reluctantly, “don’t you think I would have seen it years ago?”
Rose shrugs, pushes herself off Rey’s desk and goes back to her own. “Love blinds us all, right?”
The conversation ends there, and Rey does her best to push it to the back of her mind, to ignore it the way she’s learned to ignore everything Ben-and-feelings-related for the past six years. But that night she finds herself wide awake, staring blankly at the ceiling while she reconsiders the past six months from a new perspective.
On Tuesday, she sees Ben for the first time since that night, and his uncharacteristically flustered manner around her combined with the way his eyes keep darting to her lips tell Rey everything she’s spent the last six years trying to figure out.
She suffers another sleepless night contemplating her next move, and on Wednesday evening Rey lets herself into Ben’s office with a fistful of elastics and pins and closes the door behind her.
“Hey, what’s up?” Ben asks without looking up at her. He remains focused on his screen even as she sits down in front of him and scatters the pins on his desk.
“So… I’ve got kind of a weird request.”
That finally gets his attention. “What is it?”
He’s still doing that thing where he doesn’t quite meet her eye, and he keeps looking at her lips, and god wouldn’t it be so much easier to just spit it out and–
“I’ve got a date tonight,” Rey blurts out despite her sudden reconsideration of the plan, and by then it’s too late so she chooses to soldier on despite the way Ben’s gone all still and tense and… frozen, really, is the only word for it. “And I normally wouldn’t do this, but it’s pretty important to me and I really want to wow him, you know–”
Ben’s stillness becomes unnerving, and she realizes with building panic that it looks like he’s not even breathing anymore.
“Ben? Ben!”
It takes a snap of her fingers right in front of his eyes before he comes back to her. “Oh, um, yeah. Yeah. Uh. Sit down,” he says, and gestures at her chair as he moves to stand over her.
He starts finger-combing her hair with no further comment, and Rey is left to stew in silence and regret as a heavy, unfamiliar awkwardness settles between them. It’s the most uncomfortable ten minutes she’s ever spent with Ben, and at some point she loses count of the number of times he attempts to start a sentence, clearly to ask about her date, only to falter two words in and trail off into silence.
It’ll be worth it, Rey assures herself. It’ll all be worth it, it’ll all work out. She closes her eyes, pictures the way he smiles at her when it’s just the two of them, walking back to the office after dinner, full and happy and sleepy, and before she knows it Ben is telling her that he’s done and making his way back to his desk.
“There you go,” he mumbles, his eyes already glued to the screen. “Have fun. Stay safe. All that jazz–” he adds with a flourish of one hand, and immediately grimaces at himself.
Rey can’t help the fond little smile that tugs at her lips as she gets up and goes to stand right next to Ben. It takes a little longer than expected for him to look her way, but eventually his eyes meet hers.
She holds out her hand, gives him a smile that’s quite obviously nervous despite her best attempts to appear otherwise. “So, wanna go on a date with me? I got my hair done and everything-”
“What?” Ben croaks, eyes darting between her face and her hand. “Rey, what-?”
The hesitant tone of his voice, the quiet hope hiding within it, gives her the push she needs to go on. “Did you know that I had a huge crush on you back in college? I did,” she assures him when Ben inhales sharply and his eyes grow wide. “I thought it would go away after a while, but it didn’t. Then I thought I’d be over you by the time I started working here, but I wasn’t. And I thought that it was one-sided…” Here she falters, lets the hummingbird flutter of her heart drown out her voice as she whispers, “but now I’m really, really hoping that it’s not.”
Ben stares at her for so long that Rey’s skin starts to crawl, that her chest grows tight and her eyes burn and her throat feels like it’s closing in on itself as she says, “But I guess it is. Never mind, this was a bad idea, forget that I ever–”
God, she’s going to need the rest of the week off from work. Maybe even the rest of the month. Perhaps a change of scenery is in order; she could take a job somewhere else and move far, far away from Ben and try to get over him the way she failed to do once before–
She doesn’t get far before Ben stumbles after her and reels her in with a hand around her waist.
“Yes,” he rasps against her temple, warm lips pressing a lingering kiss to the crown of her head. “Yes, I’d love to go on a date with you.”
Rey collapses into him, trusts Ben to keep her standing as she hides her face in his chest and chokes on a sob of relief. “Yeah?” she mumbles against the sliver of skin exposed by his undone top button.
“Yeah,” Ben nods and pulls her even closer. “Multiple dates, actually. As many as you’ll let me have. Preferably for the rest of our–”
She looks up because she needs to memorize the look on his face in this exact moment, but the minute Rey sees Ben and his bright eyes and his boyish smile, she’s a goner. Surging up on her tiptoes, she snakes her hands around his neck to hold herself steady as she kisses him for the very first time. Ben responds in kind, curls his hands around the back of her thighs and secures her legs around his waist before he backs her up against the door. One hand begins to roam upwards, skimming along her arm before it curves around her cheek, and the most ridiculous thought occurs to her–
“Don’t mess up my hair,” Rey whispers against Ben’s lips with a breathless laugh. His fingers slip into her hair anyway after a brief pause, and when Rey opens her eyes she finds Ben sliding pins out of her hair and letting them drop to the ground.
“Ben?” she questions as he sets her back down on her feet and uses both hands to comb out her braids.
“You said that you wanted to wow your date,” he reminds her quietly, looks at her with a soft vulnerability in his eyes that she’s never quite seen before. “You had your hair down the day we met. I was wowed the second I laid eyes on you.”
It feels like her heart is being squeezed again, in the best way possible. “Oh,” she murmurs as memories from the past six years rearrange themselves to present her with an entirely different picture. “Oh.”
Ben smiles, leans down to press his forehead to hers. “Yeah,” he smiles against her lips. “Oh.”
He kisses her again, soft and slow now like they have all the time in the world. It feels like a lifetime before they finally manage to separate themselves.
“About that date…” Rey reminds him when it looks like he’s about to lean in for more.
“Right,” Ben shakes his head with a smile, offers her his arm the way he always does on Fridays. “Shall we?”
Rey laces their fingers together instead, and warmth blooms in her chest at the way Ben looks at her when she does, at the quiet wonder and joy and love in his eyes. “We shall.”