Infinite Cashback: My Wealth Rebate System

Ben had a dumbbell in each hand, working through a set of curls with the kind of effortless rhythm that came from doing this literally every day, when he glanced over mid-rep.

"So" he said, not even breaking stride "you gonna tell me what’s going on with you, or am I supposed to guess?"

Jason, seated on the bench across from him doing absolutely nothing productive, blinked.

"What are you talking about?"

"You’ve been weird all morning. Weirder than usual, I mean." Ben set the dumbbells down between reps, wiping his palms against his shorts

"You didn’t want to come to the gym, which, fine, whatever, you’re always finding excuses. But you’ve also got this look. Like you’re carrying something."

"I don’t have a look."

"You have a look. I’ve known you three years, man, I know your looks."

Ben picked the weights back up, unbothered, like he wasn’t demanding anything, just offering the space in case Jason wanted it.

"You don’t have to talk about it. I’m just saying I noticed."

Jason exhaled, long and slow, and found himself talking before he’d fully decided to.

"Amanda messaged me."

Ben didn’t stop his set, but something in his expression sharpened slightly.

"Yeah?"

"Invited me to some party she’s throwing. Saturday."

"And?"

"And I don’t know. I didn’t reply." Jason picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, mostly to have somewhere to put his hands.

"I typed like four different things and deleted all of them."

Ben finished the set and racked the dumbbells with a clean thud, but he didn’t reach for the next weight.

He just stood there a second, towel over one shoulder, studying Jason with an expression that had shifted from casual curiosity into something closer to genuine attention.

"Wait." He sat down slowly on the bench across from him.

"I’m...hold on. Why is this such a whole thing? You guys were cool before, right? She rejected you, that sucked, but I figured you were past the worst of it by now. Why’s a party invite got you drafting and deleting four texts like it’s a hostage negotiation?"

Jason went quiet for a beat, long enough that Ben’s eyebrows started to climb.

"There’s more to it," Jason said finally, "than just the rejection."

"More how?"

He hadn’t told anyone this part. Sarah knew the shape of it, the confession, the

you’re looking at how it went

A joke he’d used to armor the worst of it but even she didn’t know the specific, ugly detail underneath.

He hadn’t planned on saying it out loud to Ben either, not here, not on a gym bench with the smell of rubber mats and someone’s protein shake in the air, but the words were already lining up, and stopping them now felt harder than just letting them out.

"After she turned me down, I was walking back...jogging, actually, first day I tried to actually get my life together and I passed by some of her friends in the park but they didn’t know I was there."

Jason kept his eyes on the floor, on a scuff mark in the rubber matting that suddenly seemed very interesting.

"They were talking about it. About me. Laughing about it."

Ben’s jaw tightened slightly, but he didn’t interrupt.

"One of them said Amanda told them I was..."

Jason exhaled through his nose, and the word still tasted the same way it had that morning, bitter and small.

"Convenient. That’s the word she used. Said I was useful to have around buying her lunch, doing her assignments, walking her home, as long as I didn’t think it meant anything."

Ben’s face had gone very still. "She said that."

"According to her friends, yeah."

"To her friends. Not even to you."

"That’s kind of the part that got me the most, honestly." Jason finally looked up.

"I stood there and let them keep talking. Didn’t say anything. Just went home and... "

He stopped himself before he got into the mirror, the tears, the version of that night he genuinely didn’t want to relive in a gym at nine-thirty in the morning.

"It was bad. Worse than the rejection itself, if I’m honest."

Ben sat with that for a moment, turning his water bottle slowly in his hands, and when he spoke again his voice had lost all its usual joking edge.

"Man." He shook his head slowly

"T-That’s genuinely messed up. I had no idea it went that deep. I thought it was just a normal ’no, sorry’ kind of thing."

"Yeah. Wasn’t really advertising the rest of it."

"I get that."

Ben leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees, and for once he didn’t rush to fill the silence with a joke.

"Okay. So now she’s inviting you to a party like none of that happened."

"Basically."

"That’s " Ben exhaled, searching for the word

"That’s kind of insane, actually. Either she doesn’t know you overheard any of it, or she knows and just doesn’t think it matters."

"Both options are equally fun to think about."

"Yeah, I bet."

Ben was quiet again for a second, and when he finally spoke, it came out slower, steadier, none of his usual rapid-fire energy behind it.

"Look Jason. You don’t owe her anything. Not a reply, not an appearance. Whatever you decide, decide it because it’s what you actually want, not because you feel like you have to prove something to her or to anyone else."

"I know that. Logically, I know that."

"But it doesn’t feel that simple."

"No." Jason shook his head. "It really doesn’t."

Ben nodded slowly, like that answer was exactly the one he’d expected, and he wasn’t going to push past it.

"Then don’t rush it. You don’t have to have this figured out today, or even by Saturday. You’ve been through a lot these past couple weeks, more than I clearly even knew about. Give yourself room to actually feel it instead of forcing yourself to decide what it means right now." He took a slow sip of water.

"You’ll know what you want to do when you know. No point deciding early just to feel like you’ve got control of something."

Jason looked at him for a second, genuinely a little thrown by how little that had sounded like a joke and how much it had just sounded like someone being decent.

"That’s surprisingly mature of you."

"I have my moments."

Ben stood, rolling his shoulder out, some of the usual looseness creeping back into his posture like he’d decided the serious portion of the morning had run its course.

"Doesn’t mean I still won’t clown you for the deleted texts, though."

"There it is."

"Had to happen eventually. Can’t let you get too comfortable being vulnerable around me, I’ll lose my edge."

Jason huffed something close to a real laugh, and the weight in his chest loosened by a fraction.

It was not gone, not solved, but lighter than it had been walking in, the way things sometimes got just from being said out loud to someone who actually listened.

His phone buzzed against his leg. He pulled it out, thumb swiping the screen to life before he’d even fully registered doing it.

Marcus: almost there, which gym

Jason read it twice out of habit, some small automatic part of him still checking for a tone that wasn’t actually there, before typing back the gym’s cross streets and looking up.

"That’s Marcus. He’s close."

"Good timing."

Ben grabbed his towel off the bench, already turning toward the back of the gym.

"I need to rinse off anyway. I’m not standing around smelling like this when he shows up and starts talking my ear off."

"You always smell like that."

"Today it’s intentional"

Ben called over his shoulder, already halfway to the locker room, and Jason shook his head, pocketing his phone and settling in to wait, the quiet after the conversation feeling different now, a little rawer, but somehow easier to sit in than it had been an hour ago.

He let a soft grin draw on his face

I’m happy I told Ben about all this. It wasn’t actually that bad

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