The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  I rested my cheek on his shoulder and looked up into his face. “I have for a long, long time. But now that I have you it just feels…”

  “Pretty amazing,” he finished.

  “Amazing,” I agreed.

  His hands moved down to my butt. “I think you need to feel more amazing. Let’s go upstairs, where Maisie can’t see us and I can reciprocate.”

  Brooks walked behind me, his hands busy, smoothing over my shoulders and arms, over my breasts, and then between my legs. His fingers teased lightly, and when we got to the top of the stairs, he pressed harder and held me against his chest with his other arm as my legs started to falter. His fingers went inside me and his thumb rubbed circles on my clit. By the time we got back to his bedroom, I was practically begging him, and when he entered me, it was so, so good.

  “I love you,” Brooks told me. “I love you, Lanie. Now, come. Come.”

  I did. And then again, and then again. And afterwards, we lay together, hearts beating hard. I was his, and finally, he was mine, too. We could make our nest, together.

  Epilogue

  “I honestly never thought this day would ever come, as much as I prayed for it,” Pamela Wolfe told us, then looked abashed. “I mean, that sounds just terrible. I’m very, very sorry about my mother-in-law.”

  Scarlett rolled her eyes. “Mother, please.”

  “I’m trying to feel sorry!” Pamela told her daughter. “You know how she treated your father, and what she put us all through every year with her will, the mean old bat. We were very grateful for everything she did for us,” she added quickly. “May she rest in peace.”

  After all the years of revising her final will and testament, Verity was finally in need of it. She had died, suddenly at the age of 94, while yelling at her driver for making a wrong turn. Brooks and I had flown back to California at Pamela’s request, because Verity was making one last big deal of her money, by insisting from beyond the grave that there was a formal “reading of the will” with all her possible beneficiaries. So there we were, waiting to hear, like we were all in an old movie.

  Brooks and I weren’t that interested in the contents of his grandmother’s will, not like a lot of the rest of the family who seemed to be practically chomping at the bit. It was pretty gross to listen to them needle each other about whom she had liked better and speculate about who would get what. If this had been what the will revisions had been like, I was glad not to have been a part of them. Brooks hadn’t had a lot of contact with his grandmother over the past few years, except around Christmas or her birthday, and except when she grudgingly called him to tell him congratulations on the success of his company when it was written up in the newspaper in San Francisco, celebrating the success of a local guy. That story had gotten picked up nationwide. Starhurst had wanted to do a feature on him in the alumni bulletin, too, but Brooks had declined.

  “How are you feeling, Peanut?” Brooks watched me anxiously as I sank into a chair. “Can I get you anything? Water? A snack?”

  “We’re doing just fine,” I told him, and didn’t feel that I needed to add that I was definitely not a peanut at the moment. Summer vacation from teaching first grade had started the week before, and it had been great to slow down a little, but I was also just at the edge of not being able to fly. Brooks had been worried through the whole trip west.

  “Oof!” I gasped. Our three-year-old daughter, Laurel, collided with my stomach and he quickly picked her up. “I’m still fine,” I said, before he asked, and I rubbed a hand over my big tummy. “All three of us are.” Twins had not been on our radars but we were extremely excited that we would be expanding our family even more (the expansion of myself, I was not as crazy about). But after all my years as an only, lonely child, I wanted to fill our house.

  I missed our house right now. I was happy to be back for a visit, but after the years of building our life together out of the state, California didn’t feel like home to me anymore. Moving away had been the best thing I’d ever done—besides rooming with Brooks so many years ago. We had already visited my mom, who was in the midst of redecorating (again) the big house where I’d grown up. It didn’t look like the same place to me.

  My mom was busier than ever. She visited us sometimes in Texas, but not very often. She had worked hard on keeping her “helpful” comments about me to herself, but the first time she said something to my daughter Laurel, about her appearance or intelligence or anything else, it would be the last time she would be around either me or my kids. Her divorce from Kristian had been pretty public and embarrassing and tacky, but in the end, he had walked away with just about nothing. The Scemo she scrapped, literally. That made the news too—a million-dollar car melted down for spite.

  I still kept in touch with Jolie from my days at Starhurst. Things had changed there for sure, with an entirely new board of directors, and all the old administrators forced to resign, retire, or get fired if they resisted the first two. Oddly, the one person who was still around was Gretchen Rosse. I thought she would probably outlast the buildings, and she sometimes she sent me letters to keep me up to speed on how my old students were doing. Felix was still living with his older brother and his wife and kids, and according to Gretchen, things were much improved in his life. It made me happy every time she reported it.

  “Lanie? They’re ready.” Pamela held out her hand but it took my husband’s muscles to heft me out of the chair. I leaned against him and our daughter patted my cheek from where he held her in his other arm. I kissed Laurel’s little hand. She looked just like her dad, just like I did my father. I hoped she enjoyed seeing him in her face as I loved seeing mine when I looked in the mirror.

  “Please be seated,” Verity Wolfe’s lawyer and executor said as we all filed into the law office conference room, and about twenty of her relatives fought for chairs up at the front. “This won’t take too long.”

  He read through a lot of legalese, and then pretty quickly got down to the nitty gritty. Her driver and her companion both were going to come out on top. She left some small bequests to her great-grandchildren, including those in utero. Brooks looked at me, eyebrows raised. We hadn’t expected that.

  “Verity wanted to let everyone assembled know, and I will read her words directly, “I appreciated your continued attentions to me over the many, long years.’” I imagined I could hear her cackling. There was a lot about who was to care for her cats and specific instructions about how the money would be paid out for that. “And to conclude,” the lawyer said, but then he didn’t right away. He continued on for quite a while with more jargon, and the relatives leaned forward in their chairs. Who would get the cash, the multiple properties, the jewelry, priceless art, all her careful investments? They waited for those magic words.

  And the lawyer said them: “The Society for Calico Cat Lovers of America, Inc.”

  There was a momentary silence before the room erupted. “We need to go, now,” Brooks said, and got our little family out of the conference room as fast as I could move my pregnant body.

  “Why is everybody mad, Daddy?” Laurel asked him.

  Brooks was laughing too hard to speak. “They found out some bad news,” I tried to explain. “Great-grandma Verity gave a lot of money to, uh, cats.”

  “That’s good. I like kitties.”

  Brooks was now laughing so hard that he was leaning against the wall as we waited for the elevator. “We all like kitties,” he finally agreed.

  “But I like Maisie best,” our daughter told him. “Maisie and Jax.” Somehow, our cranky old dog had welcomed both baby Laurel and our other new addition, a giant mutt of a dog Brooks had met and didn’t feel like he could leave at the animal shelter. Maisie, now pretty stiff and grey, still managed to boss around her dog compatriot like nobody’s business.

  “We all like Maisie and Jax best,” Brooks agreed again.

  “And that’s what we’re going to name the babies,” Laurel continued, pointing at my stomach. “Masie and Jax, j
ust like our doggies.” She wiggled free of her father and ran over to hug her Aunt Scarlett, who was also emerging from the conference room.

  Brooks put his arm around me, his other hand on my stomach. “She’s going to be pretty mad when we don’t name her brother and sister after the dogs.”

  I nodded. “Maybe their middle names,” I suggested.

  He laughed again. “I know I shouldn’t have been surprised by Verity’s will, but wow, she screwed everyone over. Do you know how many years they all kissed her ass, hoping for a slice of that pie?”

  “I’m glad we didn’t.”

  He kissed my forehead, and his hand patted over our babies. “Me, too. Let’s go, Peanut. Back to our house, and our dogs, and our life.”

  I smiled as I snuggled a little closer, and looked over at our daughter, now running back to us. The babies moved and Brooks felt them under his hand. “They agree with me,” he told me, and so did I. I loved, loved, loved, the people I was with, and it was time to go home.

  About the author

  Jamie Bennett is a reader turned writer (but still a reader). Like the heroine of this book, she loves small, ticked-off dogs, and as always, really enjoys talking about herself from the third person point of view.

  Her many other novels are available on Amazon. You can reach her via Instagram and Facebook @jamiebennettbooks (and join the Rocinante group for extra updates).

  Thanks for reading!

  And if you enjoyed this book, please leave a review!

  NOW AVAILABLE: Love in Many Languages

  “Konnichiwa!”

  There were some murmurs back, but mostly, everyone just stared.

  “Watashi wa Marumo Gin desu.”

  More stares.

  “My name is Gin Marumo. Welcome to Conversational Japanese 101!” the instructor clarified.

  Ok, good! I was in the right place. Sometimes it happened that I wasn’t, but things usually worked out.

  “Please call me Gin,” the teacher announced. He had a lovely smile. He told us more about the class and I looked around at my fellow students rather than listening as closely as I should have. There was an older lady to my right who already looked half-asleep. I studied her, thinking she would be interesting to paint.

  “Let’s get started! Please say the phrases along with me,” our teacher said. He turned to the whiteboard and pointed to the sentences he had written out. I read them, but they weren’t what I had been expecting. Hm. Gin said the words and we chanted them back to him.

  “Very good!” He smiled again. “Now I would like you to introduce yourselves. Turn to your neighbor and use at least three of these phrases to get to know each other a little.”

  The older lady to my right was now out cold. I wondered if I should wake her up—it seemed like a shame to miss the first day of class! But she was frowning angrily in her sleep, so I turned to the student on my left instead.

  “Konnichiwa!” I announced. I tilted my head and read what was next on our list of phrases. “Watashi wa Ione desu.”

  The man to my left looked blank. “What?”

  “I said ‘hello,’ then I introduced myself,” I explained. I pointed to the words written in green marker on the whiteboard. “Watashi wa Ione desu. My name is Ione. Onamae wa? What’s your name?” I prompted.

  “Cooper.”

  “Hajimemashite, Cooper!” I smiled at him.

  He just looked perplexed, so I pointed to the board again. “‘Hajimemashite, Cooper’ means, ‘Nice to meet you, Cooper.’”

  “Oh, right. Washboard was Cooper Jesus.”

  “Watashi wa Cooper desu,” I said slowly.

  “That’s what I said. My name is Cooper.”

  “Yes, good job!” I encouraged him. Oh, no, it really wasn’t.

  “How did you learn to say all that so fast?” He ran his hand over his short, dark brown hair. There was a little grey at his temples but I didn’t think he was much older than I was. I put him at about 30, so maybe five years or so on me. He looked very serious, very intent.

  “I’m just reading what’s up there on the board,” I said.

  “Hash browns shitty,” he responded.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Now I’m saying that it’s nice to meet you,” he explained.

  “Oh!” He was trying to say “hajimemashite.” I smiled. “Thanks,” I told him, and waited to hear if he would say any more.

  “Oh she won’t want dessert cup?” Cooper asked me. “I’m asking what you do, what your job is.” It was the third phrase on the board: O shigoto wa nan desu ka?

  I had understood him. “I’m a receptionist at an app development company here in Detroit. What do you do?” I asked him in Japanese as well.

  “Robotics.”

  “Like Transformers?”

  Now he squinted at me. “No, nothing like Transformers.”

  “I used to love that cartoon,” I said, and smiled, remembering.

  The older lady on my other side poked me. She had woken up. “I’m not following this at all,” she complained. “When do we do the computers?”

  I turned to her to help, and we figured out that she was there on the wrong day for Introduction to Email and Browsers. Also, she didn’t have a laptop or a tablet, which I thought she would need. She left, then Gin moved us on to introducing ourselves to different people. I heard my old partner say “Cowabunga” to greet the next person he was working with and I got a lady who wanted to tell me about her daughter who was stationed in Okinawa. It was a very interesting class, but not exactly what I had been expecting.

  I went up to the front of the room at the end of the 90 minutes to talk to the professor but there was a big group of students around his desk. Lots of people were taking this class before trips to Japan, and they had a lot of questions about the country. I thought I would just ask later, or maybe we would get to my interest in the next class on…I stopped and looked at the paper calendar my friend Karis had gotten for me to carry in my purse when she realized that the phone reminders just weren’t cutting it for me. The next class was on Wednesday. The datebook was really great, except when I forgot to look at it. Or when I lost my purse. I looked at today’s date, and realized that I’d had a dentist appointment at lunch that I had missed. Shoot.

  While I was walking down the hall, looking ahead through the rest of the week so that I didn’t miss anything else, I smacked right into someone, my forehead connecting hard with his shoulder.

  Cooper, my former partner. “Sumimasen,” I told him, and rubbed my head.

  We had just learned that expression, but he looked at me uncomprehendingly. “That means sorry, excuse me, remember?” I asked him. “I was looking at my datebook instead of watching where I was going.” Where was that thing? I had dropped it somewhere. “I had it in my hand…” Both of us bent to pick it up, and bumped heads.

  Now I laughed. “Cooper, sumimasen!” I said again, and waited. “You should try saying it, too,” I prompted him.

  “Summer sun,” he answered.

  Oh, man. “It was nice to meet you,” I said. He nodded and turned to walk away. “Ja ne! See you,” I called after him. I followed him with my eyes for a while. Wow, he was bad at Japanese! But I loved how seriously he had taken the class, paying attention all the time. He really wanted to learn. I realized I was watching his butt a little bit, too.

  Find LOVE IN MANY LANGUAGES on Amazon

  READ MORE ABOUT EVIE AND HEATH IN I LOVE YOU BETTER

  It was like a fairyland.

  Strings of light dipped over the parquet floor, little shining stars above the dancers, and above them the real moon and stars glowed in the night sky. It wasn’t cold and foggy in July like it was where I lived in San Francisco; here, it was warm and the air smelled good. There were flowers everywhere, purple and pink and white, like a garden, and everyone was so fancy. Sparkly and poofy dresses floated around the dance floor. Every table was heavy with plates of white frosted cake, and jars of candy, and trays of cook
ies, and heavy glasses full of bubbly, sweet soda. Plus, there was a cotton candy machine that spun sugar fluff onto paper cones, as much as you wanted. My face was still sticky with it, and my tongue, when I had looked at my reflection in the back of a spoon, was a lovely shade of bright pink. I filled my mouth every time I got a chance to. You never knew when an opportunity like this would come again!

  I heard my mom’s laugh, high and loud above the music. I didn’t like it. A laugh like that meant she would have a headache the next day and I would have to be quiet and get my own breakfast. And lunch, and maybe dinner. It also meant I would get carsick when we drove home, because when she drove after she had a lot of the nasty tasting drinks she liked, the car was all fast and wiggly. I preferred the orange and red and brown soda in the fancy glasses on the tables. I picked one up and chugged. Mmm. Yummy!

  A hand shot out from under the billowing pink tablecloth. It grabbed my ankle and I squealed, then I kicked at the arm attached to it with my free foot. “Ow!” a voice yelled, and a boy’s head came out. “You could have broken my arm. That’s my right one, too! I’m a tennis player!”

  “Sorry.” I squatted down and looked under the table. He had spread napkins around and set up his own feast of cake and candy and those delicious pastry things with the chocolate on the top and some kind of cream in the middle, and the little pink sandwich cookies that melted away on my tongue. “Can I come under?”