Joke's On You- To beta

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  “How was the labor?” I asked quietly.

  “How do you think the labor was, boy?” David snapped.

  I stiffened then.

  “I’d like to hold him again before we go, dear,” the old lady from the church said.

  “Of course you can, ma’am,” David said, sounding so sure of himself that it almost amused me.

  “Dad…” Dillan hissed.

  I’d had enough.

  “Can y’all get out, please?” I rasped.

  The old woman that’d come from the church honestly looked like she’d swallowed sour watermelon.

  My mother and brother gathered their things.

  My mom placed a kiss on my cheek.

  My brother hugged my head hard.

  Then they were both gone.

  “You, too,” Dillan ordered as she cleaned up around the room. “Get out now.”

  David looked like he would like to take a belt to Dillan.

  “You can’t talk to me like that, little girl,” David said.

  “No, but I can.” The nurse came in. “Mom and Dad need some privacy. Please give it to them.”

  He looked like he’d swallowed some of the same sour watermelon that the old lady had.

  “I’ll wait outside,” he snapped, pointing at Delanie.

  “No, you won’t,” Delanie said. “My mind won’t change. It’s done. You’ve had your hold. You’ve met your grandson. Now it’s time for you to go. Remember? You didn’t want me to have the baby in the first place. Then you disowned me when you found out that I was going to have the baby whether you wanted me to or not. Then you just show up here on the day that I have him and think that I’m going to be okay with it?”

  David hissed out an annoyed breath, looked at Dillan then Delanie, and left without another word. The door that he tried to slam closed bounced back open, allowing me to see my brother standing with his hip leaning against the wall right outside the door.

  Dillan breathed a sigh of relief and set down her bag.

  “You, too,” I said. “I have a day and a half. I want it.”

  Dillan’s eyes narrowed.

  God, she was cute when she was pissed. Even when it was at me.

  “I’m not leaving,” Dillan said fiercely.

  I looked at Bourne, who was still outside as if he’d known he was going to be needed, and he understood in an instant.

  It was as if we weren’t separated for the last eight months. He could read me better than I could read myself at times.

  That was the benefit of being twins.

  I mean, sure.

  My brothers and sisters could read me as well.

  But they just weren’t on the same page that Bourne and I were.

  “You didn’t need to kick her out,” Delanie said, looking pissed now.

  I looked at her, not thinking it was anywhere near as cute as I did when her sister was in the same state.

  “Maybe,” I said softly. “But I have a day and a half. That’s thirty-six hours. I want to use it. I don’t want to share him with anybody but you.” I paused. “And we need to talk about the next couple of months. How we’re going to do this.”

  God, I wanted to keep him in my arms forever.

  It physically ached something fierce to know that I wouldn’t be able to hold him for the next six months.

  To know that he was going to grow, and the only way that I’d be able to see him do that was by photograph and the occasional FaceTime… if Delanie was willing to do that with me.

  Which, by the look of her anger, she wasn’t.

  She glared at me, arms crossed tightly over her chest, and I felt her anger like a whip against my soul.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She looked away.

  “I don’t know how to do this by myself,” she said softly. “Hell, I’m still so surprised, even after nine months of getting used to it, that I’m a mom.”

  My shoulders relaxed a bit as I nodded. “I’m still a bit in shock.”

  She blew out a breath. “Do you remember that night at all?”

  The tension in my shoulders that had relaxed was right back, and even tighter than last time.

  “No,” I admitted. “I…” I paused as I looked down at the baby in my arms.

  He looked so much like me.

  He had black hair, a cute little nose, and bowtie lips.

  He looked nothing like Delanie.

  Delanie was tall, thin, and blonde. The typical Icelandic features.

  Every once in a while, I looked at her and thought of Elsa from the Disney movie. If a character could come to life, Delanie would be her replica.

  Even though Dillan didn’t look anything like Anna off of Frozen, she had the same bubbly personality. She may look identical to Delanie, but she sure the fuck didn’t act like it.

  It was what had drawn me to her in the first place.

  “I don’t remember either.” She swallowed hard. “I thought you were Bourne.” Her quiet whisper had me looking up from my son to stare into her face. “You thought I was Dillan.”

  I nodded once. “I did.”

  She blew out a breath. “I remember the party. I remember drinking, but not excessively. I don’t… I don’t know how it happened, Booth. I just know that I would’ve never chosen you had I been sober. Thinking straight.”

  Her words didn’t hurt me, because I’d thought them quite a few times on my own.

  I sat down into the chair.

  “I agree,” I told her honestly. “I feel like there are pieces of time that I’m missing.”

  She blew out a breath and sat on the bed, all of a sudden looking exhausted.

  “My dad wants me to move back in with him,” she said softly.

  My brows rose.

  “What?” I asked, surprised that she was even moved out.

  She grimaced. “When he found out I was pregnant, he lost his mind. Kicked me out. Didn’t let me explain. I told him who the father was, and he just… flipped. Today he gave me an offer right before you came in. He wants me to move back in with him but not tell anyone who the father is.”

  I leaned back in my chair.

  “What does your dad have against us?” I asked curiously.

  Her eyes flicked up to mine. “I don’t know. I just know that any time I mention your family’s name, he gets all tense and angry. We just don’t mention your name anymore.”

  I ran my hand over my child’s full head of dark hair.

  “This is going to be a mess as it is, Delanie,” I told her bluntly. “We don’t need your dad here making it worse.”

  She snorted out a laugh. “You have no idea how true that statement is.”

  Hours later, while Delanie was feeding Asa, I invited Bourne and Dillan back in.

  Neither of them were talking, but they were still there, waiting to be let back in as if they knew that I’d cave.

  Dillan stormed past me, a glare on her face, and I smiled at her in amusement.

  Bourne watched her go then turned to me.

  “I know that I don’t have a right to ask this of you,” I said softly. “And you might very well hate me but...” I licked my lips. “Can you stay? Can you hold off on going into the Navy?”

  Bourne had been intending to go into the military with me eight months ago.

  Instead, he’d been in a motorcycle wreck and had broken his foot the day before we went to the recruiting station. Instead, he’d stayed home. With the intention of following behind me when he’d gotten the all clear.

  Except, thing after thing went wrong with his foot, and even now he was walking with a slight limp.

  Though, that was likely due to him having surgery about ten weeks ago.

  Bourne’s eyes met mine.

  “I’ll stay,” he said. “Until you can get back, I’ll stay.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Make sure that he knows me, Bourne,” I
said. “I have this really, really bad feeling that he’s gonna have no idea who I am.”

  And I was right.

  Though Bourne had done his best, the next five years were some of the worst of my life.

  Sadly, it wasn’t anybody’s fault but my own.

  Chapter 1

  I used to be cool. Now a tiny person shows me his asshole to make sure that he cleaned the poop off well enough.

  -An actual conversation between Booth and his mom

  Booth

  Five years later

  “Daddy, can we go see Uncle Bourne when we get home from school?” Asa asked. “He promised me that we could go get ice cream.”

  I tried not to let my irritation show.

  “Asa,” I said as I gathered up his school lunch. “Do you remember what happened at school yesterday?”

  Asa narrowed his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  “And do you remember me telling you that you wouldn’t be going anywhere after school when you asked me that exact same question an hour ago?” I continued.

  “Yes,” he said, looking quite a bit more sullen. “But I was hoping that you’d changed your mind.”

  I didn’t smile, but it was a close thing.

  Sadly, though I found his antics on the bus hilarious, his bus driver did not. Nor did the school.

  Some little kid had started to pick on him due to his size.

  Asa was small. Much smaller than the rest of his friends in his class.

  He was normal, according to his doctors, but the kid just wasn’t a big guy. He was a small little guy, with a squeaky voice that kids loved to make fun of when they weren’t being watched as closely as they should be.

  When I’d met the bus at the bus stop yesterday, his bus driver had informed me that he had a three-day suspension for fighting with the other students.

  My kid may be small, but he knew how to hold his own.

  “I want to go to Mommy’s.” He stomped his little foot.

  God, when he showed his temper, he looked so much like me that it hurt.

  “I know you do, kid.” I ruffled his hair. “But Mommy is in Kansas at a convention. She has to be there for work.”

  Delanie normally kept Asa during the week while I kept him Friday through Monday morning when I would drop him off at school.

  Though it sucked because both Delanie and I really wanted to have him full-time, it worked for both of us.

  Delanie was super busy with her very successful company that she’d started a few years back. When I was deployed for the fourth and final time, she’d opened up a new business that helped match men and women who suffered from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—with a dog that could help them combat it with their companionship.

  It’d taken off, and now she was so successful that she was traveling all over the place.

  Our schedules had changed a lot since she’d started traveling, and now I was keeping Asa more during the week, and she was keeping him just as much on the weekends.

  At this point, we should really just consider moving in with each other.

  But I still hadn’t offered that option up as a possibility, because then that would mean that I’d have to see Dillan every day since they lived together, and I didn’t think that I could handle that.

  It was hard being around Dillan because it was literally like looking into the eyes of someone that hated you.

  Not that I could blame her.

  Before I’d slept with Delanie, I’d wanted Dillan.

  Hell, the only thing that I could rationalize about why I’d slept with Delanie at all was because, in my inebriated state, she looked exactly like her.

  Which technically wasn’t hard to do seeing as, just like Bourne and I, Delanie and Dillan were identical twins.

  If you didn’t know them, you really wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.

  Just like it was nearly impossible for Bourne and me to be told apart.

  So yeah, my drunk, stupid self had taken one look at drunk Delanie, saw that she gave me the time of day, and that was the end of that.

  The end of my old life as I knew it.

  “Daddy, you don’t cut my crusts like anybody else,” Asa supplied helpfully.

  One last hoorah the night before I deployed had turned into this life. A life where my kid complained about the way I cut off crust from his sandwiches.

  “Well, son,” I said as I shoved his peanut butter and jelly sandwich into the Ziplock bag. “You can either take it or leave it. I’d much rather be giving you lunch money to eat at the school every day, yet you refuse to eat the school lunch.”

  Asa grimaced. “It tastes like crap.”

  For a five-year-old, Asa had such a colorful vocabulary. Where his height was much smaller than average, his intelligence was not. When Asa had started school, he’d started in pre-K. Within days, they’d realized that pre-K was too little of a challenge for him, so they’d moved him into kindergarten. Even that hadn’t been a challenge. However, since it was his first year, we’d kept him in kindergarten so that he could learn and get used to school.

  This year, when he was to go into first grade, he bypassed it altogether and went into second.

  Yes, my five-year-old was in second grade.

  Hence the reason he was bullied by all the other kids for being so small.

  Asa was smart as a whip, quick of mind, and could really make you feel as if you were insignificant with how smart he was.

  Honestly, I wasn’t sure how the hell I’d ended up with such a smart kid, and sometimes it was intimidating because I literally only had a high school education. Asa was bound for bigger and better things.

  “I can cut them off,” Asa suggested.

  I snorted out a laugh.

  “The last time I allowed you to cut off the crusts of your sandwich, you cut off half the sandwich, too,” I told him. “And then you asked for another sandwich.”

  Asa grinned, and I couldn’t stop myself from ruffling his hair.

  “Ready?” I asked as I packed his lunch into his lunch kit.

  He’d gone from the cute little lunch kit with Captain America on it to a plain black one. It broke my heart every time I had to put food in it because I realized that my baby wasn’t really a baby anymore.

  He was in second grade for Christ’s sake.

  “Are you working today?” he asked as I picked up my gun belt.

  I shook my head. “I have meetings all day. And some mandatory training time at the practice gym.”

  “The strip club?” Asa asked, interest on his face.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Asa loved going there because he got to run wild and nobody stopped him.

  Also, usually when he was there, his papa showed. And Asa was all about his papa.

  My father, better known as Papa for the last five years, loved Asa. At times, I thought, more than his own kids—i.e., me.

  “Papa is out of town, remember?” I said. “And, if you’re good, we’ll go there this weekend. No more fighting, remember, Asa?”

  Asa sighed.

  “Fine.” He paused, a gleam coming into his eye. “Can we stop by Aunt Dillan’s store?”

  I rolled my eyes. “If we go there, you’re not getting a donut. You need to eat healthier than I’m letting you eat lately.”

  Asa rolled his eyes. “It’s not my fault that you don’t know how to cook.”

  That was true.

  I didn’t know how to cook. I couldn’t even scramble eggs without somehow fucking them up.

  Needless to say, we’d gone to Dillan’s store four times since I’d had him, and three of those days he’d gotten a donut.

  Every time that we walked in the door, Dillan would look at me accusingly, as if I should be giving him something healthier than a donut.

  Which, technically, I should.

  But how the hell was I supposed to give him something healthy when A, I didn’t have tim
e since I had to work, and B, I couldn’t cook it. And let’s not mention the fact that even if I did cook it, he wouldn’t eat it.

  Asa was the pickiest eater I’d ever met.

  Anything green was out. Anything sour of any kind was out. Anything that didn’t resemble a cooking commercial was also out.

  Pretty much, anything that I might be able to cook was something he wasn’t willing to eat.

  Which was why we ended up at my mom’s place for dinner, and the donut shop that Dillan owned for breakfast.

  “To answer your question,” I said as I wrapped my gun belt around my hips. “Yes, we’re stopping by Aunt Dillan’s store.”

  Except, when we pulled into the parking lot, I immediately knew that we wouldn’t be getting anything today. There was a fucking school bus with kids pouring out of it in the parking lot, and all of them were headed inside.

  There wouldn’t be a single thing left by the time Dillan got around to serving me.

  Cursing under my breath, I looked back behind me at my kid. “How about Sonic?”

  He grimaced. “No, thanks. I’ll just eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” He paused. “You can bring me another one, right?”

  I could.

  If I didn’t eat lunch myself.

  But that was a sacrifice I was willing to make at this point.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “You ready? Buckled back in?”

  After getting his nod, I pulled back into traffic, momentarily hoping that he didn’t get peanut butter or jelly all over himself before I dropped him off.

  Delanie hated it when I dropped him off with dirty clothes.

  I mean, it wasn’t like when I dressed him they weren’t clean…

  School drop-off was its usual nightmare.

  Thankfully, with Asa being in the second grade timeframe, I wasn’t being stuck with all the pre-K and kindergarteners that took forever and a day to get out of their parents’ car.

  “You ready to bail out, kid?” I asked him, glancing into my rearview mirror.

  He was already unbuckled, jacket on, and his backpack firmly in place.

  And he didn’t have any stains that I could see.

  Score.

  “Yes, Daddy,” he said as he looked at the line of cars. Judging if he had time, he dropped his backpack and scrambled over and into the front seat. There, he pressed a kiss to my cheek.