Double Pop

by Jamie Bennett

  I felt like I was going to throw up. “Maia. Please stop. You can call one of those girls to blow smoke up your ass about how great this is, but you’re not going to hear it from me. I need to go.”

  There was a huge silence. Then I could hear her crying. “I’m really happy,” she said, her voice full of tears. “I’m really happy and I’m positive this is the best decision I could ever make. I’m sure.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy,” I managed to say. “That’s what I want most for you.”

  Maia sniffled. “Maybe you can help me plan the wedding,” she suggested. “That would be fun to do together and my mom is useless about it, of course. You can come home and we can decorate the nursery. We’re going to live with Hunter’s parents. In their basement.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t be able to do those things. I really have to go, Maia.”

  “Ok.” Sniffle. “Like, you really don’t want to help with the wedding?” She sounded surprised by that. I had always helped her, with everything, but this time was a no. No, I didn’t want to plan her wedding to her 18-year-old groom.

  “Nola and I will definitely come. I’ll look for your invitation.” That was the best I was going to be able to do. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” she answered quietly, and I hung up.

  “Mama, look!” I stood and watched as Nola pedaled about ten feet with Luca holding on to the back of the seat. The moment he let go, she wobbled over and crashed. Her wail echoed around the stone bleachers and I leaped down to get her, vaulting over the wall that separated the track from the spectators’ seats. By the time I had sprinted to them on the other side of the oval, Luca had her on her feet and was wiping off a little scrape.

  “Vedi? No more blood. You’re fine,” he told her. I stopped in my approach, knowing that she would cry more if I acted less than cool at this moment. “Let’s keep going.” She looked over at me and I smiled and gave her a thumbs up.

  They did keep going, and I took movies and applauded. She actually biked by herself, going at least five feet before she crashed again.

  “This is the best bike ever,” she kept saying. “Look! Look, Luca!”

  After we had used up his supply of band-aids, I called a break on riding. We went to the monkey bars where he walked back and forth a million times, holding her up, until she was pretty close to doing it on her own. Her little palms were red, her arms as tired as her legs. I showed Luca my classroom when he asked to see it, then Nola was hungry for lunch and we loaded up the bike into Luca’s big trunk.

  “Um, her bike should stay with you,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed. “You don’t want to keep it in your storage area? With a new lock?”

  I shook my head, no. “I think it’s better with you.” Because both Nola and I would fall apart if this beautiful new bike got destroyed, too.

  “Ok.” He looked at me for a while. “Ok. Come to lunch. My treat to celebrate the riding of the big girl bike.” When I opened my mouth, he said, “I insist,” and I closed it. We followed him in our car to a restaurant, Nola talking the entire time about her prowess on the bike and on the playground.

  “Mama, I love Luca,” she announced.

  “Do you?” I looked at her in the mirror.

  She nodded. “He loves me too. You say, ti voglio bene. I ti voglio bene Luca.”

  I started to cry again, keeping it quiet so she wouldn’t get upset. Oh, fuck. Of course she loved him. Who wouldn’t? I tried the words also, when my throat unclenched. “Ti voglio bene.”

  “No, like this!” She repeated herself about 20 more times before switching to discuss lunch.

  At the restaurant, I studied the menu with Nola and she picked something besides noodles with butter. “I’m fine,” I said when the waiter came. “Nothing for me. Just not hungry,” I added, when Luca looked at me.

  “A salad? Some soup,” he said. “Something small.”

  Well, he had seen me naked, and he still wasn’t pushing me to diet, so that was good. I nodded and got a salad, not within my normal range of eating, but the ones that he had been giving me for lunch had been mostly tasty. Minus the kale one. We ate with Nola and Luca talking a mile a minute in between her yawning. I got the feeling that maybe Mrs. Santa had let her stay up a little late, although Nola denied it. “Let’s go back home, Noles, and have a little quiet time,” I said as we left the restaurant.

  She was tired enough that she agreed. She was basically over naps, but her school did the “quiet time” thing in the afternoons and sometimes she did nod off. Today was one of those times, after we read together in the bedroom and talked about the morning’s activities. “I love my bike,” she said sleepily. “It’s the best bike ever. Even better than my old one.” I kissed her again.

  “Nola, ti voglio bene.”

  “Ti voglio bene, Mama.”

  Luca had come home with us, like it was just obvious that we would spend the day together. He had made himself at home on my couch, again like it was the most natural place for him to be. He looked up and smiled as I closed the bedroom door. “Come here, immediately,” he ordered me. “You have to sit on my lap.”

  “I have to?” I asked, trying to rally. Trying to sound like I was the happy, funny (I hoped) person he had wanted to be friends with in the beginning.

  He nodded sternly and patted his thighs. “Much better,” he told me, when I had carefully placed myself on them. He put his arms around my waist and drew me up against him and I relaxed. It was like he was some kind of drug—he just felt so good to me. “Now tell me why you were so upset.”

  I pretended that he meant why I had been so upset after my phone call with my cousin. “Maia isn’t going to college. She’s going to marry her boyfriend. She’s pregnant.” I couldn’t hold in the long, shuddering sigh.

  He whistled a little. “She’s very young.”

  “She’s making such a mistake. And the worst part is, she’s looking at me, thinking that I’m some kind of role model for how having a baby can turn out just fine.”

  “Nola’s pretty great.”

  “Of course she is!” I sat up. “But everything else is so—” No. “I mean, of course, yes. I just really, really wanted Maia to go to college. I didn’t want her to get married so young, to get pregnant so young. Those things could have waited! I had these big dreams about her succeeding.”

  “I guess it depends on what your idea of success is, right? I hope it will work out for her.” He studied me. “But that wasn’t why you were crying earlier. You were upset before you called her back.”

  “No, I was, um…” I slid down to kiss his neck. Distraction was the better part of valor, wasn’t that right? Something like that, anyway. Plus, his neck was just so attractive, ridiculously so. He tilted my chin and looked at me and then kissed me, and we did that until it got pretty heated, and both of us broke apart to glance at the bedroom door.

  “Is Mrs. Santamaría free tonight?” Luca asked. His breath came fast. Very casually, his hand moved to my breast, rubbing. “We could go out. Or, we could stay in at my house.”

  “Oh. Oh,” I breathed out.

  He put his other hand on my thigh. His fingers crept up my jeans. “I look forward to warmer weather. I’m hoping you wear a lot more skirts and dresses. Also, very few pairs of underwear,” he commented.

  “I’m not sure if it’s appropriate for a second grade teacher to go commando…oh, Luca. God. That feels good.” Because now his hand was at the V of my legs, also rubbing. “Ok, yes. Who needs underwear?” My hips moved, pressing myself against his fingers.

  He stopped and laughed. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Was this just a ploy to take my mind off my cousin’s bad decisions?” I asked. He tweaked my nipple and I jumped. “Luca!”

  “I can’t seem to keep my hands off you and all your fascinating parts,” he answered. “This part, and this part…” As he enumerated, he touched, rubbed, and caressed, making me pant. “But,” he continued, “I think you we
re the one who started kissing me, not the other way around. What was that about a distraction?” He took my chin in his hand. “Why is there a ‘U Get It Delivered Driver’ sticker on the back window of your car?”

  I looked at his mouth, rather than his eyes. “I started doing deliveries at night. To supplement my income.”

  “To pay me back?” His mouth had turned down into a frown. “I hope that wasn’t the case.”

  That had been part of it. “I need the money. I have to pay for more stuff for my mom and Kayla. Beyond what I’ve been able to squeeze out of the state and local governments.” I sighed. “I knew that they had been struggling some, I saw it at Christmas. When I was up there again, my stepfather admitted that it’s overwhelming for him to care for my mom and my sister. I’m trying to provide it for them without having to move back there.”

  “You have a life here,” he said sharply. “No moving. You’ve been very vague about how you’re helping them so far. Tell me exactly what they need, what you’re doing for them.”

  I put my head down on his shoulder again. “Are you sure? It will just be me complaining.”

  “I thought we had cleared up that I want to hear what you’re dealing with. I don’t consider it complaining.”

  I sighed again. I really wanted to talk to someone, and there he was, encouraging me. “Last time I told you awful stuff about my family, you got upset. Remember? When I was cleaning their apartment and decided to air the dirty laundry to you on the phone. I don’t blame you for getting tired of hearing it, but I don’t want to do that again. I don’t want to make you bored.”

  “To make me bored,” Luca repeated.

  “I don’t want to lose you as a friend,” I explained. I tightened my arms around his neck. I really, really couldn’t lose him.

  “Right.” I felt his muscles tense up under my body, then he sighed, and relaxed. “I did get upset when you were talking to me that day. When I heard you crying over the phone, I jumped up and ran away from my desk to get to my car, without even thinking about it. I knocked my laptop onto the floor and broke the screen.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Tears are your kryptonite.”

  “It wasn’t your tears. Well, it was, but I wasn’t trying to run away from your emotions, like I do with Vesa.”

  Vesa. I hated that woman. I practically growled and hissed when he said her name.

  Luca paused. His fingers kneaded into the muscles of my back. “I was running to you. I had a total, irrational urge to get to you that day. And the more you talked, the more terrible things you told me, the more I wanted to be there. First I mapped out a driving route, then I was searching for flights, then I started trying to rent a helicopter. On my shattered screen.”

  I sat up. “You wanted to come? Because you thought I was in trouble or something?”

  “Because I wanted to be there with you. To help you, to make you stop crying. To hold you. Your tears didn’t scare me, not at all. I hung up before I did something crazy, like try to buy experimental rocket boots to get to you. I thought if I acted too controlling and nuts, the way I wanted to act, you would run in the other direction. I limited myself to hiring people to help you clean and then made myself hang up.”

  “I wouldn’t run from you,” I said. In fact, I wouldn’t be running anywhere, my damn ankle hurt so much.

  “It reminded me of how you acted today. When Nola fell off her bike, you jumped over the wall at the track to get to her. Like you were a four-hundred-meter hurdler.” His fingers went to my ankle and I flinched it away. “This still bothers you,” he pointed out. “You limped for the rest of the morning after leaping the wall.” He touched it very gently. “I can feel that it’s swollen.”

  “It’s fine. I have a naturally thick right leg.”

  Luca looked me in the eyes. “I’m going to help you.”

  “You’re going to cure my ankle?” I asked. I leaned and bit his neck, just a little.

  “No, Jolie. I’m going to help you with your mom and your sister.” I sat up but before I could speak, he held his finger to my lips. “I’m giving in to my controlling, crazy side. I’m going to help you because you need it, and because you gave me that terrible, terrible soup when you and Nola came to swim at the pool with me last week. Why soup, by the way?”

  I moved his finger away to protest. “It wasn’t that bad! And when people are upset, or under stress, they should eat soup. Your dad is sick, so I made you soup. Duh.” Now I frowned. “I took a lot of time making that crap. Nola wouldn’t eat it, but I thought you might. It had all those vegetables and spices.”

  He laughed. “Thank you. Friends help each other. You make me soup, I help your family. Quid pro quo.”

  “I love it when you speak in dead languages,” I told him.

  “Carthago delenda est,” he said. He touched his nose to mine.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Carthage must be destroyed,” Luca told me. “Cato said it about the Punic Wars.”

  I kissed him. “Jesus, that’s so sexy.” I kissed him again. “Tell me more about those hot, dirty Punic Wars.”

  “Acta non verba.” He kissed me ferociously. “Deeds, not words,” he translated.

  We both laughed. I kissed his eyebrows, which I seemed to love, and his nose, which I equally loved. And his ears, because they were just so lovable, too. “Luca, you don’t have to do anything for my mom, you know. I don’t expect it.”

  “I know.” Luca kissed me back. “But I’m going to, anyway.”

  I would keep track and pay him back for whatever he insisted on paying for. Add it on to everything else I owed him.

  “What is the plan currently in place?” he asked. Do you have anything actually written out beyond the notes to yourself stuck to your appliances?”

  “Yes,” I huffed. “There are also notes stuck to my dashboard.”

  He laughed, and kissed me again. “Jolie, omnia vincit amor: et nos cedamus amori.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look it up, teacher. And rest your ankle, I’ll gather the post-it notes.”

  Chapter 15

  “Jolie. Jolie?”

  “What?” I sat straight up in bed. It was very light in the room, way later than when Nola usually got me up on Sunday mornings.

  Luca came into the bedroom and I automatically tried to fix my hair. “What’s happening?” I asked, my voice sleepy and slurred.

  He stopped for a moment, tilted his head, and smiled at me. “You’re cute when you wake up. Your hair is so pretty.”

  That was patently false. I could feel it in a nest around my head. “What’s happening?” I asked, still so confused. Once again, I remembered falling asleep on the couch, this time with Nola on top of me and both of us cuddling Luca pretty hard. Eva hadn’t been available to babysit the night before, and no one else I had called could either at such late notice. But to be honest, I hadn’t looked very hard. I’d had a sinking suspicion that if I slept with Luca again, another amazing evening of him practically worshiping my body and making me come so hard I saw flashing lights, I was really going to go off the deep end.

  It had been fun to have a night in with the three of us, especially since Luca went grocery shopping and cooked dinner. I helped, in my way, and Nola was fascinated at how he used the knives. I foresaw hiding them in the future.

  “Eva Santamaría is here,” Luca told me now. He rubbed his neck. “We’re going couch shopping later, if I’m going to keep sleeping over here. I don’t fit on that one.”

  “I fit there fine. When you said you were staying, I told you to take the bed,” I grumbled, and wobbled onto my feet. I wasn’t at my best in the mornings, even if they had let me sleep late. Luca kissed my forehead as I went by, and I hugged him, just for a moment. He didn’t seem to have the issue of looking like someone had scrambled him up in a blender when he woke up, like I did. He was as adorable and handsome and sweet as always, and I gave him another hug.

  “Panca
kes!” Nola called from the kitchen table when I released Luca. “With holes of grain.” I gave her a quick morning kiss on her shiny curls.

  “They’re whole grains,” Luca said, but now I was focused on Eva standing by the couch, and on the newspaper she was holding above her head. It looked like she was on the sidelines sending in plays for her quarterback. Despite my aversion to unknown outcomes, I had watched a few games in my time with Ty, hoping for a score that would be good for our finances.

  “Jolie!” Eva waved her arms, crackling the paper. “Have you seen today’s Gazette?”

  I tried to tie my unruly hair into a knot. “No, I haven’t seen it,” I said. “You’re the only one in the entire building who gets the actual newspaper. What’s up?”

  She thrust the front page of the local section into my face and I stepped back a little to look at it. My mouth dropped open when I saw the picture and I knew immediately why she had come up here with the paper. “Oh, holy—fudge,” I finished, looking at Nola as she munched on her holes of grain pancakes. Then I took another look at the blurry image, but no, Eva was wrong. I shook my head. “No. I know what you’re thinking, but no.”

  “Yes!” she insisted. “I’ll bet my last dollar.” She pushed the folded page at me. “Look again.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Luca took the newspaper from her and scanned the black and white picture and headline above it. “This is about a bank robbery in San Francisco last week. So?” He stared at Eva. “What am I missing?”

  Eva raised an eyebrow at me. “They just released some pictures from the surveillance video to see if anyone can identify the suspect. It’s him, Jolie.” She nodded her assurance. “I know it.”

  I pointed at the image of the robber, a guy of medium height wearing a hat, a bandana tied over the lower half of his face, and sunglasses. He was also holding a gun on the teller. “She’s trying to say that this is my…” I glanced over at Nola, as she swam a bite of pancake in the syrup on her plate. I lowered my voice. “Eva thinks this guy is my ex-boyfriend, Ty,” I told Luca. I shook my head. “I can see how you would think it, Eva, because the nose does look the same. The Marlon Brando thing Ty has.”