The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  “Lanie, what is the problem here?” she asked. “You’re often indecisive, but it’s worse than usual.”

  So many problems. Leaving my home for the first time, since I hadn’t before, not even for college; moving in with…

  My phone buzzed in my pocket and I avoided her question by answering it, still so surprised and with a happy, flippy feeling inside to see his name the screen.

  “Did you have car trouble or something?” Brooks asked.

  “Hi.” I turned my back, as if that would prevent Ava from hearing me. She was standing about four inches away. “No, no trouble.” Except in my own mind. “I’m just getting ready to leave right now. Packing took longer than I expected.”

  “Do you need help?”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Ava. It seemed like she had edged closer to me. “Thanks, but I’m good. Leaving really soon.” I looked back again, and she was definitely closer. It was like a horror movie. “I’m leaving right now,” I stated. He started to tell me about an accident on Highway 101 and I swore that I could feel her breath on my neck. I told Brooks I’d avoid the traffic problems and see him within minutes. Avoiding Ava’s sharp eyes, I went immediately to my car.

  I didn’t speak to her again as I got in and leaned over to wipe away a spider web next to the glove box. I pulled out of my driveway—my mom’s driveway—and a moving truck was waiting to turn in. Ava hadn’t been kidding about the imminent arrival of the next tenant.

  Maisie was coughing unhappily as I turned onto Brooks’ street—my new street. I had driven extremely carefully and slowly for her. For me, too. This was the last possible moment to drag my feet and I was doing it all the way to my new house. I was still not convinced that I had made the right decision. For one thing, my nails still looked terrible, all bitten down, and they would look even worse if I tried to paint them red. How could I be the super-seductress that Jolie described without red nails?

  How could I do it, even if I had the perfect manicure? The car had almost crawled to a stop as I approached the house. I couldn’t connive and seduce. It was going to have to be me and Brooks, friends and roommates, not me and Brooks, friends with benefits and beyond. That was going to have to be enough for me. I had gone all these years missing him while he lived somewhere else, caring about him from afar. We would be living in the same house and I told myself to be happy with that and not worry about anything else. To take what I could get, as long as I could have it. Pretty soon he’d be falling for another woman, and I’d look on and be glad, glad that he was happy. I would make it happen.

  Anyway, there was the cute little house, and there was Brooks out in the front, sitting on the steps with a gaggle of women surrounding him, a variety of kids and dogs surrounding them. I pulled in front at my snail pace and probably would not have gotten out but Maisie started to make a yakking noise that indicated that vomit was near. I leapt from the car and opened the back to get her. I put her kennel on the driveway and opened the door, and she emerged and puked as Brooks jogged over.

  “Brooks, meet my dog, Maisie.” She stared up at him balefully, shaking. I picked her up and she made angry noises. “She doesn’t enjoy the car. Sorry about the mess on the driveway.”

  “Well, it’s your house too. I guess I’ll have to show you where the hose is.” He grinned at me.

  I looked around him at the small crowd of women and their strollers and pets. “Did you already make some new friends here?”

  “I was sitting outside on the steps, waiting for you, and they all came out, too,” he said, sounding surprised. It was a very damp, grey day, not great for playing outside. “We have very friendly neighbors. They walked over to introduce themselves and they’ve been bringing all kinds of gifts, too.”

  “All those women.”

  “Women and their kids. Human and otherwise.” He pointed to Maisie, now lying in my arms as if she was near death. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s just being dramatic,” I assured him. “Mostly when she gets in the car with me it’s because we’re going to the vet, so she freaks out.”

  Maisie coughed weakly and Brooks laughed. “Let’s move you in.”

  The crowd started to disperse while Brooks and I unloaded the car, and Maisie sniffed around the yard to check out her new surroundings and perked back up. We took trip after trip inside, up and down the steps to my second-floor bedroom. I was about done in, but Brooks still looked like he’d never seen a suitcase before, totally relaxed and refreshed. “You don’t have very much stuff,” he commented, as I plunked back down the stairs into the living room.

  “You think? It feels like way too much to me.” I looked at the couch. Maybe I would rest for a moment.

  “Hardly anything. It seems like you’re coming for an extended vacation, at best.” He tilted his head. “Are you really moving in?”

  “Yes!” I did grab a spot on the sofa and tried to force my hair back into a neat ponytail. “I mean, yes, of course. I just don’t have all the housewares that make a move particularly awful.” I had helped Jolie move into her current apartment and I had cursed all the boxes marked “Kitchen.” “I never lived away from…I always had furnished places. What about you? The house looks pretty empty. You haven’t accumulated much.” The major furniture was still there, and necessities like pots and pans, but Scarlett had de-accessorized a lot.

  “My things are in a container in Nebraska right now, on the way here. Everything that I carted all the way out to New York when I thought I was there to stay is now coming back west. Some of it is pretty well-traveled, because I first I had dragged it to Croatia with me after college, when professional water polo was my plan.” He shrugged. “I probably should have said screw it and given everything away rather than moving it back again, but I do have things I wanted to keep. Pictures of my dad, stuff like that.” I understood, given the giant box of mementos Brooks had just carried upstairs for me.

  He sat down next to me on the couch. “You should have seen the place where I lived in Croatia, in Split, right on the Adriatic Sea.”

  “I wish I could have visited you.” I had seen the pictures he had sent to his mom, though.

  “It was the smallest apartment that I had ever been in, and I shared it with four of my teammates. I never really unpacked because it was so tiny, it was like a bedroom on a boat. None of us could even fit into the shower stall.” He looked down at himself, at his big, muscular body.

  I looked too, and I imagined…no. I could not start my first day as his roommate drooling over him. “Four water polo players in one apartment?” I asked, trying to redirect my thoughts. “I remember how bad it got in the aquatic center locker room at Starhurst with you giant, dripping guys in there.” No, that was not a good redirection. I had gone from one naked room to another.

  “Why were you in the boys’ locker room, Peanut?”

  “Uh, I was a journalist,” I muttered. I was a stalker.

  He laughed. “We had an apartment the size of your car, all four of us spoke different languages, and we were competing against each other for spots on the same team. Not a great situation, but I stuck it out until one of the coaches told me to go back to America.”

  “Ouch.”

  He held up his hands. “I had it coming, and anyway, playing professional polo in Europe wasn’t a smart move. When I started looking for a real job in New York, I was two years behind the guys I graduated from college with. It made it a lot more uphill. Which was how I landed at a company I wasn’t thrilled about. I tried to make that work, too.”

  “Did you really think that professional water polo was going to last forever, though? That you would live in Europe your whole life?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t want it to be my whole life. Really, I didn’t want it at all. I was done with playing polo after high school.”

  “I remember.”

  Brooks looked over at me. “Do you? What do you remember?”

  I thought back to that night up in Scarlett’s room
, right before he’d left home for good. “I mean, you didn’t seem very happy about going to college and being on the team. Why did you keep playing all that time?”

  “I have a hard time quitting. Quitting anything, not just sports. If the company where I was working in New York wasn’t going under, I’d probably still be there, too. I tend not to give up on things, even when they’re not the best idea.” He touched my knee. “What do you think about going for a walk and showing Maisie the town? You can unpack later.” He stood up and reached out his hand to pull me up, too.

  I took it, and even when I was standing, I didn’t let go until I made myself shake my fingers free. “I’ll give you advance warning that Maisie isn’t a great walker. She’s great at being carried, however.”

  “Lazy, is she?” We both looked over at my dog, asleep next to the door on Brooks’ big shoe. “We’ll whip her into shape. I’ll bring her swimming with me in the mornings.”

  “She’ll drown,” I told him.

  “I’ll rescue her,” he assured me, and I had total faith that he would.

  I looked at him and realized that my heart was racing. A man who would rescue your dog had to be the hottest thing around. I went to get my coat before I did something totally ridiculous, like telling him that I loved him, I always had, and I always would. Maybe that would have been a little much on day one of my tenancy.

  ∞

  After two days and three nights, I felt like I was getting a slight handle on living with Brooks. I determined this by the following criteria:

  By the third night, I was no longer waking up on a regular basis to try to hear him breathing in the next room;

  I didn’t jump with excitement every time I saw him in the house or yard and have to stifle a happy exclamation;

  I’d come down for coffee that morning and found Brooks leaning against the counter, unshaved and wearing only his boxer shorts, and I hadn’t fainted.

  I considered that real progress. Two days before, seeing him in his underwear, sleepy and with those abs, and I would probably have keeled over backwards, out cold. But, really, in my defense, any other woman would have, too. That smile and the stubble, and then he handed me a cup of coffee. It was an arrhythmia-inducing episode, but I stayed on my feet. I felt like I was becoming a little inured to his presence.

  More than that, it was pretty fun to hang out with him. Ok, it was really fun to hang out with him. We had eaten dinner together for the three nights I’d lived there, and when he saw me pulling out my planning book and papers to work in the living room, he had carried in his laptop from the tiny office and made himself at home in an armchair next to me. It was cozy, the two of us together. I wasn’t just inured to his presence; I liked it.

  So I was able to say, when I saw Jolie back at school after vacation, that I was doing great. “Really well. The move was easy, I’m all settled in. Maisie loves him, of course.” She had slept outside of his door the night before, rather than in her cozy little bed with her favorite stuffed carrot toy.

  “And?” She glanced at the clock on my classroom wall. It was almost 8:00. “Fill me in, quick.”

  “And what? There’s nothing else. He’s actually a very considerate roommate so far. He makes this delicious coffee in a pot he got in Croatia that he brought out here in his suitcase—”

  “You know that’s not what I mean,” she told me. We heard the sound of kids’ voices outside of the room. “Shoot, we’ll talk at lunch.”

  I wasn’t doing any of Jolie’s “oops, I’m naked” techniques on him. I wasn’t flirting at all, in fact, but I completely loved living with him. As his roommate. I thought that at lunch I could tell her that when Brooks had gone to the pool with the dog in his swim bag, he had left an apple on the counter with a note for me, telling me to have a good first day back. And I was also going to tell her that I had planned to make dinner that night for three, one dog and two adult sized-portions—

  “Lanie?” The head of the lower school, Shirley, knocked and put her head in the door. “Good morning and welcome back.” She opened the door wide and indicated the little boy standing next to her. “You remember Jonah.”

  I stood up. Here was my new student, the one who had visited before Christmas. “Of course I do! Welcome back to Starhurst, Jonah. I’m so glad you’ll be joining our class.” I smiled at his parents, then remembered there was some kind of confusing relationship there, that the beautiful blonde woman who was kissing and hugging Jonah as tightly as she could wasn’t actually his mom, even though she was acting like one. And the man smiling at her, his hand on her shoulder, wasn’t her very cute husband, but he was Jonah’s dad. I resolved to learn more about the situation, because this was gossip that I was interested in. “I’m Lanie March,” I told the woman. “I know we met last December. Jonah did so well that day and I’m sure he’s going to be fine,” I assured her, because she looked a little like she was going to cry. First days were sometimes harder on the parents. Or whatever relationship she had to the little boy.

  “Eve Moriarty,” she told me, and gave me an absolutely dazzling smile. She didn’t look very much like the other moms at the school, who wore neutral makeup with their expensive yoga outfits. She was more how I imagined women in southern California, all perfectly blonde and stunning. Wearing a shorter skirt and brighter lipstick than the natural look usually allowed for here, in the north.

  “I’m Jonah’s dad, Heath Baldwin,” the man told me. He bent and kissed his son. “Have a great day, Jonah. I love you.”

  I put my hand on Jonah’s head. It was better not to have a long goodbye, even though Eve, the mom/whatever, didn’t look ready to leave. “Jonah, let’s look for your cubby. Can you read your name above the hook?” I asked him.

  “It’s right there,” he informed me. “But I do my J facing the other way.”

  “We’ve been working on that, he knows the right way,” Eve told me anxiously. “Come here, man,” she called to Jonah. “Give me one more hug.”

  Her husband/boyfriend (?), AKA Jonah’s dad, laughed. “Evie, he’s fine. Time to go. Let’s peek in on Chloe. My niece started in the middle school here today also,” he explained to me.

  “Yeah, ok,” Eve said, still watching Jonah. “I want to see her and make sure that the girls are being nice to her.” Jonah’s dad put his arm around her waist and gently tugged her and she walked backwards on her high heels. He said something in a low voice and she turned and smiled up at him, and they stared into each other’s eyes. Ok, then, they were definitely a couple. He looked like he wanted to kiss her right here.

  The other kids started streaming in and Jonah looked up happily at them. “We’ll both be here at the end of the day. We love you!” Eve told him, but he was much more interested in the play kitchen and Quaid, who took a pot out of the oven, put some Legos in it, and announced that he was cooking jelly beans. Jonah didn’t even notice his parents (?) leaving.

  “We didn’t have this in my old kindergarten,” he mentioned to me, looking in the little oven. “You guys had that dead Jerusalem cricket when I was here before, too.”

  “Yes, that was exciting.” It had been an interesting discussion that day, about how that particular insect had met its end and then also about where baby Jerusalem crickets came from. Their ideas on that subject had been wide-ranging. You never knew where kindergarten was going to go.

  “Is it gone?” he asked, eyes moving around the room.

  “Unfortunately, yes, no more Jerusalem cricket. Come over here and look at your desk. You’re sitting at the green table group with Samantha, Tobias, Bashir, and Katrina.” Mrs. Rosse arrived, and like all the other kids, Jonah took to her right away. I seemed to be the only one to hate her, and vice versa.

  Jonah had a great day, but he was very excited when it was over, too. “Evie! Daddy!” he yelled when I opened the door, and he dropped his stuff and threw himself into their arms.

  “He was fine,” I told them. “Jonah, don’t forget your bag and coat.”
He was telling both of them about how I did a little curl at the bottom of my lowercase Q, and he really liked it, and something about building a house for lizards which I didn’t catch but thought I would probably have to investigate further before he was bringing animals into my room. That was pretty par for the course in kindergarten.

  “There’s a really good slide on the playground, Daddy,” he said earnestly. “Can I show him?” he asked me.

  “Of course! Go ahead,” I told him, and smiled. He was a nice addition to the class.

  Eve, his dad’s girlfriend (?), stayed behind. “Did Jonah really do ok?” she asked. “I was worried all day about both of them.”

  “He was great…can you hang on a second? I’d love to talk to you, if can give me just a moment.” I sat down on the bench outside my room next to Felix, who was huddled in a lump, crying. “Hey, Felix. Is Marilyn supposed to pick you up today?” I looked around. His nanny was usually right on the ball.

  “I don’t know where she is,” he said. “She never forgot me before.”

  My heart broke a little and I put my arm around him. “She didn’t forget you. Something must have held her up. Maybe something happened to her car. Let’s go back inside the room and we’ll call her.”

  “No!” He jumped up, eyes blazing, tears flipping to fury. “I’m waiting here so she’ll see me!”

  “Felix,” I warned. “I’m trying to help you out. Calm down.”

  He breathed hard and drew his leg back.

  “Felix! Do not kick me. You are ten million percent not allowed to kick. I can tell that you’re angry that Marilyn isn’t here yet. Can you say that with words rather than actions?”

  He kicked me. Shit, that hurt! I shot a glance at Eve, the new mom/whatever, who was watching the whole scene. Awesome.

  “Felix, I know you’re already sorry that you did that,” I told him, rubbing my leg with my other foot, and he burst into noisy sobs and fell on me, apologizing. I patted his back. “It’s ok to be angry, and maybe you’re scared, too, but I’m right here. You’re going to be fine.”