First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  “Rella is far away, anyway,” I responded, and tried not to sound sad. She had finally admitted that she needed more help, that she didn’t want to live on her own anymore. Her grand-niece had driven up from Georgia and taken her back there, but only after I swore up and down that I would be fine, and Rory promised her, too. We agreed that we would talk all the time on the new tablet that he had gotten and patiently shown her how to operate, and that we would drive down to visit so much that she would get sick of us. We would even fly there, maybe, which would be a new experience for me.

  “Come here,” Rory said, and kissed where a tear had snuck out. “We’ll go down next weekend.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “This car could use a few more miles.”

  I smiled, since it already had a lot. “That sounds good, then.”

  “Would you be worried about Jade if we left Detroit?”

  I sighed now, because I would always be worried about Jade. “I think she’s doing ok,” I answered, and she was. She’d gone to the new doctor with Rory and was sticking better to taking her meds. We’d hired someone to be a kind of visiting nurse to help her out, a lady recommended by the old guy who had kept me company that day when Rory had gone looking for Memphis. He was a strange old man, for sure, and he’d wanted to hear all about Jade and how she was doing. Rory thought he was just a busybody, controlling, but I wasn’t sure. Something he’d said about leaving a hundred-dollar tip for his waitress—

  “Jade’s definitely doing better,” Rory broke into my thoughts. “We could drive down once a week, if she needs it. You could keep going to the same cardiologist, then. Eventually, we can buy a house here. And you can keep getting your GED, and you could try college, if you want.”

  “Really? You think I could do that?” I asked skeptically.

  “I know you could.”

  Well, maybe he was right about that. “I know you can run an amazing shop, too,” I told him. “You’ll be the best woodworker in Michigan.”

  “The happiest,” he told me, and kissed me again.

  “And I also know something else,” I went on. “I know that your whole family is standing at the windows in the house because the curtains keep moving.”

  “I can’t believe they’ve been able to hold my brother back for so long,” he said, and just as he did, a huge guy came out of the front door, trailed by a whole group of people. So many came out of the little house that it reminded me of a clown car.

  “My family,” Rory noted, and got out to walk around to my side to help me down, which he liked to do. He kept hold of my hand, gripping it like he was nervous, but every single person was smiling at him, including the guy who looked so much like him, and who grabbed him in a huge hug that lifted him off the ground.

  Everyone in his family wanted to hug him, and kiss him, and tell him how glad they were to see him, and there were a lot of very happy tears. I stood back a little, smiling at the scene and so, so glad at the welcome he was getting. It was going to be a very good thing for him to be with his family again.

  “Hey,” Rory’s voice cut in over the others, “you have to meet Isobel.” He took my hand again and pulled me to his side. “This is the girl I’m going to marry.” He held up our hands to show the ring he’d made for me out of wood. He’d carved a heart on it so it matched the charm he’d given me on my birthday, which I wore on the chain that had once carried the key to his safety deposit box. He wanted to get me a new ring, when we had the money, but I was very happy with what he’d made. When he’d put it on my finger, he’d said it meant that he had given me his whole heart. He had mine and I didn’t need a new ring or anything else. I just needed him.

  “Isobel.” A small, older lady, Rory’s mom, smiled hugely at me. “We’re so glad to meet you. We feel so fortunate that our sweet boy is settling down with you.” I realized that I was smiling back.

  “And the cat,” Rory said, and held her aloft to demonstrate.

  “We’re moving up here,” I told his mom, and he looked down at me.

  “Are we?”

  “As soon as we can get everything settled in Detroit, we are,” I agreed, and he smiled. I melted inside when he looked at me like that, and it had nothing to do with the August heat.

  “I’m moving back to start over with Isobel,” he said to his family. “A new beginning together.”

  I nodded, and went on my tiptoes so our lips could gently meet to seal the deal. Rory was first, and last, and we’d figure out the in-between together. He was always.

  About the Author

  Jamie Bennett (that’s me!) is the author of a bunch of super great books, including a few about football (like the one about Rory’s brother, Defending the Rush). You would really like them. In fact, you should probably read them right now, immediately.

  Seriously. Go find them on Amazon.

  You can reach me 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!

  Read More about Jory Morin:

  DEFENDING THE RUSH

  This had been a big mistake. Like, huge.

  “Help,” I said to the empty room, and waited for a response. The only answer I had was the quiet hiss of the air conditioning. “Help!” I called more firmly, then waited again.

  Of course, no one answered. The room was empty except for me and the giant exercise equipment. The whole, enormous stadium was empty so early on a Saturday morning—eerily vacant and quiet for a place that should have teemed with fans there to cheer on the Woodsmen, northern Michigan’s one professional football team. The emptiness was why I had come to the weight room now, so I wouldn’t run into anyone. Great thinking, Meredith.

  “Help?” I asked it this time, kind of begging, and waited again. “Help! I’m stuck hanging upside down in the gym! This isn’t a joke, I really mean it!” Still no answer back. Ok, no one was coming.

  I tried once more to free myself, doing a partial curl in midair with my body to reach up to my ankles, to where I had hooked them on the exercise bar ten or so feet off the ground. “Come on!” I yelled, exhorting myself, but for what seemed like the millionth time, I just couldn’t make it. I flopped back down to dangling, panting and furious. Unbelievable! Was I seriously stuck like this, suspended here by these stupid boots? I rattled my feet in the straps and then tried another curl. Almost—almost—I held my breath and stretched—my fingertips brushed—no. I hung upside down again, defeated.

  I waited for a moment to gather my strength and calm myself down, but all the blood rushing to my head was making me dizzy. Humans were just not meant to be inverted for so long and I was going to have to get myself out of this somehow, and fast. First, I tried to reach my fingers out for the stool I had climbed on to get to the high bar, but it was just beyond my grasp. Then I strained up again, gasping, clawing at my own legs to try to grab my feet. I couldn’t get above my knees and I collapsed back down—again. My hands hung uselessly about a yard above the floor.

  Was I going to die this way, hanging like a bat by my ankles in the Woodsmen weight room? Would I meet my maker in the spandex pants that I could now see had a hole in the crotch, with me all sweaty and red and angry-crying? This was not the way I had thought I would go. But did anyone think she would die like this, suspended by gravity boots from a bar in room that smelled like a thousand years of sweat and male hormones, just because her stomach muscles weren’t strong enough to pull up one last time to unhook and jump down? I moaned a little, overcome with sadness for my wasted life and my weak abs.

  “What are you doing?”

  I had been so involved in the vision of my approaching demise, I hadn’t even heard this guy come in. “Oh, thank God!” I said. I reached out my hands toward him. My vision was getting blurry from being the wrong way up for so long. “I’m stuck hanging by my ankles from this bar! I can’t get down!”

  He stared at me. “Do y
ou need help or something?” he asked.

  My mouth opened and closed. Was he kidding? “No, I’m really enjoying this. I wanted stay upside down forever,” I answered sarcastically.

  “All right.”

  And he walked away, back toward the door.

  “No, wait!” I yelled desperately. “I do need help! I really do! Can you get me down?”

  He ambled over, in no particular hurry. “All right,” he said again. He pushed aside the stool I had used to climb up on, apparently not needing the extra height himself.

  My face smashed into the front of his shorts as he put his arms around me. “What—” I yelped, but my words were muffled by his crotch. He lifted me up so that the hooks on my ankles could detach from the bar, and then he spun me around like a pinwheel so my head was back pointing to the sky. My face yanked free of his shorts and he put me on the ground and let go of me.

  Blood rushed back out of my brain and arms and I lurched forward, my body smacking into his. He didn’t reach for me, or steady me, but he did let me lean there, my forehead resting on his t-shirt.

  I stood back up, blinking as I looked into his face. “Thank you.”

  “You’re all red,” the man pointed out.

  “That’s what happens when you hang upside down for too long,” I explained. I still felt a little dizzy and a lot like I was going to throw up, but that might have also been because he swung me around so fast. I had been like a baton he twirled. How had he picked me up like that? I wasn’t exactly light.

  I bent to get those boots off my feet and the man stepped away. When he did, I realized that he was, by far, the biggest human being I had ever seen. It looked to me like a fairy tale had lost its giant, that was how large he was—like a foot taller than I was, and I didn’t count myself as small. But he wasn’t just extremely tall, he was also enormously broad across the chest where I had just been temporarily leaning. His tattooed arms in the sleeves of his t-shirt were as large as my thighs, and I didn’t count those as small, either. He had a bushy black beard, and crazy, long, wavy black hair, a sharp nose, and dark eyes, but I couldn’t tell the color because his baseball hat was pulled low, so that the top of his face was in its shadow. He was obviously one of the football players, because no normal human would have been so large, and also, only the Woodsmen players were supposed to be allowed in the stadium’s gym.

  Which was what he told me next. “The cheerleaders don’t work out in here,” he announced.

  “Oh, you mean me?” I was extremely flattered, because I had seen the Woodsmen cheerleaders. They were generally gorgeous and very toned. “You thought I was a professional cheerleader? No, I’m—”

  “You look like one,” he stated.

  I got flustered. “Thanks, I—”

  “They wear those bra shirts, too,” he said.

  I tugged at mine. It was a tank top, not a bra, but it was tight and it was short enough to show off the hole I’d spotted earlier in my pants. “Well, I’m not a cheerleader. I’m—”

  “Also, no wives can work out here. Or girlfriends,” he told me.

  I shook my head. “I’m not with one of the players. My dad works for the Woodsmen. He’s—”

  “Daughters aren’t allowed, either.”

  My dad was the new Woodsmen head coach, I had been about to say. “I know. I’m Meredith Rob—”

  “Football players only,” he concluded.

  I stared at him. If he interrupted me one more time, we were going to have a problem. “Fine,” I retorted angrily. “I was going to leave, anyway.”

  “You were going to leave? Then why did you hang yourself from that bar?”

  With all the hair on his face, and with his hat pulled so low, I couldn’t tell his expression. I also couldn’t tell from his voice if he was joking, or teasing me. “I wasn’t hanging from there on purpose. I wanted an ab workout and…and I couldn’t get back up.” I hadn’t been able to reach the boots to get my feet out of them, and I hadn’t been able to grab the bar to unhook them and jump down, despite many, many long minutes of trying.

  He nodded and tilted his chin up and down, like he was giving me a once-over. “There’s a big hole in your pants,” he noted, and pointed at the juncture of my legs.

  I crossed them. “Thanks for noticing.” The jerk.

  “Anytime.”

  “And thanks for lifting me down. Goodbye.” I made it halfway to the door when the giant spoke again.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home, to make breakfast,” I said. Why did he care?

  “Do you make a lot?” the guy asked, angling his head thoughtfully. “I need big quantities.”

  “What?” I asked back, totally confused. “Well, yes. I make plenty.”

  “Sounds good.”

  What did? I stared at him, but he didn’t speak again, and it was just so odd.

  I really shouldn’t have come here, to Woodsmen Stadium. My dad had been trying to get me to visit his new workplace since I had finally given in and moved with my brother to northern Michigan about a week before, but I had told him no, I didn’t want to go to the stadium, I didn’t want to go anywhere. “I’m not interested,” I had mumbled over and over as I stared at my phone and checked on what my friends were doing back in California. I had said the same thing when he wanted me to go to the beach, to the sand dunes, on hikes, waterskiing, golfing, winetasting, and the million other activities that he had explained there were to do here. He sounded like he worked for their tourism board.

  “Meredith, you and Brendan can’t stay in the house forever,” he kept telling me, but I had just shrugged.

  However, it was true: you could only stay inside for so long, no matter how angry you were about having to uproot your life and come to Michigan. It definitely wasn’t healthy for my brother. Yesterday, I had pestered until Brendan tore himself away from his guitar long enough to go with our dad to the Woodsmen training facility to see the football team work out (although my brother told me later that he had waited in the car for most of that time).

  I was getting out of the house too, but more covertly, because I wasn’t giving in to my dad just yet. I had taken to running at night, after his nine o’clock bedtime. It stayed light really late here, all the way up near the North Pole. And today, I had also gotten up early enough to sneak out while my father was still in his room doing his morning routine of sit-ups, push-ups, stretching, and meditation. I took the bike that he kept telling me to ride, and also his ID card that got me into Woodsmen Stadium through a door in the back that unlocked with a swiping thing.

  The bike was how I was going to get home, right now. I hurried out of the weight room and away from the giant man, who was planted in the center of the floor with his arms crossed, watching me. I walked faster, looking over my shoulder, then did a skippy kind of jog, and then launched into a full run back out to the parking lot where I had stuffed the bike behind some garbage cans. I jumped on and sped up the stadium driveway and out to the road. First I went the wrong way, because the map on my phone pointed me in that direction but then swung around 180 degrees. I had to double back and retrace where I had ridden, passing the stadium again. My phone seemed to get confused up here, in the middle of nowhere, like it didn’t get what it was doing in Michigan. I understood its feelings.

  I puffed as I turned into the driveway of the house my dad had rented. Despite those late-night runs, I had already fallen out of shape. I wasn’t doing all the exercise classes I had gone to back in Los Angeles and it showed, definitely in my heart rate, and probably also in my butt. I also puffed because even though it was still early, it was already getting hot. It was much warmer in this place than it was right by the Pacific coast where we had lived in California. Humid, sometimes, too, which I’d rarely had to deal with before, and my brown hair was frizzing like I had rubbed a balloon on my head. I opened the garage and started to try to lift the bike onto the rack on the wall, something I wasn’t able to accomplish with my weak muscles fr
om missing my spin and yoga classes.

  At least I was alive. If that weirdo hadn’t lifted me down from where I had been hanging on the bar, plucking me off it like I was a mere piece of lint, I could have been stuck there until Monday when the rest of the employees came back to the stadium. Since the entire news cycle of this place seemed to revolve around their football team, coach’s daughter’s death by gravity boots in the players’ gym would have been a big deal. I—

  I turned and stared, because an old truck had just come down the driveway and rattled to a stop in front of the house. The giant, the oversized guy who had been in the weight room, opened the door and got out.

  “You?” I asked incredulously, staring at him.

  “Jory,” he said, pointing to his chest. “I’m Jory.”

  Find DEFENDING THE RUSH on Amazon

  More about the Woodsmen Football Team:

  THE LAST WHISTLE

  The end. It was really over.

  “You did the best you could, Hallie,” Gaby told me. “No one could have done more.” She placed her Sterling Standard Realty sign in the window and followed me out through the door, the bell jingling with its familiar cadence.

  “Yeah,” I sighed, and eased the key out of the lock for the last time. “I tried.” And currently, I was also trying to restrain the tears that had flooded into my eyes when I saw Gaby’s “for sale” sign. There was no use crying over this anymore; it was finished.

  “Keep your chin up, Hallie.” That was what my dad had always told me. So I looked up at the sky to hold in the waterworks, but I caught sight of the gold lettering on the glass that read “Holliday Booksellers.” My grandpa had painted those words on the shop’s front window himself, with a big, curly H at the beginning and an elf face hiding in the S at the end. He had sat behind this window every day in the bookstore that he had founded and that he loved, as had my dad. As had I, until I’d left and then everything…