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  “I guess I don’t see you as a woman.” He laughed. “No, I know you’re a woman! But I still think of you as the peanut tagging along behind, the little girl whose hair got caught in her bike chain and I had to yank it free. I still remember you looking up at me, asking me not to tell your mom. That’s what you are to me, Peanut…

  And therein lies the problem. Maybe Brooks and Lanie just have too much history for there to be anything more between them. Maybe there’s just too big a jump from old friendship to new love, despite what Lanie’s heart wants. After all, he has seen her in her diapers (and less), and saved her from jellyfish stings, broken bones, wayward bike chains, and more over all the years they’ve known each other.

  The one thing Brooks couldn’t save her from was a lot of misery at the school they both attended, the school where Lanie now works as a kindergarten teacher. And there’s some tough stuff going on there as well, with students, and with some parents who come back from the past to make Lanie’s life more than a little challenging. Not to mention her mother…a whole other story!

  Lanie has to get it together—with her job, her family, and her love life. And when she does, maybe that will include the guy she’s fantasized about her whole life, and maybe he’ll be able to see her as the woman she is, rather than the girl she was!

  Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid.

  FRENCH PROVERB

  The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

  William Blake, from “Proverbs of Hell,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  The One I’m With

  Jamie Bennett

  Copyright © 2019 by Jamie Bennett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Book cover by Angela Haddon Book Cover Design.

  Prologue

  This was the stupidest, most terrible, awful, worst idea in the world. Why had I done this? Holy shit, this was just bad. Bad! I was quaking with embarrassment, unable to believe I had even suggested it. I would never, ever be able to look him in the face again. Fortunately, I would be dead of shame before the night was over, I was pretty sure.

  I could hear him breathe, and gentle wafts of his delicious aroma, spicy-woodsy-boy, tickled my nose. I was close enough to Brooks to smell him, not because he was helping me off my butt on a ski hill when we were kids, not because I had tripped in our high school parking lot and all my stuff had flown all over the ground and he had come to help, bending down next to me as I tried to reach under someone’s Mercedes and got oil all over my shirt. I could smell him because we were in bed together. BECAUSE WE WERE IN BED TOGETHER. What was I doing? Oh my God, this was a bad idea. I almost groaned out loud. This was a horrible idea!

  He shifted and touched my arm. His bare skin below his t-shirt sleeve brushed against mine. Skin on skin—my heart beat hard with the absolute astonishing amazingness of it. He was right next to me, his arms behind his head now, ankles crossed, totally relaxed. His long, muscular body stretched over the end of the twin bed and his broad shoulders took up almost the whole width. I occupied a sliver of the edge and held on to the comforter, gripping it in white-knuckled fists, to keep myself from falling off. We were lying next to each other, on a bed. On a bed. His skin had touched me and I could smell him! What had I been talking about? This was the best idea ever.

  “Lanie, what’s your plan now? How long do you think we should stay in here?” I could hear the laughter in his voice.

  How was I supposed to know how long it should last? Did I have any experience with this? No, ten million percent, no. “Like, a few minutes?” I suggested. “How about five?”

  “You don’t have a great impression of my staying power.” Now he did start to laugh, jiggling the mattress.

  “What do you mean? Oh!” I was glad at it was so dark, because I could feel my face turning red. I knew nothing.

  There were giggles in the hallway and then a thump outside the door. They were right there, ears pressed against the wood, people from our high school listening and wondering about me and Brooks.

  He picked up his head. “Beat it!” he yelled, and the giggles increased, then faded as footsteps ran off down the stairs.

  “I would say longer than five minutes,” he told me. “It takes a while longer, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, definitely,” I answered, so glad again that he had turned off the light, so that he couldn’t see my burning humiliation. “Ok, so like, seven minutes.”

  He laughed again, shaking the mattress more. “Seven minutes. Ok, sure.” He turned on his side, facing me. Instinctively, I yanked myself away, propelling myself onto the floor. Hard.

  “Ow.” That had hurt. I would have another bruise.

  “You ok, Lanie?” His head appeared over the edge, a dark silhouette. “Here.” He took my arm and helped me back up. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  The only thing worse than the pain in my hip was the further loss of dignity. “I’m great,” I said. I carefully aligned myself on the edge of the bed again, not touching him, but close. Very close. He was still on his side and now I could feel his breath, beer-laced and warm, sweeping across my cheeks. I tried not to lean even closer.

  “Tell me again what this is supposed to do,” he said. “How is this going to help you?”

  “It’s going to make things much better.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because you’re you, Brooks,” I explained.

  He laughed again, shaking the bed, almost wobbling me off. His arm came around me so I wouldn’t hit the floor for the second time. Oh my God, we were lying on the bed and his arm was around me, his bare arm, his skin only one layer of cotton away from touching my naked back. It was almost like we were really nude together, except that we were wearing clothes. Really, I could have died at that moment, pretty glad to end things at what had to be the pinnacle of happiness in my life.

  “What the hell does that mean, that doing this will make things better because I’m me?” he asked, and he pulled his arm away. It had been just like the time he had helped me when his sister had the retro roller-skating birthday party that she’d been forced to invite me to. I had fallen about 10 feet into my first foray onto the rink and bruised my tailbone, and Brooks had to skate me back to the wall around the edge, his arm around me so I wouldn’t wipe out again. Now he was trying to prevent me from doing any more damage to myself, just like he had then. In other words, it wasn’t like he wanted to touch me.

  I cleared my throat to free my brain of the fog caused by the feeling of his bare arm, his warm skin. “This, what we’re doing…I mean, what we’re pretending to do…it’s going to make everyone see me differently,” I said. “They’ll see me as the girl—the freshman—the one who…” I stopped, unable to spell it out for him. No longer would I be Lanie, the freshman who tripped getting off the bus on the first day of school and scraped all down her face. No longer would I be remembered as the girl who got her period for the first time in eighth grade and walked around for hours with blood on her uniform skirt, and no one told her about it. The Lanie March who wore braces and headgear for 20 hours a day—yes, that included every moment of my time at school—to correct a hideous, donkey overbite. The girl whose thick glasses and untamable hair made her look like the math nerds who hung o
ut together solving equations during lunch, but sadly, she wasn’t even very smart. The Lanie who failed so miserably at every sport that she was the only girl in the grade to flunk PE; Lanie, who, if life was at all fair, should have at least been good at music but couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and broke both a violin and an oboe on instrument try-out day in fourth grade.

  Yes, I was the girl who even the teachers laughed at and joked about (I had heard them when I went into the faculty workroom to get something out of the printer for my seventh grade English class). To hear the teachers, who I had thought liked me, make fun of me that way…

  “I’m going to surprise everyone,” I announced. No one would remember any of that stuff after this night. “I’ll be a new Lanie March, because I’ll be the woman who slept with Brooks Wolfe.” There! I had said it!

  “You’ll be the girl who’s pretending that we had sex, you mean. Lanie, I don’t know.” His words slurred as he spoke. “I still think this is a bad idea. Honestly, it makes me feel pretty weird to even talk about the two of us together like that. I’ve known you since you were tiny and in diapers. I remember when you peed in the bushes next to our pool at my parents’ anniversary party.”

  Yeah, that hadn’t been my finest hour. The bathrooms had all been full and I’d had about ten glasses of lemonade. At the time I’d still had the vague idea that if I closed my eyes, people couldn’t really see me. Unfortunately, there had been more than a few eyes on me as I squatted in the shade of the boxwoods. “I think I asked you not to mention that story anymore,” I said. Because the last time he had made a joke about it, someone on his water polo team had heard him, and that had been when the nickname “Leaky March” had been born.

  “Right. I forgot.”

  “I really need this, Brooks,” I burst out. “I can’t go for another three years at Starhurst Academy like the first one was.” Yesterday had been our last day of class. It meant, starting today, I had to make the most of the summer to reinvent myself before I was a sophomore. “I’m going to start next year with a bang,” I said, determined. Pretend sex with Brooks was the way to do it. No one would even associate the new Lanie with the girl who stepped in the giant pile of horse crap on our field trip to the farm in middle school, making me smell so bad on the ride home that three kids in my class threw up in the bus. And one chaperone, too. Luckily the name “Lanie Manure” hadn’t lasted beyond sixth grade.

  “I’m sorry school was so bad for you this year,” he said quietly. “I tried to help.”

  “I know,” I said. “Thank you. It wasn’t bad.” No, it hadn’t been bad. It had been miserable, every day of my freshman year. I had imagined that starting high school would be some kind of radical, transformative experience, like by August 27th, our first day, I would suddenly have clear skin and manageable hair. I had dreamed of good grades for the first time, and friends (also for the first time). Somehow the two and a half months between eighth and ninth grade and moving between buildings on the Starhurst Academy campus hadn’t made one fat rat’s ass bit of difference. I had been the same girl sitting (hiding) in the niche next to the water fountain before classes when the library was locked and reading books by myself in the stairwell at lunch. Just like I had been in eighth grade. And seventh, and sixth, and so on.

  But Brooks had tried to help me. He really had. It had been semi-successful at first, because I was the only freshman girl that he ever spoke to, and my classmates were intrigued. Then his sister, the beautiful Scarlett in tenth grade, had let everyone know that the only reason that Brooks deigned to talk to me was because our moms were best friends, not because he really liked me. After that, his attention had made things worse because everyone knew it was out of pity.

  And really, who could have believed it? The cutest guy in the school, the most athletic, and one of the smartest, just happened to be friends with his absolute polar opposite, me? It was laughable. I knew that, because a lot of people laughed at me. The year had gone on much like the ones before it had for me: shitty.

  Then, right after the prom, Brooks had broken up with his girlfriend, Colette. Coco. He was getting ready to go off to college and thought it was time. Coco didn’t, but who would have voluntarily let go of him? Seeing him single had given me the glimmer of an idea. I had come to his party tonight, snuck in, really, with one purpose: to convince Brooks to pretend that we’d had sex. I was going to be his rebound girl! I would be famous. Envied. Admired.

  “Lanie, seriously. I don’t think this is going to have the effect that you think it will,” Brooks told me. I felt the heat from his body. I wanted to absorb it and hold it in for the rest of my life. “This is like some bad movie,” he continued. “It won’t work. Sex with me—pretending to have sex with me—isn’t going to change things for you.”

  He said something else but I was closing my eyes and imagining us actually naked. Woo boy, naked. Maybe he liked flat chests and boniness. That thought snapped me to reality. “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I said, no one’s going to care that the two of us supposedly did it,” he repeated.

  “Yes, they will.” He didn’t understand the effect he had on the student body of our school. When he had worn his t-shirt inside-out by mistake because he got up late one morning, he started a fashion trend that didn’t die for months. In fact, it spread to inside-out shorts and pants until the Starhurst Academy administration put a stop to it. I had reported on it for the student newspaper, my most important after-school activity.

  “Ok, then, I guess we’ll see.” Brooks held up his phone to check the time. “To protect my reputation, we’re going to have to be in here longer than seven minutes.”

  I could hear the laughter return to his voice. I fought the urge to reach out and feel the dimple that always appeared in his cheek when he smiled. I was fighting the urge to reach out and touch him in many ways: to run my fingers across his dark eyebrows above his gorgeous blue eyes, over his nose that made me think of a Roman gladiator even though I didn’t really know what one would look like. I would feel his chest and arms and stomach with all those muscles like they were chiseled out of stone…I had been to every one of his water polo games. I had gotten quite an eyeful.

  “Thank you, Brooks,” I said, and I sincerely meant it, from the bottom of my heart. It had taken a lot of convincing for him to do this, and I’d had to hide in the hall closet and wait until he’d had a few beers in him, but finally he had reluctantly agreed. Shaking, I had led him upstairs, so nervous it was as if it was real, like he would really sleep with me. Like I was ready for sex, even with Brooks. His bedroom had been occupied by another couple, so we were in his little sister Scarlett’s room, all pink fur and trophies and medals from her many sports accomplishments. In her twin bed that didn’t fit Brooks at all. “Thank you so much for doing this for me.”

  “You’re welcome,” he answered. “I hope you get what you want out of it.” He still sounded doubtful.

  We were quiet. I thought about what I wanted, but everything in my head was a big tangled mess when it came to boys. When it came to sex. When it came to Brooks.

  “Tell me about what you’re going to do this summer,” I said, to make myself focus on something other than the fact that his…thing was right next to my thighs. That was one part of him that the water polo suit had covered, but I had an imagination. And the internet to help me make some educated guesses.

  “I’m leaving for school next week, to start practicing with my college team,” he answered.

  I already knew that, because I made it my business to know everything about him, if it meant hacking my mom’s emails and texts with his mother, sitting near the cool girls’ table during study halls in the library so I could catch whatever his sister Scarlett had to say, or hiding behind the outdoor showers at the pool so I could eavesdrop on him and his friends after practice. There was really no low to which I wouldn’t stoop.

  I realized that Brooks hadn’t sounded too excited about leaving early for
college. “Don’t you want to go?” I asked.

  “I’d like to spend one last summer with my friends. We were going to go up to my family’s place in Tahoe and hang out for a few weeks, our last time together. But I’m going to school, Julius has a job, Haakon has an internship. Luca’s going out east to some polo camp. Everybody’s got something and it’s not going to work.”

  “It’s pretty cool, though, that you got recruited to play, right?” I said. “It’s an honor.”

  “Yeah. Right.” His voice was flat.

  “If you don’t want to go to school there and play polo, then maybe you shouldn’t,” I suggested. Maybe he could stay here in northern California rather than going off to LA to college. He could stay here and I could always watch him, for ever and ever.

  Even I realized how sick I sounded.

  “No, I know I’m lucky,” Brooks was saying. “Three other seniors on the team would kill for this opportunity. I’m a little tired of polo, is all. I feel like I’ve been playing for a long time. I feel like it took over everything, you know? Maybe sometimes I wanted to go camp on the beach, or…” He trailed off. “No, I know I’m lucky,” he repeated. “I worked hard for the opportunity, too.”

  “You’re a natural at water polo. Besides your hard work, I think your talent is God-given,” I said.

  He started laughing. “Why are you talking in that voice, Peanut?” He hadn’t used that nickname for me in a while and I liked to hear it now. But then he imitated me, sounding breathy and worshipful: “You’re a natural. It’s God-given.” He laughed harder. “Shit, I drank too much.”

  I had sounded like an idiot. “I think we’ve been in here long enough,” I said. I sat up fast and almost fell off the mattress onto the floor again, for the millionth time.