Their Freefall At Last by Julie Olivia
62
Bennett
Five Months Later
Ruby & Bennett are Thirty-One Years Old
Loving Amelia Ruby Sullivan is easy.
Sure, there’s the stress of wedding planning and engagement parties. But they’re punctuated by jokes and close friends and car rides to catering companies, where we eat all their food.
Loving her is like breathing. Simple. Right.
Plus, she carries extra Tupperware to hoard more catering food.
I love this woman so much.
But there’s also the day-to-day happiness.
God, the happiness.
Parties at Honeywood might be fun, but there’s something about sitting on our couch, watching television, occasionally throwing popcorn at each other. Or even pausing the movie because we keep talking over it anyway. We’ve tried watching with subtitles, but sometimes, that’s a lost cause.
If I could go back in time and tell seven-year-old Bennett that he was going to marry that shy redhead, that he would grow up to share strawberry shampoo, just for the smell, or that he’d wake up, kissing her from her dreams, I would.
Younger Bennett might whine, Ew, gross, cooties. Or he might just grin and say, Cool. Every pirate needs a parrot.
And he does.
I need my parrot like I need each breath of life, and Ruby gives that to me every day.
On our thirty-first birthday, I wake up to a treasure map on our kitchen table.
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” I say, running back to our bedroom and pulling a very similar treasure map I made for her from the bedside table.
Thankfully, our buried booty are in different spots.
We start with my gift. I tucked her treasure in our backyard, near the garden we planted, and she follows the map with ease.
Sifting through the flowers, Ruby finds the handmade pirate treasure box I constructed in secret at my workshop in Honeywood. I tried to hide it before today, but the little twinkle in her eyes says she might have seen it at least once. But what she hasn’t seen is the treasure inside.
All of our treasures in fact. A shadowbox full of her drawings, our prom picture, and even the PC disc for RollerCoaster Tycoon. And nestled at the bottom are the remnants of our two pink bracelets.
Her eyes well up with tears before she rolls them.
“You sap, you.”
I shrug with a grin as she scrambles to her feet and jumps into my arms, placing kiss after kiss on my cheeks, peppering me with the love I’m not sure I’ll ever get accustomed to.
“Okay, your turn! Your turn!” she says, shoving a map into my hands.
I follow the map’s path through our house and to our front yard with her trailing behind at each step.
When I reach the X at the end of our driveway, almost bumping into our car, I look up.
“There’s nothing here,” I say with a laugh.
“Isn’t there?” she prompts, clicking the key chain that has our car unlocking.
“The treasure is the car? Are we taking a trip?”
“Oh, yes,” she says.
“And to where?”
“Your favorite place.”
I squint. “Between your legs?”
She snorts. “Hilarious. No. To the tattoo parlor.”
I can’t help the smile that grows on my face.
“Oh, yeah?” I ask. “And to get what?”
“Forever.”
“To get forever?”
“Just get in the car, Pirate.”
“Whatever you say, Parrot.”