Right Beside You
By Missy

SERIES: Souvenirs
SUBTITLE: Right Beside You
FOLLOWS: Souvenirs, Fire With Fire, Bury That Jewel,
High Sierra, Walking Lonely, Blues Along The Way, Balloons Land, Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans, Somewhere Sails, Baby, It's You, So..., Through The Looking Glass, Desertion, I Know You Rider, Midnight Musings, BattleLines, Bright Lights and Promises, Break, From Me To You, Wanderers
PART: 1 of 1
AUTHOR: Missy
EMAIL: lasfic@yahoo.com
RATING: PG, Het
PAIRING(s): L/L

DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Kai, Myself and FG so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine. Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!
CATEGORY: Drama
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SETTING IN TIMELINE: California
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Lenny comforts Laverne on their way back to Milwaukee.

****

At least she had stopped crying. Now she was just lying against his knee, as though every last drop of energy had been wrung from her.

She had been a robot ever since they crossed the Mississippi - it had been his job to undress her, bathe her and get her food, though she managed to feed herself. Talking only seemed to bring tears to her eyes.

As Godzilla stomped through Tokyo, Lenny stroked her back. If only she weren't so depressed, the setting would have seemed romantic to him.

He would have been angry with Shirley, but he couldn't blame her. She wanted a fresh start, away from Walter, to try and make something of herself. With a baby, that would be difficult enough. He felt bad about Laverne and Shirley's argument. The wrench in their relationship felt as sharp as the one in his and Squiggy's.

"You ain't made a move." She said suddenly.

"I ain't that big of a pig," he said spiritedly. She rolled over to face him. "I know you're real sad, 'cause Shirley left and you guys didn't fix your fight."

"I feel so bad about it," she admitted quietly. To his relief, she didn't burst into tears. "I gotta see her again, I gotta make it right..."

"It'll be okay..."

"No it won't! Not 'til I tell her I'm sorry for bein' so dumb about you and me..."

He winced at her words. "I didn't think you was bein' dumb, Laverne."

"It ain't us...it's how I treat us."

"We love each other."

"We do."

"You love me?"

She seemed to realize what she was admitting. "You know I do. You think I woulda given up my whole life to follow you here if I didn't?"

He shook his head. "But I ain't giving you much..." His eyes widened. "But I can!" He pushed her head off of his lap and jumped to the floor, kneeling.

"Len!"

"We ain't got nothin' but each other, Vernie. For all the stuff we been through, I know we got more than just this..." he gestured toward the bed.

"It was never this," Laverne blushed a bit. She could be boldly intimate with him one minute and still be unable to talk about sex frankly, and that contradiction proved an amusement only to outsiders.

"I love everything; I like the way ya look at me, the way ya smile; I like bowlin' with you, singin' together...between you and me, we got it all, Vernie. I ain't got a ring right now, but if we wait 'til we get to Milwaukee...I ain't ever gonna look at another girl. I wanna be with you till I croak or get run over..."

"Len! I know what you're askin' me..."

"So?"

"Yes. Yes, I'll marry you!"

He gawked at her. "You just made me the luckiest guy in the world!"

He embraced her in the middle ground of the borrowed motel sheets.

FIN



To "Wanderers"
To "Separate But Together"