Authors: Lauren Gilley
He snorted. “They have more distractions, you mean.”
This was going to be the hard part: pretending her feelings weren’t hurt. Jo flattened her palms and slid them down over his collar bones, his pecs, circling her arms around his neck and dropping her chin on his shoulder, her temple against his cheek. “Do you know,” she said in a quiet voice and felt his body come to immediate attention, “the first thing that went through my mind when I started thinking I might be pregnant?”
Tam was silent, but it was a waiting, wondering sort of silence; Jo could feel it.
“We haven’t had enough time,” she continued. “That’s what I thought; you and me, we haven’t gotten to enjoy
us
long enough yet.
“We live with my parents and we’re broke and you’re going to school…this isn’t the stage of our lives I wanted to bring a baby into.”
There was the softest of rustling sounds as his hair brushed along the crown of her head. He was leaning into her.
“I wanted us to have a home,” she said, and felt a lump forming in her throat. “I didn’t want to feel like we were mooching off Mom and Dad – I didn’t want to bring a crying baby into their house.”
She took a deep breath and pressed on. “I’m terrified, Tam. I don’t know shit about babies. Watching Tyler for Jess does
not count
. I’m gonna get fat and moody, my feet are gonna swell. I’m going to push a human
out of my body
.”
His shoulders rolled beneath her arms, a nervous twitching.
“But all that’s irrelevant.” Her voice was beginning to shake. “Because I’m
most
terrified that having a baby is going to damage us, and I don’t know how to cope with that.”
Jo paused to gather her welling emotions, hating that he pushed all the waterworks buttons inside of her. And in the quiet, she felt his hand reach up and encircle her wrist. He squeezed.
“The timing is awful,” she said in a tear-choked voice. “But this was always the plan – my plan. I didn’t want
a
baby, I wanted
yours
. I’m not worried about your blood…God, Tam, I’m not a blind idiot, but I know you, and
this
isn’t you…
“Shit, can you just say something, please?”
He pulled her around the chair and into his lap. Jo slipped her arms around his neck and tucked her face in the hollow of his throat as some of the crushing, guilty weight she’d been carrying around began to lift.
“I’m sorry,” Tam said against the top of her head, and his voice didn’t sound much stronger than hers had. “I don’t want to be a dick.”
“I know,” she sighed.
They were silent a long moment, his hand moving up and down her back.
“I didn’t know you didn’t want kids,” Jo said when she trusted her voice not to crack. She blinked, lashes fluttering against the collar of his t-shirt, and prayed the tears would hold.
“It’s not that I don’t. I mean, when we were younger I
did
. But now…”
“That bad timing, it wouldn’t make the emotional hurdles any easier to get over. Now isn’t any different from ten years down the line or five years ago.”
His arms tightened around her. “What if you regret it?”
Damaged
, she thought again, and the word was a massive understatement. “Tam,” she said, heart squeezing. She stroked her fingers up the back of his neck. “I can promise you, with complete confidence, that I will never, ever – not now or in the future – regret having a baby with you. I’m not even sure I like kids, but
our kid
, that’s a kid I want.”
She felt the emotions wrestling in his chest just as sure as she felt his chin against her hair.
“It’s going to be okay,” she told him. “Are
we
going to be okay?”
He pulled back and she sat up, tilting her head back so she could meet his gaze. Jo wanted so badly to understand the haunted look in his eyes, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t share his trauma; she’d never know what it had been like to grow up in the home environment of his childhood, to carry the emotional burdens he did.
Love him
, Mom had said, because that was the only thing she could do: wait for him on the other side of his mental minefield and tell him it was okay.
“Yeah.” The muscles in Tam’s throat worked as he swallowed. “Yeah,” he repeated, as if to reassure both of them. “Definitely. I didn’t mean - ” He touched his forehead to hers. “Shit, I dunno what I meant, baby.”
In so many ways he’d always been mature beyond his years, but moments like this brought out the shriveled parts of him still in infancy.
Jo ruffled her fingers through his slippery hair. “Nothing’s going to happen overnight. We’re gonna take it a day, a week, a month at a time. We can do this.”
She wasn’t at all confident in her ability to “do this,” but Tam needed to hear it, and with their eyes inches apart, lashes almost touching, she could see a bare scrap of a smile lift one corner of his mouth.
“You’re probably gonna have to say that a lot.”
Jo smiled. “I can do that.”
**
Okay, so he liked her. He didn’t
like
her, as in having mushy, romantic, emotional feelings, but Jordan liked the girl, and fuck him if he could make that just go away. Ellie was the stuff of wet dreams, yes, but she was cute too. Didn’t take herself too seriously. Didn’t have that princess mentality.
At least, that was how she seemed. He was well aware that he wasn’t always the most impartial judge of women. But for the moment – the drive home – he was going to like her, and enjoy it.
Jo and Tam’s cars were the only ones in the drive when he pulled up to the house and he braced himself for the fight and/or angry staring match he was about to walk in on. Their dissention about having a baby was becoming comically stupid. To have been friends since their prepubescent days, they were acting like strangers who’d turned a one night stand into a sudden, unwanted commitment.
Jordan entered through the front door so he could shuck his shoes and heard the TV rumbling. In the living room, Jo and Tam were in Dad’s chair together looking friendly and not at all mad at one another.
“I take it you ratified a peace treaty?” he asked as he fell, boneless, onto the loveseat.
Tam shot him the bird.
“Yeah,” Jo said with a sideways glance.
“I was starting to get worried, you know. They say divorce is hardest on the brother-in-law.”
Tam cracked a smile though he looked like he was trying not to. “I dunno. I was gonna get you one of those Barbie Jeeps.”
Jo snorted. “You can compete for him if you want; I wasn’t gonna get him shit.”
“You say that now…” Jordan said, and let it hang, the familiar lumpy comfort of the couch sucking all the snark out of his tired body. They were watching some sort of house shopping show, but he didn’t care, content to settle in and let his mind wander.
It wandered straight back to campus and to Ellie’s ear-to-ear, almost guilty, eye-crinkling smile as they’d parted after their walk. If he didn’t know himself better, he’d think he had a
crush
on her. The forbidden fruit angle wasn’t helping either; knowing she was off-limits and barely legal was only making the fantasy aspect of it hotter.
“You’re in a good mood,” Jo said, pulling him out of what was fast becoming his favorite daydream.
“What?” Jordan smoothed his face, but he could feel that it was too late. He’d already been busted.
“You’re smiling over there by yourself.”
“No I’m not.”
Neither she nor Tam pursued it further, but for the next hour, he kept a tight check on every facial twitch and tried to think about something, anything, else. He settled for listening to the lovebirds list the merits of the houses being shown on TV. They had longing in their voices: wishes for a home of their own and an independent life they couldn’t see behind the piles of debt and dirty diapers.
Sometimes Jordan thought they were luckier than the rest of the world to have always been so sure of what they meant to each other. But then he remembered Tam’s parentage, the four year Cold War, the lack of funds and the baby on the way…and then he wasn’t sure “lucky” was the right word.
Dad brought home a bucket of greasy chicken for dinner that smelled like heaven wrapped in cardboard. As they trooped toward the kitchen, Jordan touched his sister’s arm and held her back in the hallway a moment.
“Hey.” He slid an arm around her shoulders. “Things are fixed, yeah?” he asked quietly enough that the others in the kitchen couldn’t hear.
She gave him a smile that said she knew what he was doing and appreciated it. She looked tired, her eyes sleepy. “Yeah. He’s sensitive, you know.”
“I know.” He gave her a squeeze and let her go. Jordan may have always thought of Tam as family, and Jo could take care of herself, but her two biggest brothers had failed her. Even if nine months wasn’t much of a claim to big brotherhood, he was going to exercise his rights as such.
9
P
aige, as expected, exclaimed over Coach Walker - Ellie was, secretly, calling him “Jordan” in her head now – and his special treatment solution to her gym problem. “Come on, El,” she said, smirking, “you don’t hate Kyle that bad. Admit it: you’re crushing on Coach Calves.”
“No,” she denied, blushing furiously.
Paige’s smile was wicked. “It’s okay. I get it. I’m seriously thinking of getting Bobby into running if it’ll give him an ass like that.” She heaved a little sigh. “You could bounce a nickel off that thing.”
That was the conversation looping through Ellie’s mind and warming her cheeks as she walked toward the track the following Wednesday for her first thirty minute workout session.
Eight-thirty a.m. in August (in Georgia) was dew-drenched and layered with cottony fog. The sun coming up in the east turned the runners into featureless silhouettes and threw long golden fingers through the mist. Ellie was missing her writing time, but it was a cool, pleasant morning and her brain could stand a break anyway.
Plus she was looking forward to seeing Jordan, however pathetic that might have been.
He was standing at the edge of the track, three students in a huddle around him, and the humidity had turned his short, dark blonde hair into tight curls against his head. Ellie lingered a safe distance away, not wanting to intrude.
“…you guys have gotta develop some gears,” she heard him say. “You’re starting full-tilt off the blocks and then fading at the end.”
“I’m a pace-setter,” one of them – a pretty-boy blonde in green shorts – insisted.
“And that would be great if you didn’t drop back at the end of the race,” Jordan said in that flat, matter-of-fact tone Ellie was beginning to think of as familiar. It was the voice he used in class when he was pretending to teach. “That might have cut it in high school, but it won’t here. You’ll get your ass handed to you every time.”
A guy with skin the color of a Starbucks Frappuccino and an Adonis build snorted a laugh and the blonde shoved him.
“You, Anton,” Jordan said, “are hitting your stride too late.”
He sobered.
“I swear you’d do better in the fifteen-hundred meters - ”
Ellie sneezed. She didn’t want to, she tried to hold it in, but it was one of those sudden, sneak attack lung seizures she couldn’t fight, and it seemed loud as a gunshot in the still morning air. All eyes swept toward her.
“Ellie,” Jordan said, and she thought there was a note of surprise in his voice, like he hadn’t expected her to show.
The three runners were glancing between their coach and the weird girl in the bright pink tank top on the sidelines.
“Hi.” Nerves stole over her like a cold shudder. Maybe she’d only imagined chemistry. Maybe he’d be a totally different person in front of his charges. “Am I too early?”
“Nah.” He waved her over. “Guys, this is Ellie.”
Shocked that he’d actually made introductions, she shook hands with Lane, Anton, and Jonathan, reminding herself that Jordan wasn’t her peer, but twenty-five and mature enough to be an adult about the whole thing. The boys gave her curious looks, obviously trying to decipher why she needed to come walk laps during their workout, but said nothing. Jordan sent them off with instructions to jog a mile. “Jog,” he stressed, “remember that you
are not
sprinters.”
“I’d stay on the outside edge,” he told her when they were gone. “They’re lucky they don’t trip on their own feet – they’re bound to mow you down.”
She chuckled. “No faith in your protégés?”
“None.”
She began to understand why as she walked and watched. She’d anticipated some good meditation time – mindless physical activity like this was always perfect for brainstorming ideas for whichever story she was penning at the time. But her hero and heroine faded to the recesses of her imagination as she listened to the frustration in Jordan’s voice while he tried to convince his runners that they did not, in fact, know everything there was to know about their sport.
Paige is probably right
, she thought with an internal frown. Her friend was relentless in her insistence that she was, deep down, craving a relationship.
“You need material for your books, if nothing else,”
she kept saying. And then she’d wink.
“A bedwarmer wouldn’t kill ya either.”
In an ironic twist, Ellie was starting to worry about the amount of time she now spent thinking about her daily adventures. For someone who spent the majority of the time locked in her own imagination, it was disconcerting to think that she was planning conversations she wanted to have with a real, live man. Her art was suffering. So was her blood pressure.
After her walk, she found a relatively dry patch of grass and sat down to trade her sneakers for ballet flats. She would duck into the restroom in the English building and swap her track shorts for a skirt later. As she unlaced her New Balances, she thought it probably wasn’t a coincidence that she had a view of Coach Walker and his ass that Paige swore you could bounce a nickel off.
“Good Lord,” she muttered to herself, forcing her eyes down to her shoes. “I’m turning into a shallow dumbass.”
“What?”
Jordan was sitting down next to her when she lifted her head, and she was horrified he might have heard. He stretched his long legs out in front of him and leaned back on his hands. Ellie’s eyes tracked up and down the length of him, liking the way the humidity had plastered his white shirt to all the lean, shredded muscle of his chest and abs. She’d spent so much time convinced that she was now immune to physical attraction, and here she could have spent a half hour just staring at him. Nikki would have wrinkled her nose and called him plain. Ellie was starting to think he was beautiful.
“I’m out of shape,” she said, staring at her shoes again as she tucked the laces inside the tongues and set them aside. “And bitching at myself about it.”
“You don’t look like you are.”
Ellie darted a sideways glance his way and saw him studying the empty air with comical earnest. He wasn’t blushing, like she couldn’t seem to stop doing, but she thought he probably hadn’t meant to say it.
“You’re not happy with your guys, are you?” She decided to change the subject and spare them any more potential for slips of the tongue.
A frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. “They won’t listen,” he said, and tossed a glance over his shoulder to where his students were stretching out after their run. He shook his head. “They think they know every-damn-thing and they’re gonna embarrass themselves at our first meet.”
“Some people are un-teachable,” she lamented.
“
I
wasn’t. Every generation gets dumber.” He shot her an apologetic look, face the softest and most real she’d ever seen it. “Sorry. I’m sure you’re teachable.”
She smiled. “Definitely.”
She didn’t recognize his innuendo until a shark smile stole across his face. “Good to know.”
“Wow,” she said with a startled laugh. “Just when I think you’re capable of being appropriate.”
“Never gonna happen.” His expression returned to its usual impassive state. “Okay, get out your chart and I’ll sign it.”
**
Tam hated when Mike was right, but sometimes, damn it, he was. Tam had introduced himself to James Horner on the first day of class and then learned that they shared three of their fives classes. Both married, both with bigger fish to fry than classroom gossip, they’d instantly signed on to work together on all their group projects and then had picked quiet, studious types to fill in the rest of their teams. And James – like Tam had suspected – really was a cop. He’d been on the force with Cobb PD for ten years and after a close call and injury that had left a pin in his knee, he was looking for a degree and desk job. Tam – whose friends had always shared the last name Walker – thought he might actually have made a new friend. School was going well, the course material was clicking. He was a little proud of himself.
He was also shocked to note that the pretty little brunette who sat in front of him in HPS was staring at Jordan with the kind of rapturous fixation girls spared for their teen idols. Jordan’s slide show presentation on the food pyramid was putting everyone to sleep. But this girl was enthralled.
Movement from the next row drew his attention and the mouthy chick with pink and blonde hair leaned across the aisle and jabbed the brunette’s elbow with her pen. “Staring!” she hissed, and the brunette startled, head dropping, gaze falling on her blank, note-free notebook.
It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a college student fostered a crush on her just-old-enough-to-be-exciting professor. He didn’t think anything of it until class came to an end and everyone headed for the door.
Everyone but the brunette.
Her pink-haired friend tried to haul her out of the room, but she shook her head and lingered, waiting.
Tam decided he’d wait too…out in the hall where he could hear everything.
**
She is a student, she is your student
, Jordan’s conscience reminded him as his class filed out the door and Ellie hung back, inching her way toward his desk. The fog that morning had fluffed her hair and her bangs had been brushed off to the side. She’d ditched the track shorts in favor of a skirt that highlighted the hips he wanted to get his hands on. He was staring like an idiot as she closed the gap between them, and he suspected her small half smile meant that she knew it.
“Do you have a second?” she asked.
As many as you want
. “Sure.”
“I was thinking about your runners,” she said, an obvious excitement on her pretty cream face. She propped a hip against the side of his desk. “And what you said about them not listening.”
It was almost impossible not to smile. “You were thinking about my problem?”
“You’re helping me, so I thought I might return the favor. Well.” She shrugged. “That or else I’m just full of crap.”
He chuckled. “I doubt it. Good looking girl tells them what to do, I think they’ll shape up.”
Her cheeks colored. “That’s not what I was thinking.” She glanced away from him and then back again, silently thanking him for the compliment even if it embarrassed her. “I was thinking that you’re right about this generation,” she continued. “And maybe they won’t listen to coaching if they don’t believe you. But maybe you can shame them into it.”
“Shame?” He lifted his brows.
“Bring in a ringer for them to run against.” She grew excited again. “Really embarrass the crap out of them and make them realize they aren’t God’s gift to Nike.”
“And where would I get a ringer?”
“You.”
“What?”
“What if you were the ringer?” Ellie reached down into her bag and came back out with a folded handful of computer paper. “I did some research in the library earlier,” she said, smoothing the printouts and setting them on the desk. “This is you, isn’t it?”
Jordan came face-to-face with a computerized version of a news clipping Mom had tucked away in a scrap book somewhere.
Marietta senior sets new state record
. An eighteen-year-old him was coming across the finish line, decked out in school colors, a good three lengths in front of the rest of the pack.
“You Googled me?” he asked, incredulous.