Between the Seams (12 page)

“These still your favorite?”

Matt looked up at her, took the can and mumbled, “Thanks.”

“No problem.” She hesitated, trying to figure out how to offer an ear without coming across as pushy.

“Jo, whatever it is you want to say, just say it.”

She took a breath, studied the can still in her hand, before saying, “I know I have no point of reference for what you’re dealing with right now, Matt, but if you need an ear I’m a pretty damned good listener.”

For a second he looked almost angry, before once again sliding the mask over his face. “Thanks, Jo, but I’m fine.”

No, you’re not
. She nodded her head. “Fair enough. The offer stands, though, Matt. And if not me, try to find someone to talk to.”

“I’m not a fucking woman, Jo. I don’t spend time sitting around talking about my goddamned feelings.”

She barely refrained from rolling her eyes. God save her from emotionally stunted males. “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. By the way, when the hell are you going to get your hair fixed? You look like you should be coming out of a bar on Sixth Street.”

Matt snorted, but his posture relaxed, which was what she’d been aiming for. “I don’t know. I kinda like it.”

“Going for the sympathy fuck, hey?”

Matt finally laughed out loud at that. “Honestly? No. My sense of humor’s just fucked up enough that I find it funny.”

“Oh, it’s definitely funny. Anyway. I’m going to go back out. Maybe you should join us and apologize to your mom for being a dick.”

“When did you get such a potty mouth?”

“Oh, somewhere between my senior year of college and dealing with teenage boys on a daily basis.”

He shook his head. “You’re braver than I am. You couldn’t pay me to deal with teenagers all the time.”

“It’s definitely challenging. Anyway, I’m gonna go back outside. Enjoy your coke.”

Matt looked down at the still unopened Dr. Pepper in his hand, at the TV, up at Jo and then back to the cold can in his hand. “I’ll be back out in a few minutes. Just need to cool off a little bit.”

Jo had a feeling he wasn’t talking about from the heat, and wondered yet again what was going on between Jenn and Matt.

~~*~~

Chapter Fourteen

The next evening Jo found herself sitting around a limestone fire pit on the patio of the boys’ ranch, a glass of wine in one hand and Chase’s hand in the other. A feral hog was roasting in some sort of box called a Cajun cooker—Chase had explained to her how it worked, but she was still skeptical—and somewhere in the distance she heard the
yip yip yip
of a coyote.

Once again, she was struck by how beautiful it was out here. Growing up in the area, she had a love and appreciation for this part of Texas, where the Hill Country began to fade into desert and mountains. Living in central Texas had given her a love and appreciation of the greenery, water and rolling hills that defined Austin and the area surrounding it.

But there was just something about this area that called to her.

Jo leaned her head against the back of the wooden Adirondack chair, and looked up at the sky. The sun had dipped below the horizon, shades of purple and orange and black announcing its descent. The moon had begun to rise, and stars were starting to peep out. Already, there were hundreds upon hundreds of them. The sight took her breath away.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Chase whispered in her ear.

“The stars. You don’t get views like this in Austin.”

She felt more than saw him shake his head. “No, you don’t.”

He leaned back, rested his head against the back of his chair, and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.

“Did you like it? Living in Austin for college?”

Chase snorted. “What college kid wouldn’t enjoy living in a place like Austin? Hot chicks, Sixth Street, live music all the time, great food. It was fun, I got to play ball for my dream school and got a top-notch education in the process. I actually stayed for a while after graduating, worked for a couple of IT startups. I got in with a commercial real estate firm, helping out with marketing and stuff. The more I learned, the more I enjoyed the business. I got my real estate license, learned a lot, stayed there long enough until I could take the broker’s exam. Once I passed it, I moved back home and started my own commercial firm. What about you?”

“What about me?” Her tone was teasing.

“Do you like living in Austin?”

She shrugged and continued to look at the stars, which were increasing in numbers as the last bit of light left the sky. The fire crackled and popped, and she could hear Jenn, Owen and Matt inside the ranch house, laughing and arguing over a game of pool. “It’s a beautiful city—as you know—and there’s always something to do. I readily admit that I enjoy the convenience of having an HEB or a Walmart within a mile or two, and a Central Market or Whole Foods within reasonable distance. There’s the food—Austin really does have some amazing restaurants. I love my women’s shooting league, and working with kids and helping them.”

“I sense a ‘but’ in there.”

She smiled. “Yeah, I guess you could say there’s a ‘but’.”

“So what is it?”

Jo sighed. “Honestly, the place gets on my nerves sometimes. Hell, most of the time. Traffic sucks. The cost of living keeps going up. The City Council’s comprised of a bunch of idiots who don’t listen to their constituents. And the city that used to actually be weird just isn’t any longer, at least not organically. Any weird that exists is a bit manufactured at this point. And don’t even get me started on the state of the public school system.”

“I thought you loved your job.”

“I do. Or, I love the kids. I love helping the kids. And I like most of my coworkers. It’s the people at the top.” She blew out a breath, took a drink of her wine. “I always have to keep my mouth shut about this stuff, y’know?”

He squeezed her hand. She rolled her head to the side, saw that he was looking at her. “So what has you so frustrated?”

She drew her brows together, trying to figure out where to begin. “Well, for one, it’s getting more and more difficult to do my job. There’s so much fear now of a lawsuit that all of us are working with one hand tied behind our backs. There’s also the fact that the administration’s become bloated. There are more administrators and non-teaching personnel than teachers and counselors. I’m talking admin assistants, marketing and PR folks, accounting, stuff like that. The superintendent keeps telling the community and the teachers that the coffers are dry, that there’s no money for teacher raises, and it’s been that way for the past four or five years. But then they turn around and remodel a football stadium or want to give iPads to high school students. Meanwhile, principals are trying to stuff thirty-five kids into a classroom that should only hold about twenty-five. We’re losing teachers—good, veteran teachers—and the kids are suffering because of it. I just…I just keep putting one foot in front of the other and doing what I can to help my kids and to make sure they get out of there with clear goals for the future. But some days, especially the ones when I hear the superintendent on the radio or the news begging for more money, those days I get really, really tempted to walk.”

“Why haven’t you?”

Now there was a question she’d asked herself more than once. “Because I love the kids. I’m in a pretty good high school, we don’t have the problems that some of the other schools in the area do with violence, drop outs, low test scores, etcetera. But we have our issues. I know the kids, know their families. I’ve been there long enough that I know a lot of their older siblings, their parents. Most of the time I’m helping them with class scheduling and college prep, but there are always the students who just need someone to talk to, or the trouble students that need someone to care. We had three kids commit suicide last semester. Three. There were days then that I wanted to walk away because my heart was breaking, but I couldn’t. The kids needed me, and I guess in some ways I needed them. I also have good friends that I work with, some really great teachers. Besides, with this economy I’ve been a little scared to walk, especially since I’ve had job security, even if I have had one hand tied behind my back.”

“And here I thought high school counselors just helped kids fill out scholarship applications.” His tone was teasing.

She smiled. “Oh, I do plenty of that, too. Believe me. And I celebrate with every student and share their excitement when they get a scholarship offer or admission to their number one college. That’s the fun part—helping the kids figure out what their goals are and how to get there.”

Chase rolled his head so that he was once again looking up at the sky. She studied his profile, drinking in the angles and curves of his face, the dark stubble that shadowed his jaw.

“Have you ever thought about moving back home?”

Jo looked back up at the night sky, contemplating the stars and his question. “Until my parents died, not really. I had no desire to be anywhere near them. In the past few years the thought’s kind of been there, especially with Gran getting on up in years. But I haven’t really given it any serious consideration, even though Jenn’s begged me more than a few times.”

“So what exactly happened with you and your parents?”

She shrugged, felt a tinge of sadness where once she’d felt nothing but anger. “I left for college. At that point I had a full understanding of the type of person my mother was, and I’d never been close to Dad. Mom would call me every now and then, bitch about how Dad wasn’t paying attention to her, ask me if I’d gained the Freshman Fifteen and what I was doing to make sure I didn’t. She would sometimes send me care packages, but they weren’t your typical care packages. Instead of homemade cookies and photos from home, or even laundry detergent and quarters, her care packages would be stuff like the latest fad diet book, a box of diet pills and a picture of the Super Model of the Day. She always wrote ‘Perfection equals success!’ on those damned pictures.

“I would throw the diet pills away—I’d tried some before and it was like I turned into Jessie Spano from that episode of Saved by the Bell. But by that point I was pretty deep into disordered eating, so I would read the stupid books. The pictures, I would hang up on my wall. I stopped talking to Mom a couple of months into therapy. I’d realized she was enabling the disorder, encouraging it, really. I tried to talk to her about it a few times, but she wouldn’t listen, didn’t realize that her behavior was damaging herself and me. We were on the phone one day, and she was laying into me pretty good, piling on the guilt trip and trying to push my buttons. I lost it, just got fed up, told her where she could stuff her diet pills, diet books and perfection, and that if she didn’t make some changes and get help herself that we were done. She hung up on me, and I’d never felt so free in my life. I was a little sad, but mostly it was like I could breathe for the first time in a long time. We never spoke again after that. Gran came to my graduation, but that was it. I don’t know if Dad even knew what had happened, since he never really talked to anyone. How those two met and got married and managed to create me I’ll never know.”

They sat there in silence, looking up at the stars. After several long moments she felt a wet nose nudging at her elbow. She looked down at Winchester and smiled, set her wine glass aside and scratched him between his ears. He rested his chin on her lap, his body wagging as he gave her puppy dog eyes.

Chase tugged on her hand, brought it to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “I’m sorry you had to go through all of that.”

His simple gesture made her heart flutter in her chest a little bit. “It was what it was, and it’s made me who I am today. In some ways, it makes me a better counselor.”

“Still, though. I’m sorry you had to go through that. It sounds like you could have used a friend or two.”

Her smile was tinged with regret as she turned her head and looked at him. “I could have, yeah. That was on my shoulders. I had Jenn, but she was up at North Texas, so we were relegated to talking on the phone and instant messaging each other. I had a couple of friends at Baylor who I trusted enough to let them know what was going on. Katie and Rebecca were really a good support system, and good roommates. We were all in the same program, so they kind of watched out for me, knew what to look for to make sure I wasn’t going back down the ED rabbit hole.”

“What exactly did you do? You said you didn’t do diet pills. The most I know about eating disorders is anorexia and bulimia.”

“It goes beyond those two, but they’re the ones that get the most coverage, I guess you could say. For me, I started out bulimic, but hated puking. So I turned to restricting, and over exercised. Basically, I counted calories and was obsessed with the macros—carbs, proteins, fats. I was eating about nine hundred calories a day, and exercising for at least two hours a day. Every now and then I would lose it and go on a binge, which would sometimes make me sick. I would feel so guilty about the binge I would go right back to restricting and amp up the exercise.” She shook her head at the memory of herself in high school and college.

“I was sick. I looked awful. My hair was falling out and I stopped having periods, which is probably more than you want to know. I
felt
awful, physically and mentally. Logically, I knew I was slowly killing myself, and in a way I didn’t care. Therapy showed me a lot of things, including the fact that at that time, I truly didn’t care. It wasn’t that I wanted to die, or that I was suicidal, but that I wasn’t sure why I should care about living. I was depressed, to say the least, along with having some anxiety issues. I’d felt out of control since junior high, or rather, that life was out of control. I was ashamed of my parents, and there really was no control of any sort in our household. If it wasn’t for Gran, I honestly don’t know what would have happened to me as a teen. She was the only stability I had. But I could control what I ate, and how much I exercised. Until I couldn’t control it anymore, which was when I would binge. And that was probably way more than you ever wanted to know about the crazy inside my head.”

Chase tugged on her hand. “Come here.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Where?”

“Just get up and come here.”

She did, and he pulled her down, moved so that she was lying on her side next to him in the oversized chair. He ran a big hand up and down her back, dropped a kiss on the top of her head. She felt him breathe in and out, could hear his heartbeat under her ear. “I’m okay, Chase. I’ve dealt with all that crap and moved on. I haven’t fallen into the trap of disordered eating in over eight years, and I’m healthy as a freaking horse.”

He dropped another kiss on the top of her head. “I know.”

“I appreciate the comforting, stud, but I don’t need it,” she said, keeping her tone light while trying to draw his thoughts out of him.

“I know you don’t. But I do.”

She raised an eyebrow and asked into his chest. “And why is that?”

Jo waited long moments while Chase inhaled and exhaled. She could almost hear his brain working. “All this time, I’ve been really pissed at you. I don’t think you have any idea how mad I was at you when you stopped talking to me all of a sudden. I was a kid, and you’d hurt my feelings and that made me mad. I tried to hate you, but I couldn’t. But God, Jo, I was so mad at you. There were so many times in high school, and especially in college, when I almost reached out to you. Those few times we saw each other in college? I was pissed. It seemed like everything was great for you and you were happy and didn’t need me or our friendship. I was a chickenshit, and instead of asking you a question I didn’t want the answer to, I acted like everything was fine, too. But it wasn’t fine for either of us, I don’t think.”

Jo swirled the tip of an index finger over the soft cotton of his t-shirt, turning his words over in her brain. “The last time we saw each other in college, I’d been in therapy for a few months. At that point I’d been refeeding and was starting to get healthy again. My therapist had been gently nudging me for a few weeks, trying to get me to open up to people who didn’t know about the ED. She knew about you, because in some ways the day I heard my mom on the phone with your dad was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and she firmly believed I needed to talk to you and explain to you what had happened. When we bumped into each other that afternoon, I wanted to tell you everything. But I was scared, and there was some girl with you, so I didn’t. I knew my therapist was right, but I couldn’t get over the thought that telling you would mean losing you again.”