Authors: Aubrey Gross
“Thanks.” Chase turned towards her, and froze.
Jo stood in front of him, sunglasses shading those blue green eyes that had always made him feel like he was drowning. She was wearing one of those two piece bathing suits that looked like a one-piece—a tankini, he vaguely remembered Jenn calling it one day. The top was dark blue, tight around her breasts while flowing away from her abdomen. It skimmed her hips, which were clad in red and blue polka dotted bikini bottoms that had these little ties on either side. Those ties made his fingers twitch.
There was nothing immodest or particularly revealing—he’d certainly seen less fabric out here on the lake—and yet his mouth was dry and his body was definitely responding to the beautiful, wet woman in front of him. The only part of his body that seemed capable of movement—his eyes—skimmed over her again, drinking her in like a parched man in the desert.
He didn’t remember her breasts being quite so…big…the last time he’d seen her in a bathing suit. Granted, that had been sometime in early high school at a party they’d both been invited to, but still. His gaze tripped down her body and stuck on her legs before flying back up and noticing her arms and shoulders.
“You lift?”
God, she was going to start thinking he’d taken one too many baseballs to the head if he kept up such scintillating conversation.
His gaze returned to her face, and he noticed that her cheeks had pinkened. She grinned shyly, winked, and then flexed her right arm. “Yup. I even have a baby bicep to prove it.”
Chase laughed and felt a little of the tension drain from his body. “That’s a little more than a baby bicep.”
She flexed again before dropping her arm. “A little more. How’d you know I lifted?”
He swallowed. “Your legs. And then your arms and shoulders.” If she hadn’t known he’d been checking her out behind the lenses of his sunglasses, she did now.
Jo took a sip of water before returning his casual perusal, raking her gaze from his head to his toes and back up. “I’m not the only one who lifts.”
“No, you’re not.”
She turned and looked out at the water before turning back to him. “I shouldn’t have come today. I’m obviously making you uncomfortable.”
You have no idea, Jolene Westwood.
He sighed. “Not uncomfortable, really. We’re just…” Chase searched for the words that could most accurately describe what she was making him feel, without giving away, well, how he was actually feeling.
Like a horny teenager.
“We haven’t seen each other in years. We’re different people, but kind of the same.”
They stood there in silence, contemplating each other before Jo turned her head and looked out towards the water again. She wrapped her arms around herself, the motion pushing her breasts up higher. Chase swallowed, tamping down the lust that clawed at his gut.
Funny how while some things had changed, others certainly hadn’t. She still made him feel like a fourteen-year-old boy, all needy and antsy and itchy, like a bottle rocket waiting to shoot off into the sky.
She worried her bottom lip, shifted her weight from one foot to the other. As he watched her—he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of her, and wasn’t sure he even wanted to—goose bumps scattered over her baby biceps and her breath hitched ever so slightly.
The sight reminded him of a day long ago, next to a different body of water, when she’d had a similar look on her face. She hadn’t been wearing a swimsuit that day, instead had on cut-off shorts and a cherry red tank top. But she’d looked at him, and since he knew her moods better than anyone had been able to see her nervousness. He’d thought it was because of the scars—she’d never seen them until that day. But when she’d blurted out that she hadn’t been looking at the scars, but at him, his fourteen-year-old brain had dared to hope that maybe the prettiest girl in school and his best friend maybe wanted to be more than friends.
He’d been thinking about kissing her, wondering if it would scare her or gross her out if he did. He remembered being anxious, fear and nerves churning in his gut. Her cheeks had been pink, she’d had goose bumps on her arms despite the summer heat and she’d drawn this really shaky breath like the ones he’d seen in movies right before the guy kissed the girl, and courage had blossomed.
And then Matt had broken the moment.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Owen and Jenn, about two hundred yards away, occupied with their usual race to the sand bar that gently bumped out of the water in the middle of the cove. Matt wasn’t here, their friends were engrossed in their own game, and Chase suddenly felt the need to at least get
some
answers from the woman standing in front of him.
He dropped his fishing pole, causing Jo to jump and jerk her head around to look at him. “Are you…”
He cut her question off with his mouth, finally doing what he’d wanted to that summer day almost twenty years ago, and so many days after that. He nipped lightly at her bottom lip before licking at it with his tongue. His hands settled on her hips—those damned tempting strings twined around his fingers—and he coaxed her mouth open.
He felt her body’s response before he felt her mouth’s response. Her arms fell and he felt her hands on his waist, riding the waistband of his shorts. Her touch burned through his t-shirt.
And then she was kissing him back. Slowly, almost shyly. Their tongues danced together and lips caressed each other.
Languorous. That really was the only way to describe it.
Languorous.
Their bodies rocked gently with the boat, but he didn’t move closer. Just an answer, that’s all he wanted.
Just one fucking answer.
He heard her inhale deeply through her nose, felt her fingers tighten on his waistband, and knew he had at least one answer.
This was going to be a really long summer.
~~*~~
Jo blinked as Chase pulled away from her, breaking the kiss and setting her thoughts spinning in her head.
Chase had just kissed her.
Chase.
She wanted him to do it again.
He was an expert kisser.
She wanted him to do it again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Except with more hands. Those big hands had stayed on her hips, but Jo realized with a sharp, jarring thought that she wanted those hands
on
her. Everywhere.
But he was Chase and she was Jo and despite having a degree in psychology and being a high school counselor she suddenly
felt
like one of the teenage girls she so often listened to. She vaguely remembered this feeling—the confusion and anguish and
want
that clawed sharply, desperately at a person’s insides. She hadn’t felt it often.
Oh, she’d wanted men before. She’d had men before. Not a lot, but a few. And she’d wanted them, been attracted to them, trusted them and in one case even loved. But this intense, sudden churning she’d only felt with one person.
Chase.
It hadn’t been there the other night at Walmart—not like this. She’d recognized the spark, the stirrings of want, but it hadn’t been like this since high school, when she’d loved him desperately and had stuffed it down because she’d been trying to protect him.
Okay, she’d been trying to protect herself, too.
Vaguely, the sound of Jenn’s laughter reached her ears, carried on the wind and the waves, and Jo blinked as she returned to the present.
Chase was still standing in front of her, their bodies close enough that she could feel heat pulsing off of him in waves. Knowing her sunglasses were dark enough to hide her eyes, she took a moment to look him over, to collect herself. His body was taut with tension, she could see that now. Could feel that, somehow, like she’d been able to once upon a time, when she’d been attuned to his moods, thoughts and emotions.
His breaths were slightly uneven, and despite the fact that it had been some time since she’d been around a man in an aroused state, she was pretty sure Chase was, indeed, in an aroused state.
He wanted her.
Somehow, that made everything simpler and more complicated at the same time.
Same, but different.
Words and thoughts and feelings pushed at her throat, tripping over each other as they danced over her tongue. Her thoughts were spinning like Jessie Spano on diet pills.
Then suddenly Jessie was no longer excited, and her thoughts were calm, and the only words that mattered—really mattered—spilled over her lips.
She pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head, removing at least one of the barriers between them, and looked him in the eye. “I never meant to hurt you, Chase.”
“Then why did you?”
She shook her head. “I was trying to protect you. Myself. My mom…”
He looked off to the side, and she followed his gaze. Owen and Jenn had just reached the sand bar, were walking onto shore with their backs towards the boat. Chase glanced back at her, grabbed her sunglasses and his, tossed them to the side and then pushed her over the edge.
Jo came up sputtering, spitting water as she scooped hair out of her eyes.
What the hell was wrong with him?
She looked up at the boat, trying to find him, and felt something brush against her leg. She shrieked and kicked, paddling towards the boat, away from whatever was lurking under the surface. She was scared to look down, for fear of what she’d see in the clear water.
Please don’t let it be a snake. Or a gar.
Just as Jo reached the side of the boat and began to tread water, Chase’s head popped up right where she’d been, and she realized with at least some relief that she’d probably felt him brushing against her leg under water.
At least, that’s what she preferred to believe.
He stroked towards her, stopping about a foot away.
“What the hell was that for?”
He grinned as he tread water. “I wanted some privacy.”
She pushed a hank of wet hair out of her eyes. “And we didn’t have that already?”
“They always turn around once they reach the sand bar and wave at me. They would have seen us and then we wouldn’t have heard the end of it.”
“And disappearing over the side of the boat and out of their sight won’t make them give us hell?”
He looked away for long moments, long enough that Jo wondered if he was going to answer her at all, and then he swung his gaze back to her and she felt her breath catch somewhere between her lungs and her throat before leaving her body on a long, hard
whoosh
. Did he even know what those eyes did to a woman?
“We’re just swimming.”
“You don’t sound like that you believe that.” She sounded much braver than she felt.
His laugh was slightly choked; with wonder, disbelief, or anger she didn’t know. “You know me too well. Somehow, you still know me too well.”
And she did. They might be same and yet different than they had been, but the fundamentals of who they used to be were still present.
“I made you uncomfortable. So you threw me into the water.” She skimmed her hand along the surface, splashing him in the face. He wasn’t the only one who was uncomfortable.
He laughed and splashed her back. “Slightly. Maybe.”
Her lips twitched, holding back a laugh. He splashed her again, and she closed her eyes and splashed back, the laughter now bubbling over. She opened her eyes just in time to see him take a deep breath and dive under the water, and knew exactly what he was doing.
Jo moved quickly to the right and then used the side of the boat to push off with her legs. When he surfaced where she’d been, she was a good ten feet away from him.
Their gazes caught and she raised an eyebrow. “I bet I’m still the better swimmer.”
Instead of answering he dove back under the water, and Jo moved again, swimming to her right.
Apparently she wasn’t still the better swimmer, because seconds later she felt his hand grasp her ankle. Knowing what was coming next she took one last deep breath before he pulled her under.
It had been years since she’d gotten into a water fight with anyone, and even more since that person had been Chase. But some things were a lot like riding the proverbial bicycle—same, but different.
Instead of fighting to reach the surface and get away from him, she instead twisted in his grip, knowing his hand wasn’t incredibly tight around her ankle. She opened her eyes, and could easily see him in the clear water. He was right in front of her, his eyes closed, and she took advantage, reaching out and lightly running her fingers along his belly where his shirt had floated up, exposing his skin there.
He jerked, and the movement propelled them upwards. Their heads broke the surface, both of them gasping for air.
“You tickled me!”
Jo snorted. “You’re lucky that’s all I did.”
Chase narrowed his eyes in an attempt to look menacing. Jo giggled—actually giggled—which made him laugh.
They treaded water, laughing, for long moments before Chase smiled and said, “I’ve missed you, Jo.”
Jo was suddenly glad for the water running from her hair down her face, because it helped hide—at least a little—the couple of tears that managed to escape.
“I’ve missed you too, Chase.”
~~*~~
Chapter Four
“Stop feeling guilty.”
Jo glanced towards Jenn and took another sip of her wine. “Guilty about what?”
“I can read you like a book, Jolene Westwood. You’re feeling guilty about leaving Gran all alone tonight.”
“She just had hip surgery, and I was gone all day already.”
“And she told you she was perfectly fine and to not feel guilty and go have fun with your friends. So stop it.”
“It’s just…hard not to feel guilty.” Jo sighed and sipped more wine. She did feel guilty, sitting here in Owen’s backyard, drinking wine while her grandmother sat at home by herself with still somewhat limited mobility.
Jenn
harrumphed
beside her before reaching for the bottle of wine to pour herself some more. “This is really good. Where’d you get it?”
Jo knew better than the trust to change in subject as being permanent, but answered her friend’s question anyway. “Spec’s.”
Jenn raised an eyebrow. “You purposely packed wine to bring with you?”
Well, theoretically she could have stopped in San Antonio on her way from Austin. “I wasn’t sure if I could find my favorites here.”
“You’re such a wine snob,” Jenn teased.
“Yes, such a wine snob that I packed a few bottles of my favorite ten dollar red moscato to bring with me.”
Jenn looked at the bottle again. “This stuff’s seriously only ten bucks?”
Jo smirked. “Yup.”
“Hot damn. I hope they do sell this stuff in Del Rio. Somewhere. Even Uvalde. I’ll drive to Uvalde for this.”
Jo laughed, the tension starting to drain from her shoulders.
Jenn flashed her a knowing smirk. “I got you to stop feeling guilty.”
Jo sighed.
“Guilty about what?” Chase sauntered over, a long neck of Shiner dangling from his fingers.
She had the oddest sudden desire to be a beer bottle.
“Jo’s feeling guilty about leaving Gran by herself.”
Jo rolled her eyes. “She just had her hip replaced!” She said for the second time that night.
Chase sat down beside her, casually rested his free arm along the back of the wooden glider they were both sitting on. Every nerve in Jo’s body jumped to attention. She grabbed her glass of wine, tried to take a casual sip, but gulped instead.
Coming to Owen’s had been a bad idea.
For one thing, Gran might need her. For another, her emotions were still too raw from her and Chase’s almost confessions this afternoon. Not to mention the definitely happened kiss.
Who knew he could kiss like that?
“How’s she doing?”
Jo mentally shook herself. “She’s actually doing really well. She hates physical therapy—which I knew she would. Stubborn woman.”
“Well, at least you come by it honestly,” Chase quipped.
Jo elbowed him in the ribs.
Jenn raised her eyebrows and peered at the two of them over the rim of her wine glass. “So what
were
the two of you doing while we were at the sand bar?”
“Swimming.”
“Horsing around.”
They spoke at the same time, causing Jenn to lift her eyebrows even higher—which Jo hadn’t thought was possible.
“Swimming. Horsing around. Hmm.” Those eyebrows eased into a lascivious waggle.
Jo forced herself not to squirm under Jenn’s gaze. Damn her and her seventh grade teacher perceptiveness.
Or whatever it was.
Grasping for something—anything—she picked up her iPhone, started up an iTunes playlist on shuffle, and said, “Oh, hey, I love this song!”
Owen stepped out of the house—the fish were apparently ready to go on the grill—and asked, “You know Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison?” His expression clearly said,
I don’t believe it.
“Any Texas girl worth her salt knows the first couple of Austin’s country music scene.”
Jenn chuckled. “Oh, I think the gauntlet might have just been thrown.”
Jo looked quizzically at Jenn, who smiled and explained, “These two,” she tipped her wine glass first towards Chase and then towards Owen, “are the two biggest music geeks in Del Rio.”
“Little do these two,” Jo pointed at Owen and then Chase, “know that I’m also a music geek, huh?”
Chase’s fingers brushed against Jo’s shoulder—almost as if by accident—as he asked, “But are you a Texas country music geek? See, Owen and I are very, very picky.”
“Snobby, even,” Jenn nodded enthusiastically.
“More of an overall music geek, with a soft spot that borders on obsession for all things Miranda Lambert.”
Chase laughed. “I should have known.”
“Should have known what?”
“I’m just not surprised, that’s all. So, you up for a friendly competition?”
Jo narrowed her eyes. “What kind of competition?”
Jenn almost bounced in her seat. How many glasses of wine had she had? “I play DJ. It’s kind of like Jeopardy or Family Feud or something. First person to slap the table gets first guess at the song. Each correct guess is one point. Each wrong, you get a point erased.”
“Do we listen to a song or what?”
“Jenn pulls up iTunes, shuffles stuff, and then starts playing. Sometimes we’ll listen to the full song, sometimes we just skip through,” Chase answered.
“Sure, I’m in.”
“You’re brave, Jolene.”
“Nobody’s called me Jolene in years, and I swear between y’all and my gran I’ve been called that more times I can count since I’ve been back.”
Chase shrugged. “Sometimes it just fits.”
Jo raised an eyebrow before turning to Jenn and smiling. “Bring it on, boys.”
~~*~~
Jo’s hand slapped down on the table and she shouted out, “Nobody’s girl by Reckless Kelly!”
Beside him, Chase could feel her hips twitching. Playing their stupid game with Jo had been fun—and an added challenge since with every sip of wine she took, the more her hips twitched on the seat next to his.
Owen set the now cooked fish on a platter in the middle of the table, and Jenn let the song play as they took an official time out for supper. As Jo speared a grilled filet with her fork, he could hear her humming softly along with the song. He chuckled, remembering how as kids she’d put on more than one “concert” in his backyard, most often to Madonna and Bon Jovi.
Chase surreptitiously glanced down at her, noticing how emotions seemed to fleetingly cross her face before they were gone, so different from how guarded she’d been that night in Walmart when they’d first bumped into each other. As the song neared the bridge Jo’s body seemed to hum with barely suppressed movement. Something told him that had she been alone she would have been bouncing and pumping her fist in time with the music and the words that expressed the heartache of a woman growing up in a broken home and finding herself repeating the cycle.
Jo’s home hadn’t been broken in the traditional sense, but he knew enough to know that it hadn’t exactly been whole, either.
How many nights had she spent on her own, he wondered, before telling himself that it really wasn’t any of his business.
The only problem was that while everyone else assumed he’d long ago stopped caring about Jolene Sommers—no, Jolene Westwood, now—he hadn’t. Not really. He’d just done a good job of stuffing the feelings down and ignoring them like she’d ignored him.
He sounded like an angry kid, even to himself. Chase supposed that somewhere inside he probably was still a little bit of an angry boy.
Conversation ebbed and flowed as they ate supper, with Chase lost primarily in his thoughts the entire time. When they’d finished, Jenn and Owen volunteered for kitchen duty, gathering up dirty dishes and carrying them inside.
Alone with nothing more than Jolene, iTunes and alcohol, Chase wondered if his friends had planned this. He wouldn’t put it past them.
The song switched from Pat Green’s “Take Me Out to a Dancehall” to Eli Young Band’s “Guinevere,” and Jo once again softly hummed along.
“I really didn’t take you as a Texas country fan.”
She looked over at him. “No? Why?”
He chuckled. “Well, considering the last time we were around each other for any length of time your locker was decorated with pictures of matchbox twenty and Third Eye Blind…”
Jo laughed. “For what it’s worth, matchbox twenty is still my all-time favorite band, and I’ve been known to crank up ‘Semi-Charmed Life’ a time or two. Besides, the last time you and I spent any sort of time near each other I’m pretty sure you had ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ on repeat.”
“Fair enough. People change.”
“Exactly. But, as for how I got into Texas country,” she paused, her brow furrowed, “I guess it was a kind of slow progression. I would listen to some stuff, the more popular stuff like Pat Green and Jack Ingram, but then I dated a guy who was in a band so any time we were together all we would listen to was Texas country. I got a little sick of it—I mean, you can only listen to ‘Boys from Oklahoma’ so many times before you feel like you might actually
need
a joint, even if it is rolled all wrong—and didn’t listen for a while. But then KOKE FM came back on the air, and most of the stuff on mainstream was, well, not very good, and I started listening more and more and, well, that’s that.”
“Wait, back up. First—you once dated a guy in a band?” That seemed a bit incongruous with the Jo he’d known and the Jo he’d spent the past eight and a half hours with. Not that he was counting or anything.
Jo shrugged a shoulder. “It’s the Austin thing to do.”
“So was he in Ragweed or just a fan of Ragweed?”
“Fan of Ragweed. In both senses of the word.”
Chase threw back his head and laughed. “You’re surprising me, Jo.”
“Honestly, it wasn’t my proudest moment. I’d just moved to Austin right after finishing my master’s degree. I was lonely, didn’t know anyone, and he approached me at a bar one night. I was just drunk enough to dance with him, and then got drunker enough and accidentally gave him my real phone number. That relationship lasted a whopping three weeks.”
“Is that even long enough to be considered a relationship?”
She snorted. “Who the hell knows? God knows to the teenagers I work with it is.”
“How in the world do you do it?”
She looked up at him. “Do what?”
“Counsel teenagers?” He shuddered. “I can’t think of a group of people that would be harder to deal with.”
She shifted in her seat, fiddled with her now empty wine glass before angling her body towards him. “That’s precisely why I do it—they’re difficult and emotional and desperately need someone they can talk to who won’t judge them. You remember what it was like to be a teen, right? I mean, we’re not
that
old.”
He thought about his teenage years. They’d been difficult, yes, but fun. He’d had a good family, a promising future in collegiate baseball, friends and plenty of girls who were willing to be his girlfriend, even if he hadn’t really been interested in any of them. Yeah, he had his scars—literally—but other than his childhood illness, the hardest thing he’d had to deal with as a teen had been the sudden loss of Jo’s friendship.
He’d actually cried over her one night, after sneaking home from a homecoming bonfire at which there may have been copious amounts of alcohol passed around among all of the underage participants.
It was the first and only time he drank until he was of a legal age.
Aside from that, though, he guessed he’d probably had it pretty easy. Some kids, he knew, weren’t so lucky.
“Being a teenager kind of sucks,” he finally said.
“Exactly. It’s just…I weirdly relate to them. My life looked great on the outside, you know? But I was a mess on the inside. My home life was a clusterfuck, to put it bluntly. There was so much pressure to be perfect. From my mom. Myself. I always thought that maybe if I was smart enough, pretty enough Dad would pay more attention and actually be a dad. I know now that there’s nothing I could have done to make him pay more attention—he was who he was, and that man was content to hide in his books and not deal with the real world, much less his cheating wife and his needy daughter. And Mom. God. There’s a great example for a teenage girl to follow. I developed an eating disorder, had it until I was halfway through my junior year of college and ended up in the hospital and started working with a therapist who specializes in EDs. I gained a lot of weight in recovery—you wouldn’t have recognized me—and lost a decent amount of it afterwards when I started treating myself right, lifting and actually feeding my body. Up until that point I’d planned on going into psychiatry and opening my own practice, but once I was out of the thick of it and could think about it without feeling crazy and out of control, I realized that I could have used a really good counselor in high school, someone to talk to who wasn’t a friend but who still got it. So I changed majors slightly and decided to be a high school counselor. And I’m rambling and saying way more than I should have and I’m out of wine. I need more wine.”
Behind Jo, Chase saw Jenn and Owen approaching the back door. He subtly shook his head and motioned for them to go back inside. He needed this conversation to continue, even if what Jo was telling him made him feel equal parts sick, angry and protective. Luckily, Jenn actually listened for once.
Chase set his beer on the table before taking the empty wine glass from Jo’s hands and setting it on the table, too. Then he did the only thing he could do—wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head, realizing that somewhere in that jumbled, rambly mess she’d accidentally poured out, was another answer.
~~*~~
Jo felt Chase’s arms wrap around her as her head swam. Whether it was from wine, emotions or embarrassment she wasn’t sure, but it was probably a combination of all three. Vaguely, she heard Imagine Dragons’ “Demons” coming from her phone’s speakers. Fitting.
She felt like she should warn Chase that she had demons hiding inside. Danger. Stay away. Don’t get too close.
“Well, that’s not Texas country.”
She snorted into his shirt before taking a deep breath. He smelled like sun and skin and everything she’d ever wanted but couldn’t have. She’d noticed it earlier on the boat, when he’d kissed her.
His scent made her mouth water.