Support seemed important at that moment.
“You’ve got a problem, Sophie,” Phyllis said bluntly. “Do you know much about eating disorders?”
The girl stiffened, but Matt noticed she didn’t shrug off Phyllis’s touch. “I don’t have an eating disorder.”
“Forcing yourself to regurgitate your dinner is an eating disorder.”
“That’s the first time I’ve ever done that.”
“I don’t believe you,” Phyllis said. She wasn’t giving the girl any leeway at all. Matt respected her for it. “Look at your finger. That sore on your knuckle testifies to how often—and how recently—you’ve been making yourself throw up.”
Sophie slid both hands under her thighs.
Matt couldn’t stand to see her suffering so much. She was a great kid. Had so much potential, if she’d just believe in herself.
“If you won’t let me help you with this, I’m going to have to turn you over to a school counselor when school starts again,” Phyllis said.
“You promised you wouldn’t go to anybody with what we talked about!”
“All I have to tell a counselor is what happened here this afternoon.”
Sophie didn’t relent. Didn’t admit to anything. Didn’t do anything but sit there between them, her hands beneath her, staring at the Christmas tree.
“Why, Soph?” Matt couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”
He was shocked when she turned angry, tearful eyes on him. “How can you ask me that?” she demanded. “You should know why.” She bowed her head.
He should?
He and Phyllis exchanged a glance, but he couldn’t give her any answers. He was as puzzled as she was.
“It was all for you.” The words were mumbled, her tone defeated. “I thought you knew that.”
“For me?” Matt’s heart started to pound. His lungs felt as if they were closing, depriving him of air.
She gazed at him, her eyes imploring. And he began to understand.
He was going to be sick.
“I know how you feel about me,” she said. “And I know you think you have to give me lots of time because you’re older than me. It makes me feel good that you’re taking such care to do things right for us, that it means so much to you….”
Matt could hardly believe this was happening. He stared at his hands. At least they were familiar. He recognized them. He couldn’t have looked at Phyllis if his life had depended on it.
“But the thing is,” Sophie said, her voice growing more confident—so confident it frightened him, “I already feel the same way about you that you feel about me. I don’t need the time. What I need to do is make sure that when you finally decide we can be together, my body’s as perfect as any woman’s you’ve ever been with. I won’t have you thinking of me as a child. I’m going to be a woman for you.”
As the life slowly faded out of Matt, Sophie turned to Phyllis.
“I’m sorry I’m saying all this in front of you,” she said. “You shouldn’t be dragged into our situation, but you know all about it, anyway, and I just can’t keep quiet anymore.”
“Matt’s the man you were talking about, then?” Phyllis’s voice sounded so unnatural Matt raised his eyes to her.
But only for the split second it took for her to look back at him, her expression clouded by doubt. He’d already been tried, convicted, sentenced.
Nine years ago.
And today.
It wasn’t ever going to happen again.
He didn’t wait around for whatever was going to happen next.
He’d already seen too much.
“MATT, WAIT!”
Phyllis was running after him, but Matt couldn’t stop. Get to the Blazer. Start the engine. Return to the reality he knew.
“Matt, I’m begging you!” She was crying as she chased him out to his truck. Crying and apparently determined. When he started the engine, she grabbed the door handle.
“Matt, don’t do this!” Her voice was muffled through the closed door, but not muffled enough. He could still hear the pain.
A pain that echoed low in his gut and throughout the rest of him. Alone was so much better than this.
But he couldn’t drive away with her hanging on to the car door.
“I love you, you idiot! Please listen to me.”
The pain. The anger. The despair. It all just stopped. He was numb. Matt rolled down the window.
“What did you say?” He was staring straight ahead.
“I said I love you, and if you think for one second that I was doubting you back there, you’d better have a damn good apology for me. I’d suspected it was you she loved, but when she was so certain that the man loved her back, I’d dismissed my suspicion. Too quickly. And the only excuse I have is that I was too personally involved to be objective.”
Matt had a feeling this wasn’t a good time to smile. But he couldn’t help it. The grin spread right across his face.
“You’ve never told me you loved me.”
“You’ve never told me, either.”
“Well, I do.”
“I do, too.”
He turned then, searching those beautiful green eyes for the truth he needed to find there. “You really do?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I love you, Phyllis,” he said, grabbing her hand through the window to hold on to her while he slowly eased open the car door and pulled her onto his lap. “I think I have since that first day in the sound booth. I’ve never made love to a woman like that in my life.”
“I never knew sex could be that…everything.”
Matt absorbed her honesty—with gratitude and with anticipation. “You know what? Neither did I.”
“Does this mean you’re ready to trust me?”
“I already trusted you, I just didn’t know it yet.”
Her gaze was sweet and honest and direct, holding nothing back. “I trusted you, too,” she whispered.
Matt took a deep breath, pondering the words he had to say next. “Enough to marry me?”
If she said no, life—as he wanted to believe it could be—was over before it could even begin.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
They had much to discuss, confessing to do, love to make, but for now, his arm around Phyllis, they went back inside to the distraught young college student standing on Phyllis’s front porch.
“Matt?” Sophie asked, her eyes locked on Matt’s arm around Phyllis’s waist.
“Let’s go back inside,” Matt said, throwing his free arm around Sophie’s shoulders, giving her no choice but to comply.
He had no idea what came next but felt confident that together, he and Phyllis would figure it out.
SOPHIE WANTED TO DIE. Wished she was alone so she could do just that.
“How could you?” she yelled at Matt. At Dr. Langford. At them. “Why did you invite me here if you two were just going to go behind my back…and want each other?”
“I didn’t realize we were going behind your back,” Dr. Langford said softly. “I had no idea the man you’d told me about was Matt”
She stared at the floor, wishing she could shrug off the guards flanking her, but too needy for their touch to do so. “Well, he knew,” she said in her meanest voice.
“Soph, you know I’ve never said or done anything that could lead you to believe I was interested in you romantically,” Matt was saying, his arm still around her as she sat sandwiched between him and Dr. Langford on the couch. Dr. Langford was holding her hand.
Humiliation worse than she’d ever known crept up her skin, making her feel light-headed, hot. And suddenly nothing mattered. Nothing. Not Matt. Not her appearance. Not the past or the future. Nothing.
And with the freedom that nothingness offered, all the weight she’d been carrying, the pretense, slid off her shoulders. She didn’t even care that she couldn’t hold back the gross-sounding sobs, or that her face looked like crap with tears streaming do
wn it.
“So all the praise was a lie,” she said, her voice devoid of caring. “I’m nothing special. Not to you, not to anyone.”
“Wrong.” Matt’s voice was forceful, more than she’d ever heard it. He squeezed her shoulder so tightly it almost hurt. “You are special. To me. But not romantically.”
Sophie felt a little bit pathetic at being so easily appeased. After all, what else could he say, considering the predicament he was in?
“I can attest to that,” Dr. Langford said, rubbing the top of Sophie’s hand lightly. “Matt’s spoken of you many times, told me how much you amaze him. He often talks about your artistic talent.”
She didn’t want to, but Sophie had to look at him then. “You do?”
He didn’t even blink, just stared her straight in the eye and nodded.
And that was when Sophie really fell apart. When she had to admit to herself, and then to her hosts, that maybe she wasn’t really in love with Matt. That what she needed was the belief that someone older and wiser, someone she respected, actually cared about her. Needed to think she had someone in the world she could turn to.
MATT SWALLOWED HARD as Sophie’s sobbing voice choked out the thin thread of words that told of a lost lonely girl searching for something that should have been hers unconditionally. The love and guidance that all children required from the people who were supposed to be raising them.
After more than an hour of listening, Phyllis managed to get the girl to admit that she had an eating disorder. She persuaded Sophie to let them help her, to let them care. And to be her friends.
By the time Phyllis got around to telling Sophie that she was pregnant, Sophie was claiming an exclusive on baby-sitting rights. She seemed almost relieved to have Phyllis filling the womanly place in Matt’s life, allowing Sophie to be a young adult, who could turn to him for guidance—no strings attached.
The day waned, and eventually they all made it back to the kitchen for seconds on dessert—which Sophie promised to hang on to this time. Matt couldn’t help thinking it had taken only one Christmas for him to know instinctively what life was all about. Love and friendship. After thirty-four years of searching, he’d found both.
EPILOGUE
AT THREE O’CLOCK on New Year’s Eve, in a chapel in Las Vegas, Matt Sheffield made Phyllis Langford his wife.
They didn’t stay in the city long. Just long enough to use it for what they needed—a wedding ceremony that would bind them together forever.
And then they were on a plane back to Phoenix. They had a party to attend. Friends to face.
“Do you think they’re going to be mad that we didn’t invite them?” Matt asked. Her friends were all people he’d known longer than she had, but he knew none of them even half as well.
“Of course not,” his wife assured him, beautiful in her white maternity suit, short red hair sassy as ever. Even after the tears she’d shed at their wedding, she looked impeccable. “Now that they’ll finally get to know you, they’re going to love you, Matt.”
“But still, they might’ve wanted to be included…”
He didn’t know why he was being such a damned idiot. He just knew that suddenly he had a lot to lose. Something he’d never had before.
“They’ll only want me to be happy, Matt, and I can vouch for you there. I’d never known what happy was until I met you….”
A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, Phyllis waited by the front door of her house as Matt started the Blazer and turned on the heat. They’d had cold weather move in—it was a chilly thirty-five degrees—and Phyllis no longer owned a winter coat.
Besides it would’ve seemed wrong to cover the beautiful gown Matt and she had picked out at the maternity store in Phoenix the day before. Rather than concealing her condition, as most of her clothes did, the black silk gown proclaimed it. Phyllis wore it proudly.
Noticing the New Year’s decorations on her front door, she had to smile. Matt had put them there. She’d teased him that she’d created a holiday monster. He was planning to decorate his house—which would be their house as soon as they got her stuff moved—for every holiday, including the Fourth of July. And Thanksgiving. Mother’s Day, of course…and Father’s Day.
“Your carriage awaits, my lady.”
He’d returned, was standing on the other side of the screen door, resplendent in his black evening wear. But it was the little paper hat sitting jauntily on his head, a hat with a pointed top, foil across the bottom and string elastic stapled to each side that split her heart wide open.
“Matt?” The word was barely a whisper.
“Yes, love?” He turned. Frowned. Pulled open the door with far more force than necessary. “Is something wrong?”
“No!” She found her voice long enough to reassure him. “Just…could you tell me again why we got married today, and why we’re telling everyone at the party tonight?”
She knew why. She just wanted to hear him say it again. Wanted to hear that reminder every day for the rest of her life.
“It’s all about new beginnings,” he told her. “Starting tonight, we enter a new month, a new year, a new life.”
“You mean that,” she said, searching those dark eyes for the peace she needed to find there. “The past is gone forever. For you. In your heart.”
“It’s in your keeping, Phyl,” he said softly. “I gave it to you.”
Leaning forward, she kissed him, a deep, familiar kiss. A kiss that promised him she’d keep the past, and anything else he gave her, in a safe place. A faraway place, where it could never touch him again.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” she said huskily.
“Of course.”
“Would you mind terribly if you had to get into that outfit a second time?”
It was another hour before they finally left for the party.
The pointed hat with foil on the bottom dressed the pillow on their bed. It would wait there until they returned home again, to claim everything they’d found there.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6257-1
JUST AROUND THE CORNER
Copyright © 2001 by Tara Lee Reames.
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Just Around the Corner Page 21
