by Evie Snow
His voice rose with each word, and by the time he finished talking, he was shouting, using every bit of his additional two inches of height to loom over her. An angry Stephen was a sight to behold and she had a feeling he’d never normally let his temper fly like this. It felt horrific that he was feeling like this now with her.
Jo swallowed the lump of tears in her throat. “We . . .” She stopped when she heard how choked-up her voice was. “We were worried that you’d get him fired and he’d go off the deep end and hurt M-Mum.”
“Jo, I don’t know if you noticed, but your mum doesn’t need or want your help. I didn’t see a lot of gratitude there just now.” His voice, his eyes, his expression were cold, harsh, leaving Jo feeling frozen in place.
She opened her mouth to say something, but all that came out was a sob. She looked away and stifled it as best she could.
“What would you have done if I wasn’t around this morning?” Stephen demanded.
Jo stuck her chin out, her lower lip trembling. “I would have handled it. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Scott . . .”
“Scott? So you could tell Scott all about it but not me? What am I? Just tell me that.” Stephen threw up his hands in fury, not catching the way Jo flinched away. “And you think you were handling things? Screaming phone calls? Your mum shooting at you? Jesus, you must have thought I was a total idiot!”
“I don’t! And I was handling it,” Jo insisted in a small voice. “Scott and I were going to go down and . . . I didn’t know, I didn’t know it was her.”
She felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach. The pressure built behind her eyes until she felt like her sinuses were going to explode.
“Well, you know now,” Stephen retorted, jamming his hand through his hair. “This is so fucked up, Jo. I . . . I seriously can’t handle it right now. I trusted you. I can’t believe you couldn’t tell me about this. You let me apologize to you repeatedly all these months for being the reason you had to leave. You know how much that guilt messed with my life? Have you any idea? How do you think that makes me feel, hey? Do you think I’m that much of a bastard I wouldn’t have cared? That my family wouldn’t have cared? I’ve just spent the last ten years in a relationship where someone kept stuff from me and lied about how she felt. How do you think it feels to find out you’ve done the same over something this serious? What do you take me for?”
“I’m sorry.” Something inside her cracked and shattered into a million pieces, leaving nothing but raw emotion and a wash of silent tears pouring down her cheeks.
There was a shocked silence then Stephen groaned softly. “Damn. Come here.” He hauled her up against him in a tight embrace that would have been uncomfortable if she didn’t need the comfort so much. “Jo. Don’t. Please stop crying, Jo.”
“C-can’t.”
“Alright then.” He began stroking her hair, which left her crying even harder.
“Tissues,” Amy said quietly from the doorway, holding out a box, her big blue eyes shiny with new tears of her own.
“Thanks,” Stephen said gruffly. He grabbed a tissue and clumsily dabbed at Jo’s cheeks.
“I’m alright,” Jo protested, pushing away from him and taking the tissue out of his hand.
“Yeah. Right. Looks like it,” Stephen said, the harshness from before entering his tone again. “Jesus Christ. This is too much . . . too much.” He turned and met Amy’s worried gaze. “I’ve got to have some time out to clear my head. Can I leave Jo here with you?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going?” Jo asked, eyes wide with panic.
Stephen grimaced. “Yeah. If I stick around, I’m probably going to say a lot that I don’t mean. I need time to deal.” He avoided her eyes, looking to Amy instead. “Can you call me a taxi?”
“Yeah.”
Jo ran her palms over her eyes, fighting the urge to beg Stephen to stay yet hating herself for being so weak. Shame pressed on her chest till she felt like she was suffocating, but she drew in a shaky breath, straightened her shoulders and met him square in the eye. “I was going to tell you today.”
“Yeah? Well . . . I can’t talk about this right now.” He looked away, breathing deeply. “We’ll talk later. You need to be with Amy and I need—” His words were interrupted by a yellow taxi pulling into the drive. It must have been in the area when Amy called. “You going to be alright?” Stephen asked.
“Yeah.” Jo willed herself not to cry again until he left. If she started again, she’d never stop. “I’ll see you soon, right?”
“Yeah.”
He took a step towards her, but she didn’t want a hug right now. Instead, she held up a hand in a wave, the other wrapped tight around her waist. “Bye.”
Stephen opened his mouth to say something, then he nodded, turned, and got in the cab.
Jo watched him go with both hands wrapped around her waist. It wasn’t until Amy gently but firmly steered her back into the house and wrapped a blanket around her that she realized the heaving sobs she was hearing were her own.
Chapter 18
“Anyone home?”
Jo squinted up from where she was lying on the couch to see Scott cautiously walking through Amy’s front door, taking his shoes off, and leaving them by the mat. She waved a limp hand at him. She still didn’t have the energy to say something as banal as hello.
“That bad, is it?” Scott gazed sympathetically down at her.
She nodded, eyes red with misery.
“Poor baby.” He crouched down and gently ruffled her hair. “Want to talk about it?”
Jo shook her head, lip beginning to wobble.
He heaved a big sigh. “Okay then, I can see I’m gonna be cheering you up some other way.” He looked around before settling on the TV, which was playing an ancient episode of Seinfeld. “You been watching this all yesterday and today?”
Jo nodded again.
“Right then. I think you two have had enough.” Scott walked over to the TV and flicked it off.
“Hey!” Jo protested, voice croaky. “Put it back on.” She waited for Amy to back her up, but Amy was fast asleep in a bright-red beanbag. There was a large, half-melted tub of Baskin- Robbins next to her.
Scott walked over and poked her with his foot. “What is this? An ice cream coma? It’s ten in the morning!” he exclaimed, gingerly prodding Amy’s shoulder with his bare toe again but only getting a small snorting sound in reply as she burrowed deeper into the beanbag.
“Leave her alone, you bastard,” Jo croaked. She threw a cushion at him. “She deserves a bit of peace and quiet.”
“What? So she can drown herself in misery and goo? You both look like shit, you know.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Welcome.”
Scott disappeared into Amy’s kitchen. Jo heard him clanging around and pouring water.
“Black. Two sugars,” Jo rasped and then winced at how the noise caused her head to hurt.
“Not until you have a shower. That goes for Twinkle Toes here too.”
“Twinkle Toes is in never-never land.”
“So what’s your excuse?”
“Alright, I’ll have a shower. Just make sure that coffee is ready when I get out,” Jo grouched, rolling off the couch and getting unsteadily to her feet. Her eyes felt dry and gritty, and her chest felt battered and beaten. She wobbled to Amy’s bathroom, hoping that the TV and comfort-food-induced numbness of the night before would hold on a bit longer.
She wasn’t that lucky, and sometime in between the soaping and shampooing, she began crying like a baby again. Stephen’s hurt, furious expression when he’d learned what she’d kept from him played through her mind over and over, feeling like a stab to the chest every time. His disappointment in her had somehow been so much worse than her mother’s flat expression as she shattered the last of Jo’s illusions about being wanted, loved.
Jo cursed out loud and shoved her face under the water. With the rose-tinted curtains pulled back, she c
ould see now that both she and Amy had been building castles in the sky.
It shouldn’t hurt like this. Shirley had always subscribed more to the “children should be seen and not heard, because they’re somewhere else, preferably far away” school of parenting. But for some reason, it did hurt, and she was crying. All the years she and Amy had thought that if they could just get Ken out of the picture, their mum would be free to care for them, had been for nothing. All the beatings she’d put up with thinking she was protecting her mum had been for nothing. It was too much. She sat down in the bathtub under the spray and began to sob in earnest again.
The sound of banging on the bathroom door interrupted her mid-blubber before Scott’s no-doubt deliberately unsympathetic words filtered through the door.
“Coffee is ready, so get up and get out here.”
“Fuck off.”
“No thanks. You’ve got three minutes or I’m coming in there with a camera.” His voice had enough threat in it for Jo to believe him. A determined Scott was a devious bastard.
Jo washed the tears off her face then stepped out of the shower, drying off and wrapping a bright-pink bath towel around her before emerging from the bathroom. The pile of clothes she’d been wearing for the past two days looked too crumpled and filthy to wear again. She shoved them into the washing machine next to Amy’s small bathroom vanity and flicked it on.
“Nice look,” Scott said when she made it to the kitchen. He was sprawled over one of Amy’s mismatched ladder-back chairs, coffee in hand, looking disgustingly perfect as his legs took up half the tiny space. Jo was glad he’d lost the sympathetic expression from before. She couldn’t take that right now.
“Thanks. I’m working on it.” She sat down on the other side of the table. He’d remembered to make her coffee in her favorite blue-striped cup from their university days. It was chipped and stained, and she’d left it with Amy because it was so comforting to drink out of whenever she visited. It was comforting now. She took a small sip of coffee, making sure it wouldn’t burn.
“I was just at your place,” Scott said after she’d taken a few more. It was working magic on her overwrought system.
“Yeah?” she asked cautiously.
“Stephen was there. He told me what happened.”
“And how . . . how is he?” Jo set her cup down and pulled her towel tighter around her, making sure the knot was secure as a distraction.
“Told me about your mum.”
“Yeah?”
Scott turned his head to face her, and she had to lean away from the intensity in his eyes.
“I’m going to say this once,” he said in a low voice that contained a wealth of barely suppressed anger. “They’re not worth this thing you and Amy are doing, they’re not worth this.” He gestured to her bloodshot eyes and sad expression. “When you work that out, you’ll feel better than you ever have.”
He paused for a moment, allowing her to digest his words.
“You deserved better, Jo, but you didn’t get it, and I’m sorry you had to realize it this way. I love you, so do Amy and that fuzzball of a cat you have. Who is at my place, by the way,” he finished with a tight smile.
Jo stared at him, her thoughts warring with her emotions before the corner of her mouth twitched in a sad smile. “When did you become Dr. Phil?”
“Daytime TV is a wonderful thing,” Scott said, pulling a deadpan expression. “You get all that?”
“Might have.”
“Did it sink in?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s supposed to sink in?” Amy asked, waddling into the kitchen, yawning hugely and stretching like a small kitten. Despite her messy hair and face, she was wearing heeled slippers with pink pom-poms on the toes and a pink-and-green striped nightie.
Jo and Scott simultaneously rolled their eyes at the overwhelming cuteness.
“That you should have given up on your mum years ago,” Scott answered calmly.
Amy stopped mid-stretch, arms collapsing at her side. “Ease me into it, why don’t you?” she muttered, tottering over to the kettle and beginning to make a cup of tea.
Something niggling at the back of Jo’s thoughts kicked in. “Why’s Boomba at your place?”
Scott raised a brow. “Took you long enough.”
“Just answer me,” Jo demanded impatiently. “Where’s Stephen?”
Scott looked at the ceiling somewhere above Jo’s head. “He’s gone back to Evangeline’s Rest for a while.”
“A while? How long? Why?” Jo asked as she felt the first pebbles of an incoming panic avalanche.
“Didn’t say exactly.” Scott shrugged. “Did you know his ex sold their apartment and finally coughed up the money she owed him?”
“No.” Jo felt like she’d just been punched. Stephen hadn’t said a thing. Why wouldn’t he have told her? Was he planning on moving out?
“He didn’t tell you?” Scott raised an eyebrow and looked surprised. “Oh.”
“What did he say to you, Scott? Why has he gone down to George Creek?” Jo demanded.
“He looked pretty cut-up about what happened,” Scott replied. “Pretty upset it was all sprung on him like that. He said he’d had a lot of time to think about things yesterday and this morning. And after you didn’t call him or return his calls . . .” He let his words hang while Jo launched out of her chair and ran into the living room to find her phone. It was sitting on the floor where she’d left it and was as dead as a doornail.
“Shit! No battery,” she exclaimed. “Amy, I need to use your phone.”
“You know where it is,” her sister called from the kitchen.
After being put through to Stephen’s voicemail five times, Jo’s anxiety level was nearing supercritical. She stalked back into the kitchen and found Scott wrapping his arms around Amy, his tall, wide frame dwarfing her sister’s. Amy was wiping a tear from her eye, but Jo was too panicked right now to think of offering comfort. Scott was doing a good enough job.
“What’s going on with Stephen, Scott?” Jo demanded.
He ignored her, whispering something in Amy’s ear before looking up with exasperation. “I don’t know. He just said he needed to get away.”
“Get away? From me?” He’d taken one look at her real life, where she’d come from, and had run. She should have told him the truth. She didn’t know how, but she should have.
“Not sure,” Scott said before finally relenting. “I think you two just need to talk.”
“How? I’m here and he’s run off to George Creek!” Jo threw up her arms and then quickly caught the towel before it slid to her feet.
“What’s to stop you from going to George Creek after him?” Amy asked in a small voice.
“Yeah. Follow him, Jo. I think he deserves a decent explanation. He’s had time to think, so he shouldn’t be as pissed off anymore,” Scott said calmly.
“How?” Jo yelled again and then stopped, brain whirring.
Stephen couldn’t be leaving her now. Not now. Not after they’d told each other they loved each other . . . well, sort of. She’d just quit her job, for Christ’s sake. Okay, not for him, but she had been thinking how great it would be to spend more time with him. A lot of time. She had no clothes though, no phone, and it was George Creek, George bloody Creek. Her parents were there. Everything that had happened in the last thirty years, in the last few days, was waiting there to jump up and bite her on her backside. Again. Dammit.
A gut panic swarmed up at the thought of losing Stephen. It couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t end it. She wouldn’t let him end it. Not like this. She let the feelings fight for a while then stuck out her jaw and made a decision.
“Get out of your clothes.” She pointed at Scott’s T-shirt and jeans.
“What? Why?” His eyes widened.
“Mine are in the wash, and I need to go. Now. Strip.”
He spluttered coffee on the floor. “Bugger off! If you take my clothes, what am I going to wear?”
&nbs
p; Jo looked pointedly down at her towel. “Pink has always been your best color, Scott.”
* * *
It began raining an hour into her ride down to George Creek, and Jo cursed her bad luck, the weather, and motorbikes in general. It was the beginning of summer—it shouldn’t be raining, and certainly not this heavily.
After twenty minutes trying to navigate her way through the steady downpour, she felt even more miserable than she had when she’d raced into her apartment to find it empty of both cat and man. She’d only spared the time to change out of Scott’s clothes and into her own before running downstairs and setting off, only realizing once she was well on her way that she’d picked up her helmet with the broken visor.
She knew she was riding too fast and that it was stupid given the bad weather, but all she could think of was watching Stephen’s taxi pull out of Amy’s driveway. She should have asked him to stay. She should have tried to explain everything to him, but she hadn’t. All she’d felt was shame that he’d seen how fucked-up her life was. All she’d been able to think about was him being witness to Shirley admitting to firing a gun on her own daughter. In that moment, Shirley had slashed cleanly through any of Jo’s illusions that she could ever be anything other than “Rabies” Blaine.
No matter how far she ran, no matter how much money she saved, how much education she got, she was running in place over the same spot. Going nowhere. She’d thought she’d moved on. Had fought for a new life, a new worth. What a fucking lie. She was still the stupid kid in the picture, dreaming she could be a part of something better one day. Stupid. So fucking stupid. She began to cry again, but the rain washed the tears off her face quicker than they could fall.
She desperately tried to ignore the poisonous litany of self-doubt playing through her thoughts, but it got louder and louder the closer she got to George Creek. It wrapped itself around her, blanketing her, smothering her until she had to pull her bike over at a gravel truck stop on the side of the road ten minutes out of town. It was either that or vomit on a motorbike moving at high speed. Never a good idea.
She soon discovered there was nothing in her stomach to bring up. Just a mouthful of the coffee Scott had made her that morning. She must be insane. She didn’t want to do this. The other day had almost shattered her to pieces; if Stephen rejected her again today, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left. She crouched on the muddy gravel next to her bike and rubbed her wet face with her hands as wave after wave of nausea rolled over her. She knew she had to go find him, but the fifteen-minute ride to Evangeline’s Rest might as well be five hours. She closed her eyes, crouching and hugged herself as she willed the horrible feelings to pass so she could find Stephen and make things better.
