Between the Seams Read Free Page B

anyway? You haven’t spoken to him or about him since you left for college.”
    Jo knew that her friend’s comment was a statement rather than an accusation, but Jo still felt guilty for basically abandoning the boy who’d been her other best friend for most of her childhood. “To be honest, I’ve kept up with him a little bit. We ran into each other a couple of times in college at football games. And he doesn’t know it, but every time the Texas baseball team played Baylor in Waco I went to all of the games while he was on the team.”
    Jenn paused, fork in midair, before slowly setting it back down on her plate. “You never told me that. Any of that.”
    Jo shrugged. “I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. You know what happened and why I stopped talking to him. I’ve always felt bad about it, but I was embarrassed and hoped that if I stopped hanging out with him that my mom would stop hitting on his dad. That obviously didn’t work, but by the time I figured that out the damage had been done.”
    Jenn reached across the table and squeezed Jo’s hand before picking up her fork again. “And yet you kept tabs on him while we were all at our separate universities?”
    Jo smiled. “It was pretty easy, considering he was the closer for the Longhorns. That, and I might have stalked him a couple of times via MySpace back in the day.”
    “Ah, the times before Facebook and Twitter.”
    “We’re getting old, Jenn.”
    “Nah. We’re just now hitting our prime.”
    At thirty-two, Jo sometimes felt old, especially after spending her days counseling high school students. There was nothing like being around teenagers all day to make you feel old, even if you were only in your early thirties. “Be that as it may, I was just curious. It was really good to see him. I’ve missed us, the Three Amigos.”
    “Chase is a good guy. Sometimes I wish he wasn’t like a brother to me—there isn’t exactly a dearth of attractive, successful, single guys around here. At least not our age.”
    “I think that’s the case everywhere.”
    They both dug into their lunches, Jenn eating her salad, Jo enjoying her grilled salmon. After long moments of companionable silence, Jenn took a drink of her Coke then asked, “So how’d it go?”
    “How’d what go?”
    “Running into Chase again. All you said was that you ran into him, didn’t really say anything about how it went or what happened.”
    Jo sighed, still a little embarrassed by the whole thing. “I bumped into him. Literally. With a box of Tampax Super in one hand and a box of overnight pads in the other. Just walked backwards right into him and then almost hit him with the damned tampons.”
    Jenn’s laugh was full and good-natured. Familiar. Welcome and missed. “Oh wow. I’m not sure which of you was probably more embarrassed.”
    “I think I was. At any rate, it was kind of awkward. He didn’t recognize me at first, and I kept almost hitting him with the box of tampons. I felt like one of the teenage girls who comes to my office at least once a week, crushing on the starting quarterback and miserable over it.”
    “Crushing, huh?” Jenn’s green eyes twinkled.
    “Maybe not crushing. But seriously, Jenn, you couldn’t have warned me that Chase grew up and got seriously hot?” Just thinking about those eyes and that smile made her feel like she’d just run a marathon—all hot and breathless.
    Jenn shrugged. “You’re the one who’s been stalking him.”
    Jo felt her cheeks warm. “True. It’s just…good Lord…I mean, he was cute before. But he was so tall and skinny in high school.”
    “He wasn’t in college,” Jenn pointed out.
    Jo finished off her tea as she thought back to the few times she’d seen him face to face in college and on TV during televised games. “No, he wasn’t. I guess I just didn’t really notice it at the time.” Liar, liar pants on fire . “I was still grappling with the shame of my mother’s actions and just