Twice the Chance, page 19
“Please.” Jazz put a hand on his arm. “I really want to leave.”
He frowned. “Without stopping at the fish market?”
“Yes,” she said.
Matt’s shoulders dropped along with the corners of his mouth. “Should I follow you to your place or do you want to follow me to mine?”
They’d driven to the farmer’s market separately, so his question made perfect sense. Except Jazz could envision what would happen if they went somewhere Matt was free to touch her: She wouldn’t be able to think clearly and they’d end up in bed.
“Waterfront Park is nearby,” she said. “I’d rather go there.”
Matt nodded once but she felt no relief that he’d agreed to her suggestion. Giving up her newborn twins had been the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. What she was about to do would rank a close second.
AT ANY OTHER TIME, Matt would have enjoyed a visit to Charleston’s Waterfront Park.
A thick canopy of oak trees afforded plenty of shaded benches. A large fountain at the main park entrance led to a wide wooden pier with stunning vistas of the Cooper River and the towering bridges that connected Charleston to Mount Pleasant.
Today Matt barely glanced at the view. He was preoccupied coming up with the words to convince Jazz to ignore the gossip.
“Let me start, because I know what you’re going to say.” Matt was beside Jazz on a shaded bench under the wooden canopy, no doubt a seat she’d chosen over the more romantic swings. “You’re blowing this thing at school way out of proportion. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Oh, really?” Jazz didn’t look convinced. “Is that what the principal told you?”
Matt hesitated. Principal Middleton had called Matt into his office the day before, exactly as Tom Dougherty had warned.
“Just tell me the truth, Matt,” Jazz said. “Please.”
“Okay, he did want to know about you,” Matt confessed. “I told him how you’d ended up in prison but only so he’d understand you weren’t some hardened criminal.”
“Did he mention the employment contract you signed?” Jazz asked.
In retrospect, it hadn’t been a wise move.
“You’re not an embarrassment, Jazz.” Matt had delivered the missive in more heated terms to the principal. “The only thing that should matter anyway is job performance.”
“Matt, I—” she began.
“No, let me finish. I don’t care what other people think. I care about you.” Matt hadn’t intended to tell her this soon how deep his feelings ran, but the time seemed right. He filled his lungs with air and said, “I’m in l—”
“I think we should stop seeing each other,” she interrupted. Her eyes flickered to his, then away.
He felt like a wrecking ball had hit him in the gut. “What? Because some small-minded people are gossiping about us?”
“That’s part of it,” Jazz said. “I can’t let you lose your job because of me, especially since we both know what we have is temporary.”
She’d told him as much upfront, yes, but everything had changed. Hadn’t it?
“You don’t think things have been going well?” Matt could have pointed out that the sex had been fantastic but he was referring to so much more. He’d spend time with her even if he couldn’t touch her.
“Well enough,” Jazz said. “But it can’t last.”
“Why not?” Matt demanded.
“It’s exhausting to be with you, Matt,” she said. “I never would have applied for that chef job or confronted Bill Smith if not for you.”
“You were the one who tracked Bill down,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but you didn’t even let me change my mind when we got to Beaufort,” she said. “You were the one who arranged for me to talk to him.”
“I was trying to help.”
“I know you were. That’s my point. You go full speed ahead, no matter the obstacles.” She stared down at her hands, then raised her gaze to the water. “It’s enough for me to be out of prison with an apartment and a job.”
They were back to her job situation again. Matt hadn’t brought up the subject in a week but couldn’t hold back his opinion now.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “You work sixty hours a week at two jobs to afford your apartment. You can’t tell me you don’t want something better for yourself.”
“See what I mean?” Jazz’s voice held a sharp edge. “You won’t accept that everybody isn’t as hard-charging as you are. You’re the same way with Brooke.”
“What does Brooke have to do with this?” Matt asked.
“Quite a lot, actually.” Jazz bit her lip. “Not Brooke, specifically. Your family. You’re so close to them that dating you is like dating your family.”
Her change of subject took him aback. One minute she was claiming they should break up because of a personality conflict and now she was bringing his family into the equation.
“You like my family.” It was a fact, not an opinion. She’d even told him so on a number of occasions. “You had a great time at the fair with Brooke and Robbie.”
Jazz gazed off into the water. In the distance, a dolphin jumped, its sleek gray body appearing, then disappearing under the ripples. She didn’t seem to notice.
“When Brooke and I were watching the dancers at the fair, she asked if you and I were getting married.” Jazz spoke so softly he had to strain to hear her over the whistle of the sea breeze. “She got the idea from Terry.”
“So what? You know what Terry’s like. She never has a thought she keeps to herself.”
“So your family already thinks we’re serious,” Jazz said. “I don’t blame them. Things between us have been moving way too fast.”
“Then we’ll slow them down,” he said. “Yeah, maybe we have things to work on in our relationship but we can make it work. You haven’t given me one reason to believe otherwise.”
“How about this?” Something hard and determined flashed in her face. “You don’t know the real me, Matt. There’s something about me that’s so big I can never tell you.”
Now they were getting somewhere. Her other reasons hadn’t made sense but this one had the ring of truth.
“You can tell me anything,” Matt insisted.
“Not this. It’s something you’d never be able to forgive.”
“Try me,” he said.
She shook her head back and forth. “You’re not listening to me. I can’t tell you. Ever.”
He couldn’t buy that. He wouldn’t. “If this secret is the real reason you’re breaking up with me, you have to tell me,” he implored.
“Stop pushing me!” she cried. “Can’t you see it’s not only what you want that’s important?”
“Of course I can.”
“Then you have to accept that it’s over.”
Everything inside him rebelled at her words. He could tell she cared about him. He could see it in her eyes every time she looked at him, except she hadn’t met his eyes once since they’d arrived at the park.
“Look at me and tell me that’s what you really want,” he challenged. Until she did, he wouldn’t be convinced.
For a couple beats of his heart, she kept staring out at the water. Then she turned and met his eyes. Hers were clear and unblinking.
“I want us to be over, Matt.” She had a toughness about her he’d never seen before.
His impulse was to try to get her to change her mind, to tell her he loved her and nothing on earth would change that, not even the terrible secret she wouldn’t tell him. But now that she’d met his challenge, he couldn’t.
Matt needed to accept her at her word even though his heart felt like it was being trampled by an elephant.
It really was over.
THE REMNANT OF the old bridge was deserted except for the lone fisherman halfway across the broken span, his pole leaning against the railing, the fishing line dangling perhaps fifteen feet to the water below.
Sadie hadn’t seen another car since she’d gotten out of her little red Kia on Monday afternoon and started walking across the bridge. Even though she wasn’t even ten miles from work, Sadie wouldn’t have known this place existed if she hadn’t followed Carl’s pickup here.
She wouldn’t have pegged Carl as a fisherman, either, but then she knew very little about him.
He didn’t let on that he was aware of her approach but she’d seen his head turn at the slam of her car door. She pulled back her shoulders and thrust out her chest anyway, strutting like she was wearing spike heels and a little red dress instead of her waitress uniform and soft-soled shoes.
Her mama always said nobody could tell you were faking it if you were flaunting it.
“Hey, Carl,” she drawled when she was twenty feet away. Might as well pretend meeting on this John’s Island bridge wasn’t unusual. “Are the fish biting?”
His dark gaze flickered to her, then returned to the water. An egret flew overhead. She could smell salt water and the earthy scent of plough mud.
“I get here right before you,” he said. “You almost lose me back at Highway 17.”
She’d followed him on a whim as they were both leaving the parking lot after work. She hadn’t switched over to the left lane quickly enough when he’d turned onto a side road. But luckily, after she’d made a U-turn, the road had led straight to this old bridge.
The sun beat down on them, making it feel warmer than the seventy degrees she’d heard it was on the radio. Sadie needed her deodorant to do yeoman’s duty, but that was more because of her nerves than the temperature.
“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” Sadie raised her face to the sun.
Carl didn’t respond, which was the way things had gone at work, too. She’d make a comment about something that happened this past weekend and hear only silence. Usually either Jazz or Carl said at least a few words in response. Today Jazz had been preoccupied with something she didn’t want to talk about. And Carl, who wasn’t a chatterbox at the best of times, didn’t even smile and chuckle like he usually did when Sadie blathered on.
She had an awful feeling it was because she still hadn’t given him her decision about the Lady Gaga concert. She hadn’t even mentioned it since last Wednesday, and that was five days ago.
“How was the football game on Friday?” Sadie had been meaning to ask him that question all day. She’d know herself if she hadn’t phoned Carl to cancel at the eleventh hour. “Did your nephew get to play quarterback?”
“Faircrest win,” Carl said. “Arthur, he play whole game.”
“That’s fantastic!” Sadie said. Carl had to be pleased even though he didn’t sound like it. From everything she’d heard, Carl was like a second father to Arthur. “Isn’t that fantastic, Carl?”
“Yes,” Carl said in a voice devoid of emotion. “Is fantastic.”
Sadie couldn’t ignore his dismissive tone any longer.
“Are you mad at me about something, Carl?” she ventured.
He yanked back his fishing pole but she hadn’t seen anything tug at the line. After a moment, he rested the pole in its previous position against the railing. “Why I be mad?”
Enough, Sadie thought, was enough. She balanced her fists on her hips and closed the distance between them so they were almost touching.
“Why, I don’t know, Carl,” she huffed. “Maybe because you ignored me all day until I felt like I had to follow you all the way out here to this bridge in the middle of nowhere and now you won’t say two words to me.”
He continued gazing out at the water.
A car, at long last, passed on the road adjacent to the old bridge. It needed a new muffler and more horsepower. Carl probably couldn’t have made himself heard over the noise, but Sadie wasn’t in the mood to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Well? Say something!” she demanded.
Carl finally met her eyes. His were dark and unfathomable.
Sadie braced herself to be verbally slammed for wavering about the Lady Gaga concert.
“If you don’t want to go to football game, you say so,” Carl said. “You don’t make up story that Benjy is sick.”
“That’s what all this is about?” Sadie’s voice was loud enough it would have drowned out the bad muffler if the car wasn’t already gone. “You didn’t believe me when I said Benjy was sick?”
Carl nodded. “Sí.”
She thumped him once on the chest. “Benjy threw up twice on Friday. It turned out he’d eaten a whole bag of candy and about a gazillion potato chips but I didn’t know that at the time.”
“You really think he sick?” Carl still sounded doubtful, damn him.
“I really thought he was sick.” Sadie had to wait for her temper to cool. “So now can we go back to being friends again?”
“You and me,” Carl said, “we not friends.”
“Of course we’re friends! Why would you say something like that?”
“You and Jazz talk about why I went to prison,” he said. “But you say nothing to me.”
“Jazz told you that?”
“Jazz say I should explain to you,” he said. “Is explanation what you want?”
Sadie was never less sure of anything in her life. She nodded anyway. “Sure.”
“I go to bar,” Carl said. “I have drink. I get in fight. I kill a man.”
He returned his attention to the fish that weren’t biting. His chin was raised, and his profile looked strong and noble.
Had Carl killed a man in self-defense, as Jazz had claimed? Or had he gotten drunk and violent, as he’d just suggested? Sadie would have to make up her own mind because it was clear that was as much of an explanation as she was getting.
She needed some space and distance to sort out everything in her mind but she couldn’t leave yet. Carl hadn’t mentioned the concert but it lay between them, unseen but in the way. Sadie couldn’t keep him waiting on her answer any longer.
“About the concert invitation…” She paused, not sure what she was going to say. Jazz had advised her to take a chance.
Could she?
“There is no invitation,” Carl said. “I take it back.”
“You can’t take it back!”
“I just do.” If Carl had crossed his arms over his chest and thrust out his lower lip, he couldn’t have sounded any more stubborn. “I already buy tickets, so you can have them. You go with someone else.”
“But I don’t want to go with someone else.” The certainty that coursed through Sadie was so absolute, she couldn’t believe it had been so long in coming. “I want to go with you.”
“Too late,” Carl said.
“It most certainly is not too late.” Sadie grabbed him by the front of his shirt and turned him away from his fishing pole. Carl still smelled like the pancakes they served at work but Sadie happened to really like pancakes. “This thing between us, it’s just starting.”
His expression didn’t soften one bit. “What thing?”
“Carl Rodriguez, do I really have to explain it?” Sadie was getting that tingly feeling she’d started experiencing when she was around Carl. The difference was this time she wouldn’t fight it.
He nodded once.
She pulled down his head and claimed his mouth. As sensation flooded her and she melted into a kiss as rich as fine wine, she discovered kissing Carl was something she should have done a long time ago.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JAZZ PUMPED HER ARMS and lengthened her stride later that Monday afternoon, ignoring the stitch in her side and the ache in her legs.
She usually stopped running about a block before she reached the parking lot of her apartment building and walked the rest of the way home to cool down.
Not today. Today she considered blowing on by. Except the stitch was getting worse and her breathing was louder than the music at some rock concerts.
She reached the outer edge of the parking lot and slowed. Exercising until she collapsed wouldn’t serve any good purpose. She’d still have dumped the man she loved—and she’d still be an ex-con who had no right to be around her children, no matter how much she loved them, too.
A heaviness came over her limbs, weighing them down, making it feel as if she were moving through quicksand.
A woman passed by in her PT Cruiser, beeping the horn and waving from the car’s open window. It was Jazz’s next-door neighbor Gabriela de la Cruz, dressed in her nurse’s uniform, heading for work on the hospital pediatric floor. Jazz had finally introduced herself and learned her neighbor’s name and precisely what Gabriela did for a living.
“Jazz! Over here!”
The shout came not from Gabriela’s car, but from the apartment complex parking lot. Sadie was slipping through the parked cars, rushing toward Jazz. “I’m so lucky to have caught you.”
Jazz didn’t reciprocate the feeling. Initially she’d been eager to get to Pancake Palace after her emotional weekend, to take her mind off the breakup, but work this morning had been another sort of ordeal.
Sadie had kept chattering at Carl even though the other short-order cook had said nothing in return. Jazz nearly yelled at the waitress to open her eyes and see what she was doing to the poor guy.
“I was driving home when I got to the turn for your place.” Sadie talked as she approached the sidewalk. “Before I knew it, here I was.”
Jazz bent at the waist and braced her hands on her thighs above her knees while she tried to catch her breath from her hard run. Sadie didn’t seem to notice that Jazz hadn’t greeted her.
“I need to ask a favor.” Sadie had finally reached her. She sounded almost as winded as Jazz.
Jazz raised her head without changing her position. “Is this about Carl?”
“Why, yes,” Sadie said.
Jazz straightened, closing a few steps until she was directly in front of Sadie. “I held back last time when you asked for advice. This time I won’t. Stop jerking him around!”
“What? But I’m not!”
“Carl is a really good guy.” Jazz had to stop herself from shoving her forefinger into Sadie’s breastbone. “He needs a woman who doesn’t make him feel like a criminal.”
