Just Around the Corner

It was something he’d never had before.

And he found himself storing up things throughout the day. He’d have to tell Phyllis that, he’d find himself thinking. And she’d always seem genuinely interested to hear about it later, when he told her.

He also looked forward to sharing her day. It almost seemed as if another dimension had been added to his own life. She’d visited Tory each afternoon after school, and Matt really liked the way Phyllis’s face lit up when she talked about her friend and the perfect baby Tory had borne. They were calling the little girl Chrissie.

She’d told him about Sophie, too. Matt was surprised to hear about the girl’s love interest, able to shed no light whatsoever on the mystery man; he was mostly just relieved that Sophie was talking to Phyllis. And that she was going to do so again. The girl was in good hands. The best.

Thanks to Phyllis, he’d been able to relax around Sophie again as they’d worked together that week. She’d still hung around him a lot, but that didn’t worry him so much now that he knew she was leaning on someone else. As usual, he took extra care to praise her for a job well done—because she did do a great job—but also because he sensed how badly she needed to know that someone believed in her.

Saturday afternoon, shortly after lunch, Matt showed up at Phyllis’s door again. They were planning to take a look at the spare bedroom that weekend to see what they’d have to do to turn it into a nursery.

Phyllis was wearing leggings again—dark gray ones—and a cream-colored knit top that hung halfway down her thighs. She looked beautiful. Far too beautiful.

Matt had been alone for a long time. Why was he suddenly feeling such a strong need for female companionship—and sexual intimacy? Why now?

Considering all the hours he owed Phyllis until she had this baby, his libido couldn’t have awakened at a worse time. It wasn’t like he had any extra hours to run into Phoenix for a liaison or two.

“How’d it go?” he asked as he climbed the steps to her front porch where she stood waiting for him.

“She was right on time. We had a good talk,” Phyllis answered.

“Did you find out who this guy is that she’s seeing?”

“No. We really didn’t discuss him today, if you don’t count the number of times she slipped in a comment about him.”

“And the anorexia, did you talk about that?”

“Not really, although I dropped some thinly veiled hints that I thought something was wrong.”

They walked into her house. Matt went immediately to the kitchen to get the trash. And then to the laundry room to pick up the basket of clean and folded clothes, ready to go back to the bedroom. He’d carried out the full basket of dirty clothes the night before. And mowed the grass in her backyard the night before that. He’d have done the front, too, she was sure, except that it had desert landscaping.

“So what did you talk about?” he asked Phyllis, who was following him as he worked.

“Her stepfathers. I have a feeling one of them did something inappropriate with her.”

He turned, frozen. “Raped her?” He could barely get the words out.

Phyllis shook h

er head. “I don’t think it got that far, but he made her feel uncomfortable—and pretty bad about herself.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No, but most of the morning she talked about the third one. He really bothered her the most. She was thirteen when her mother was married to him, and that’s a very impressionable age for a girl. It could just be that he was jealous of Sophie. He wouldn’t let her mother spend much time with her.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder, feeling for the kid. He knew what it felt like not to matter. “You think that happened?”

“I know it did. And the worst of it, of course, was that her mother chose to give in to him rather than put Sophie first.”

He understood that, too. Hell, he and the kid had more in common than he’d known. Maybe subconsciously he’d sensed that. And maybe she’d sensed some kind of kindred spirit in him. Maybe that was why they had such a good student-teacher relationship.

Of course, it could also be simply that she was the most gifted student he’d ever had.

After looking at the spare bedroom, Matt decided to take the twin beds down. He was going to store the frames in her garage and the mattresses in an unused room in his house until she decided what she wanted to do with them.

“Any more bleeding?” he asked as he worked on the first bed frame with the wrench she’d provided.

“No.”