Page 85 of 7 Days and 7 Nights

Letting himself into his room with the key card, Matt dropped his bag on the bed. He’d made good time, first on 75, then jogging west on 24 around Chattanooga, and under other circumstances, he would have driven straight through, but now that he’d put Atlanta behind him he was strangely reluctant to reach his destination. Maybe he’d take a couple of extra days before he faced his past, not, he hastily assured himself, that that was the reason for this trip.

While driving, he’d purposely left his cell phone in his bag in the trunk so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it, but he pulled it out now to call an old friend who lived in the area. His next call would be to his sister to let her know when to expect him.

All he was looking for was a little R and R, a little time to regroup and get his head back on straight. There was no reason at all why he couldn’t hang with friends and enjoy himself a little.

As far as Matt was concerned, there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with Never Land as long as you still knew how to fly.

???

JoBeth handled the overflow lunch crowd on autopilot. She waited on customers and cleared tables, smiling and nodding her head at what felt like the right moments. It was a damn good thing her mouth and body could work independently of her brain because her brain was full of the question Dr. O had raised the day before. And her gut was too busy churning to provide her with an answer.

She wanted to fall in love with Kevin Middleton. She already loved his mountain house and the lifestyle he offered, but every time she tried to examine her feelings for him, her brain shut down and her stomach hurt.

At three o’clock she untied her apron and clocked out. All the way home she told herself she was finished with Dawg, that Kevin deserved a chance. That there didn’t have to be wild heart-throbbing love for a relationship to work. But the thought of never feeling that again filled her with such sadness she wanted to cry.

By the time she got home and parked in the drive, she had calmed down enough to think rationally. She was too old to worry about true love and old enough to appreciate the importance of compromise. Two people who shared the same vision could build a life together, she told herself. She could live without excitement and passionate lovemaking if she got children and security and respect in return. And she knew she could make Kevin Middleton happy.

But not to hold Dawg in her arms again? Never to feel him settle inside her and rock her world to pieces? Could she really live without that?

JoBeth spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning house. She chased nonexistent dust bunnies out of corners, wiped baseboards that already gleamed with fresh paint, and took a toothbrush to the newly installed tile in the guest bathroom. While she worked, her head and her heart battled, her brain arguing the logic of a life with Kevin Middleton, her heart clinging stubbornly to its memories of Dawg Rollins.

By six o’clock her tiny house sparkled. Spent, JoBeth poured herself a tall glass of sweet tea and carried it out to the porch, where she sat and rocked for a time, studying the bright yellow daffodils that bordered the walkway and testing her resolve.

She would go for moderately-happy-ever-after with Kevin Middleton. She would settle for less than a love match in exchange for the family she wanted to build, and she would make it work. But not before she had one last night with Dawg.

???

There was nothing like rejection to put a woman in touch with her insecurities. As Olivia rediscovered in the aftermath of her confession, neither education, occupation, nor social position could prevent a woman from falling into the pit of self-doubt. Nor could they predict how long it would take her to claw her way back out.

Despite her training and the years spent counseling others, Olivia Moore, Ph.D., handled Matt’s rejection in much the same way early cavewoman must have handled hers when her Neanderthal man used his club to drag another woman back to the cave. That is to say, she handled it badly.

For two point five days Olivia didLiv Live—which used to last only three hours and now seemed to go on forever—and then she went home and engaged in pathetically cliched behavior. Like countless women before her, she donned her fuzziest bathrobe so that she could sit on her couch and eat large quantities of Ben & Jerry’s straight from the carton, which was immediately followed by more chocolate than the law allowed. At night, suffering from insomnia and her self-induced sugar high, she paced the rooms of her home until she could have called out their dimensions in her sleep—if only she could have gotten some.

For two point five days she wallowed and paced. And paced and wallowed. Not even James’s betrayal and the resulting divorce had shaken her so completely.

And then on Friday afternoon, when it was finally possible to leave town without looking like she was running away, she took a flight to Tampa and picked up a rental car for the drive over the Howard Frankland Bridge to St. Petersburg. With her hair whipping around her face and the salt-tinged air filling her lungs, she followed the familiar scent to the Gulf of Mexico where a small beach road took her toward the southernmost tip of Pass-A-Grille.

New multimillion-dollar homes dotted the sandy white beach, but there were still plenty of small funky beach cottages lazing under the swaying palms. It was in front of one of these, on the corner of a tiny street that stretched from the beach to the bay side, that Olivia parked.

The house was hers, bought with her first radio money, and held on to with steely determination through the chaos of her divorce. It had a faded picket fence, a crabgrass-and-sand lawn, a sagging front porch, and gulls wheeling in the blue sky. Less than a block away, the waves kissed up to the shore.

Olivia breathed in the damp salt air and felt her heart lighten a notch. She and James had lived in a well-manicured north Tampa suburb, but this had always been her preferred retreat. It was a place for getting heart and head in line, and its magic had never failed her.

Pulling her bag and a sack of groceries from the car, Olivia held the screen door out of the way and fit her key into the ancient lock. Minutes later every window in the house had been thrown open to the late afternoon breeze, and she and her glass of wine were outside beside a sand dune, waiting for the sun to sink into the sea.

On Saturday and Sunday she woke with the sun and crossed to the beach to begin her trek toward the northernmost tip of St. Pete Beach, where she sat at a concession stand with an egg sandwich and orange juice and people-watched until she was ready to head back down the beach again. She walked countless miles under blue skies stuffed with cotton-ball clouds, and the slap of hard-packed sand against the soles of her feet soothed her in a way indoor pacing never had.

In the afternoon she slathered on sunscreen and stretched out on a blanket to read. Or gave herself up to the enjoyment of the ever-changing light that danced across the swells, reassured to see that fiddler crabs still scurried across the wet sand, and seagulls still knew how to cage food from the less savvy tourists. All the while her mind whirled with the jumble of thoughts and feelings that had brought her here.

By Sunday evening her hurt and humiliation had been tempered by a new sense of calm. She’d been honest and ultimately true to herself and her feelings, just as she counseled her listeners to be. Matt Ransom was either uninterested or unable to do the same.

She had only one course of action open to her: to pick up the pieces and go on. She’d survived Matt Ransom eight years ago with far fewer tools and resources at her disposal than she had now. She could survive him again. She had a life and a career to pour her energies into, and if the ache in her heart hurt even more than the egg on her face, she’d make sure no one else ever knew it.

Early Monday morning as she flew back to Atlanta, the concept of survival was still very much on her mind. Women survived heartache and disappointment all the time along with daily demands that most men could never fathom. An idea mushroomed as she worked her way out of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and into the flow of rush-hour traffic.

She called Diane from the car to pull some music and give her a heads-up while she contemplated what she wanted to do on the air. She’d try not to bash too hard, but she intended to have her say. This morning’s show would be dedicated to all the women out there who knew how to survive... and the men who couldn’t seem to keep up with them.

Chapter Thirty

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