“Yep.”
“I’m meeting the other woman. Or am I the other woman?”
Jethro lifted an eyebrow at me. “Neither of you are the other woman. There’s no reason to be uncomfortable.”
“I’m not uncomfortable. I’m just feeling weird, and I don’t know how to un-weird myself.”
“Well, don’t un-weird yourself on my account. I like you weird. And Claire will, too.”
We drove in silence, me with my thoughts, Jethro with his, until I blurted, “I just don’t understand how you have dinner with a woman once a week, every week, who isn’t a relative, and not try to make a move.” I didn’t add especially this woman.
Last Tuesday Jess, Duane’s girlfriend, had shown me a picture of Claire. I’d mentioned to Jess that Jethro and I were going over to Claire’s house for dinner and Jess pulled out her phone to show me a picture. Apparently they were really good friends and taught together at the local high school.
I momentarily forgot how to blink because this Claire woman was gorgeous.
No. That’s not right.
She was fuckingly gorgeous. She was so gorgeous, her beauty deserved the f-bomb used as an adverb.
How could Jethro spend time with her every week, week after week, and not succumb to her? Cletus told me she was tough and smart. Duane told me she was sweet and kind. Beau told me she was a great cook and had “real pretty eyes.” Roscoe told me she was his favorite teacher in high school, and he’d paired that statement with an eyebrow wag.
Side note: Roscoe was too freaking adorable for his own good. End side note.
Billy, however, had remained stonily silent on the matter of Claire. I was growing accustomed to Billy’s stony silence.
So why hadn’t Jethro made a move?
I was already a little in love with her, and I hadn’t even met her yet.
“Not every week. Sometimes I have to travel for work. On those Sundays, my momma would invite Claire over for dinner. But, as far as I know, she never . . .” Jethro’s easy expression morphed into a thoughtful frown, his eyes growing unfocused, like he’d just realized something of importance.
“She never what?”
He shook himself. “Sorry. She never accepted the invitation. She hasn’t been to our house since she was a teenager.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Why haven’t you made a move on Claire? According to your family and Jess, she’s an ethereal goddess of perfection.”
Jethro rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, I know Claire better than they do. She’s human enough, got scars and flaws like everybody else. Plus, I don’t think about her that way. We’ve known each other since we were kids. She’s like a sister to me. Objectively, I can see that Ashley is beautiful on the outside, but when I look at her, I see her heart and her warts in equal measure. It’s the same with Claire.”
“Okay, that makes sense. But just so you know, I have no warts. I am an ethereal goddess of perfection.”
Jethro grinned, pulling onto a long dirt driveway leading to a small white farmhouse with a red door and navy trim. “I never doubted it.”
His eyes conducted a quick, appreciative sweep of my body before he closed them briefly and exhaled, like he was trying to control himself.
Meanwhile, my stomach was a bundle of nerves.
Despite what he said, with his sister just recently returned after an eight-year absence and the passing of his mother, Claire was the woman in his life. She was important to him. They may never have been romantically involved, but what she thought mattered. Also, she was single. Jethro told me she was an only child and had no family to speak of. She had no other person in her life to make dinner for on Sundays.
I felt like a usurper.
I also felt a little irritated with her for making me feel like a usurper even though she’d done nothing but exist.
How’s that for mental health?
Claire’s house had flowers in boxes under the windows and along the porch. Gorgeous, neatly trimmed topiaries sat on either side of the porch steps and the door. The house looked like something out of a magazine.
“Wow,” I said, scanning the front yard. “This is a really pretty house.”
Jethro grinned like he was proud. “It is, right? I added the porch two years ago. The boxes were Claire’s idea last spring. I painted them to match the trim.”
I gaped at Jethro. “You built her porch?”
He nodded, completely clueless as to how that news sounded to me. “I did. And the gazebo and deck out back. I’ve done a little work around the house, from time to time.”
A little work. You know, like building porches, decks, and gazebos.
Maybe this news wouldn’t have struck me so acutely if Jethro and I had been together longer, or if we’d been physically intimate since the Daisy Doughnut incident last Monday. But we hadn’t. This thing between us was new and tentative and just a week old.