The next few months were relatively quiet. Well, as relatively quiet as life could be with Raylan Givens hanging around. Jo only found herself embroiled in his personal turmoil, and not his professional.
"Have you ever been in love, Jo?" Raylan asked one night as they shared beers on Winona's patio. The woman herself had long since vacated the premises, leaving only a note in her wake. Raylan wasn't handling the abandonment well, to say the least. "Can't say I have," she admitted, pressing the bottle to her lips.
He gave her a disbelieving look out of the corner of his eye. "Not even the high school boyfriend? What was his name? Something that started with a J." She chuckled through her sip of beer. "Jimmy? No, not even the high school boyfriend. I was just wasting time with him."
Raylan merely scoffed in doubt and questioned her further. "What about college? Were there no serious boyfriends then?" Jo took a long swig before responding. "You really wanna know about my romantic endeavors? Are you prepared to hear all the salacious details?" She teased in return. He simply waved a limp hand in surrender.
"Alright, so you've never been in love. I wonder why that is?" Jo's joking mood instantly turned sour at the insinuation. "You know exactly why, Raylan," she insisted through another sip.
Readjusting in his patio chair, Raylan sat taller as he admitted, "I suppose you're right. We weren't really built for lasting relationships." Jo's mind began to turn. Is that what she was doing, building a lasting relationship? She and Tim had been messing around for more than a year now, but she still clung desperately to the illusion that it was all casual. She didn't want anything more, wasn't comfortable with anything more. So, she merely hummed in response to Raylan's observation.
"You know," Raylan began, leaning closer to her as if he was going to divulge some deep dark secret into the quiet night. "I love Winona. So, why can't we make it work?" Jo mulled over his predicament. Why couldn't they get their shit together and commit to happy, healthy relationships? Their upbringing was undoubtedly to blame, but how long could they cling to that excuse? Eventually, there had to come a point when personal responsibility trumped childhood trauma, right? She bought time with another long pull from her bottle. It was empty now, so she tossed it into the yard, before grabbing another. "You weren't willing to change for her. Relationships can't work if you're not willing to make adjustments," she surmised.
Raylan hummed while contemplating the answer. "I suppose you're right."
They got drunk that night, as people often do when they've got no proper coping mechanisms to deal with their feelings. The alcohol numbed the pain, muzzled the doubting voices, until there was only peaceful silence left in its aftermath. Jo passed out on the living room couch, while Raylan stumbled upstairs and into the bed he'd shared with the mother of his future child.
Jo had seemingly forgotten much of her drunken evening with Raylan. Their late-night confessions were lost to an inebriated haze in the far corners of her mind. Until, a certain Marshal unwittingly triggered her memory of such realizations.
She'd been working on some legal paperwork at her kitchen table, flicking her way through the casefile carefully. All the while, jotting down notes here and there that might serve pertinent to the impending lawsuit. Tim was cleaning his rifle at the coffee table, or, at least, he had been. Jo was too focused on her reading to notice him wandering off after reassembling the weapon.
Two shot glasses and a bottle of scotch being placed on the surface in front of her had Jo abandoning her assignment. "What's this?" She asked while Tim eased himself into the seat across from her. He took the file from between her hands and closed it, before gently setting it aside and out of the way. "Twenty questions," he grunted and set about filling each glass to the brim.
"Great," Jo muttered sarcastically, drawing out the word in exaggeration. Tim only ever wanted to play this particular game when he had something he wanted to ask her but wasn't able to do so without a little social lubrication. He chose to start with an easy one, "are you excited about bein' an aunt?" Once he'd finished his drink, and refilled the shot glass, she admitted, "can't say I've thought much about it. What with Winona being out of the picture and all." She didn't bother expanding on her answer any further.
"What's your favorite color?" Tim scoffed at her easy question. In turn, she chuckled at his annoyed reaction from behind her glass, before draining its contents. "Hey, this is your game. I'm just humoring you," Jo announced with a shrug of the shoulders.
He rolled his eyes at the statement, and apparent lack of enthusiasm from the woman seated across from him, but answered nonetheless. "Blue," came his short reply. Jo considered him while refilling her drink, and commented, "like the color of your eyes." She'd never given eye pigment much consideration before Tim, but, sometimes, when he wore that one blue bomber jacket, his proved very hard to ignore.
"I'm actually more of a navy man," he shot back in jest. Jo hummed in mock contemplation. "I would have thought you'd go for Army green," she smirked at his obvious irritation. If she was gonna be instant upon not taking this seriously, then he was gonna have to make her take it seriously. Tim needed her full attention before reaching the question he ultimately wanted to ask, but they needed more alcohol in their systems before that particular bomb dropped.
"Have you and Raylan even, you know?" His head dipped in insinuation as he awaited her inevitably adverse reaction. Jo's nose scrunched in disgust, like she'd smelled something foul, and her mouth hung open in shock at the implication. "Ew. No. He's my brother. What's wrong with you?" She disputed, her tone horror-stricken. "Not biologically," Tim challenged with a mischievous glint in his eye. Now he had her full attention.
It was now Jo's turn to scoff at his absurd behavior. "You're right, and Raylan is handsome in that rugged sort of way. Maybe I'll give it a shot now that he's single." Tim's mischievous glint dulled considerably at her defiant response. His blue eyes turned to slits while he glared at her from across the table. Tossing his shot back, Tim felt the amber liquid burn his throat as it passed. However, no alcohol could burn harsher than the thought of Jo with another man.
If he really wanted to play it that way, then two could tango, Jo figured. "Who's your FBI friend?" Her eyes flashed dangerously while the query was spoken. Shit, she really did know about everything, Tim realized. "Now, Jo. It's not what you think," he warned carefully, but his lie visibly missed its landing, a fact made apparent by the sharp rising of her eyebrows in disbelief. "I bet it's exactly what I think," she argued with crossed arms. For a moment, he was scared of incurring her wrath, but then another thought occurred to him. A thought that caused all fear to immediately dissipate. "Why, you jealous?" Tim snickered as a wide grin overtook his features.
"You wish," she countered, but the conviction didn't quite reach her voice, and Tim's smile spread further. "You are. You're jealous," he laughed again, reclining back in his seat, seeming all too pleased with himself. Jo was decidedly not chuckling along with him. The knowledge that there was an ex-girlfriend somewhere out there, whom he still conversed with, infuriated her to no end. You don't have any right to be irate, though, Jo reasoned with herself. That's not what this sort of thing was about. Casual hookups were constructed to allow freedom in one's personal ventures. She finished her drink in one gulp, refusing to catch his eye. This whole vulnerability thing was for the birds, she concluded.
Jo promptly poured another shot and threw it back, not bothering to follow the action with a corresponding question. This game was stupid, and she should have known better than to engage in it. Past mistakes were always best left unrepeated.
"Are we datin'?" Tim asked suddenly while they sat in strained silence. He gave no indication that a question had been uttered at all. Neither chancing a glance in her direction nor pausing in his rhythmic swirling of the drink in his glass. In fact, she wouldn't have been sure he'd said anything at all had it not been so deathly quiet in the house.
Her previous words of wisdom to Raylan slammed back to the forefront of her mind. The phrase 'relationships can't work if you're not willing to make adjustments,' mocked Jo through her subconscious. This was the moment she needed to make a decision in. Would she behave like a grown adult who could handle the prospect of vulnerability, or would she run away like the scared child she used to be? She settled for somewhere in between. "No, we're knitting a quilt," she'd challenged, pinning him down with an austere glance. A moment passed where they held eye contact, but neither uttered a word. Both willing the other to understand things that neither were brave enough to say out loud.
Tim deftly nodded and guzzled his drink, and Jo swiftly mirrored his actions. Nothing more was spoken of the matter, though something in the atmosphere shifted between the two.
It's a thing to behold, the efforts of two people so severely emotionally crippled, trying to make something substantial without a roadmap to show them how.
"What do you want, Raylan?" Jo called as she approached his Marshal's desk. His mouth took on a roguish smirk as she approached him, and the observation made her weary. Nothing good could come of Raylan Givens looking so self-satisfied. Leaning back in the office chair, he twiddled a pen absentmindedly between his fingers while he appraised her. Yeah, nothing good could come of this at all.
"You'll never guess who I ran into just the other day," he drawled in barely contained glee. Jo crossed her arms, steeling herself for whatever surprise was sure to follow. Raylan retrieved a file from his desk and tossed the manila folder at her. Catching it with ease, she hesitantly opened and began viewing its contents. What lay inside had her eyes rolling. "Oh goddammit," she muttered under her breath while Raylan began chuckling.
"Recognize a familiar face?" He shamelessly mocked her obvious discomfort. Jo could see from her peripheral, Tim eavesdropping in on their conversation from the next desk over. She snapped the folder shut and threw it back at Raylan. "Shut up," she groaned, spinning on her heels with every intention of stalking away from him.
"No. Now wait a minute, Jo," Raylan said, rising from his seat. "I just thought you'd like to know what your old high school boyfriend has been up to." His tone may have held a false innocence, however, he was anything but innocent. Her eyes were slits as she glared at him. "You're a real shit starter, Raylan," she seethed from behind clenched teeth before stomping out of the Marshal's office.
Did she really care how Jimmy Tolan was wasting away his life in Harlan County? No, but Raylan's little spectacle had been in front of the wrong audience, and Jo would have to pay for that later.
Later came pretty quickly, precisely around the time Tim slid into the elevator just before the doors slammed shut. Somewhere between the first and second floors, he leaned over and pressed the red stop button. The elevator jolted to a halt while he turned towards her. Jo remained facing forward out of stubbornness.
"What's this I hear about an old boyfriend?" He asked as though he hadn't been seated four feet away while the whole ordeal played out. Jo tilted her head to evaluate him. "Why, Gutterson? You jealous?" His hands were on her hips in an instant, pressing until her back hit the elevator wall. The unexpected contact made her gasp, and her spine arched instinctively, bringing their chests together.
"I got any reason to be?" He challenged, pressing his weight into her for emphasis. The air in the elevator was suddenly stifling, but Jo tried to appear unaffected by their close proximity. "Yes," she answered antagonistically. "I was planning on running away with one of Boyd Crowder's crew. I'm so sorry you had to find out this way."
Tim's hands slowly crept beneath the bottom of her shirt, palming the soft skin underneath. "I guess we'll have to fix that, now won't we?" He whispered huskily in her ear. The elevator didn't move again for quite some time.
