ÿþ<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>the romance of west texas never gave me good advice</TITLE> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=unicode"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2523" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY text=#003366 bgColor=#ccccff> <P><BR> <CENTER> <TABLE width="50%"> <TBODY> <TR> <TD><FONT face="arial, helvetica" size=4>the romance of west texas never gave me good advice</FONT> <FONT face="arial, helvetica" size=2> <P align=justify><STRONG>Author:</STRONG> Minervacat <BR><STRONG>Fandom:</STRONG> Friday Night Lights <BR><STRONG>Pairing:</STRONG> Eric/Tami <BR><STRONG>Rating:</STRONG> R <br><strong>Spoilers:</strong> Through 1x21, "Best Laid Plans" <BR><STRONG>Summary:</STRONG> <em>She'd never meant to marry a coach; she'd meant, growing up, specifically to not marry a coach.</em> 2000 words. <p align=justify> <P align=justify></P> <HR> <P align=justify>Tami knew the risks of marrying a coach when she married a coach -- she was Texas born and bred, and she knew what football meant. The mood of a town turns on a dime -- on a win, on a loss -- and when she married Eric, she knew that they'd spend more time moving than they would in one place, because sometimes you get run out of town, and sometimes you run before they can run you out. <P align=justify>She's always tried not to get attached to any one place, and it was never hard; when you were the football coach's wife, people were likely as not to hate you, depending on how the team was doing. It wasn't hard to leave a place when everyone in town had avoided your eyes when they saw you doing your grocery shopping. <P align=justify>It's all those things that go together with being a coach's wife -- doing things she doesn't want to do, moving places she'd never in her right mind want to live, being nice to people who talk about her hair and her clothes and her job behind her back -- but she sure hadn't planned on being a coach's wife when she was in college. Hadn't planned on marrying a washed up football player at all, except she met Eric and she fell in love and it was six months before she even knew he played football. <P align=justify>They were eating pizza three weeks before graduation, and Tami remembered hoping that Eric would -- ask her to marry him ... or move in with him. Or something. <em>Anything</em>. She didn't want to go home to her parents, and she didn't know what else she was going to do if she didn't have Eric, or a job. The pizza had pepperoni and green peppers on it, and Eric had cheese on his chin when he said, "There's a high school west of Lubbock that wants me to come coach their linebackers. Will you marry me?" <P align=justify>Tami said, "You play football?" And then, "Oh -- yes. Yes." <P align=justify>Eric kissed her over the table, and that was how they ended up in Levelland, Texas, a town so small that you could drive through it and not realize you'd missed the town, except they had a football field and you could see the glow of the lights on Friday nights for miles. <P align=justify>They stayed in Levelland for three years, long enough for Julie to be born, for Eric to get some experience, for Tami to realize that being a coach's wife wasn't as easy as it had seemed in a pizza place in College Station. <P align=justify>She wasn't sorry to leave Levelland for El Paso, where Eric took a job as the first assistant to the coach at one of the smaller high schools, and Julie started preschool, and she could go back to school and get her master's degree in counseling. She hadn't had a single friend in Levelland but she'd liked listening to the players who came over to sit in their tiny kitchen and talk haltingly about the stuff that was bothering them; the longer they were there, the more the word got around that the linebacker coach's wife listened pretty well. Tami told her mama that, sitting on the floor of the kitchen with the phone cord twisted around her finger, feeling sort of young and stupid and lonely, and her mama said, <em>Well, why don't you get a degree in that, darlin'? School counseling. Next place you're at that has a university. <P align=justify>I don't know, Mama</em>, she said, and in the bedroom Julie started to cry. Eric was still at practice, and she hadn't done the shopping. <P align=justify><em>You knew what you were getting when you married a coach</em>, her mama said. <P align=justify><em>Yes</em>, Tami said. <em>I've got to go, Mama, the baby's crying</em>. <P align=justify>El Paso was a big town, and she applied for a program to get her Master's without telling Eric. When she was accepted, she told him, and he picked her up and swung her around in the middle of their bigger-than-the-one-in-Levellend apartment. Julie sat on the floor and clapped her hands and laughed. That's what she remembers about El Paso -- not how Eric's team did, not cooking and studying, not Julie starting school -- Eric's arms around her in the kitchen, and the sound of Julie laughing. <P align=justify>She didn't leave anybody in Levelland, and she didn't leave anybody in El Paso -- Julie was still little then, and she cried for two days when they left El Paso and then she forgot about it, because the new house (in San Angelo, with a kitchen so big she couldn't touch two walls at once even if she stretched her arms as far as their would go) had a big backyard and there were two little girls who lived next door, just the same age as Julie. <P align=justify>San Angelo was the first place Eric took a team to state -- the first place he had a team all his own. It was the first place Eric came home from practice laughing, hopeful. He came home late from watching film, and dinner was cold on the table and Julie was asleep. The first days in San Angelo he kissed her all the time, wrapped his fingers in her hair and pressed his mouth against her neck, and they made love on the floor in the kitchen because they could. <P align=justify>San Angelo was the first place they had a knock down, drag out screaming fight, too -- she didn't have a job yet and Julie had the flu (whose kids got the flu in October? The coach's kid did, and the coach's wife was the one stuck at home wiping up vomit and pouring endless glasses of ginger ale while her kid cried for her father), and she called Eric and asked him to stop at the store and bring some fried chicken home, because she was too wiped out to cook. Except that he was late, and he forgot to stop at the store, and she was exhausted and Julie had cried all day. <P align=justify>Eric came home and she was sitting in the living room, exhausted from being Julie's mother and Eric's partner and the football coach's wife. She knew the minute she saw his face -- the minute he stepped through the door and saw <em>her</em> -- that he'd forgotten all about stopping to pick up dinner, and Tami had always kept her temper under control, because that was part of what her mama taught her about being a lady. <em>A good Texas woman hits so subtly that the man she's hit doesn't know he's been knocked out until he comes to</em>. <P align=justify>She can't remember what they fought about, now -- just remembers throwing a glass of iced tea at Eric's head and watching it shatter on the wall behind him, remembers grabbing her keys and her coat and saying, "I'll be back when I stop hating you so much." <P align=justify>San Angelo was big enough that it had more than three streets for her to drive circles on, but not so big that after an hour circling their neighborhood, she wasn't tired of seeing the same storefronts. Maybe if she was lucky, the next place they'd go would be a little bigger -- maybe if she was lucky, they'd stay right in San Angelo for the rest of their lives. <P align=justify>She didn't fool herself in thinking that she'd be that lucky. <P align=justify>When she got back, the lights were all off in the house and Eric was sitting on the couch in the dark, drinking a beer. "I'm sorry," he said. <P align=justify>"I'm sorry? That's all you've got? No excuses?" <P align=justify>"Would excuses make it up to you?" <P align=justify>"No," she said, and when she sat next to him on the couch in the dark, he put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned her head against his shoulder, because she hadn't meant to marry a football coach, but sometimes you can't help the people you fall in love with. <P align=justify>"I'm sorry," he said again. <P align=justify>"Promise me we won't move for a while," she said. <P align=justify>"I promise," he said, and sitting in the dark in the living room of their house in San Angelo, Eric said, "Someday, I'm going to find a place where we can stay." <P align=justify>For nine years she fooled herself into thinking that San Angelo was that place, but by the time Eric took the job in Dillon, Julie was old enough (14 years old, with scraped knees and braids, the apple of her daddy's eye) to know that football was the reason she had to leave her dance classes and her friends in San Angelo, but not quite old enough to resent the hell out of football for dictating the whole family's entire lives. And Tami was smart enough to know that one day they'd find a place where they could stay, could settle down, could build a dynasty, buy a house, grow old together. <P align=justify>Just not San Angelo. <P align=justify>Dillon was bigger than Levelland, smaller than El Paso, with a better program than San Angelo, and they'd been in town just four days before everyone knew she was the new coach's wife; she and Julie walked down the main street and Tami could hear the tide of whispers before and behind them, receding only when they actually passed people. She got lost six times the first month they were there before Eric said, "Honey, just look for the football field, and you'll always know where you are." <P align=justify>He was right, but it stung -- football was the center of their family, and that never changed, no matter where they lived. <P align=justify>Well -- the football fields were always the centers of the towns where they lived. Tami always supposed it made a strange kind of sense, that they were the centers of the lives of the Taylor family, too. <P align=justify>When Eric won his first game in Dillon, he came home and danced Tami around the kitchen while Julie sat at the table and laughed. When Julie fell asleep, he took Tami to bed, and a dozen years had passed since they sat in a pizza parlor and he asked her to marry him, but she still loved him, wanted him, needed him, just as much as she had that day. <P align=justify>She didn't know where her life was headed now any better than she'd known it the day Eric asked her to marry him, and she could track the places she'd been by Eric's win-loss record and the things that people had said about her on the street. <P align=justify>The streetlight filtered through their bedroom window, throwing shadows across Eric's face. "I trust you," she told him. "I think we're going to like it here." <P align=justify>He kissed her shoulder and hooked an arm around her waist. "I know it's not an easy life, babe," he said. "But I'd never have gotten this far without you." <P align=justify>Tami was a lot of things, but she'd never been shy. "You wouldn't have." <P align=justify>"I love you," Eric said. "A coach couldn't ask for a better wife." <P align=justify>"Promise me we'll stay a while," she said. <P align=justify>"'Til they run me out of town with pitchforks and torches," Eric said, and she hit him with a pillow and he laughed and laughed, and kissed her. <P align=justify>She'd never meant to marry a coach; she'd meant, growing up, specifically to not marry a coach. She'd never meant to live the nomad's life that a coach's family lives, because she'd never meant to do that to her kids -- the hypothetical ones she had in her head when she told Eric she'd marry him, or to Julie, heartbroken and furious that Eric had made the decision to take the job in Austin without asking either of them. <P align=justify>But she'd married a coach, and they'd had a beautiful, smart, headstrong daughter, and if they hadn't lived a dozen different places, they'd certainly lived enough. From day one, Tami's wanted them to find a place where they could stay. <P align=justify>She didn't mean to live a life where she gave directions in respect to a football field, but she had. <P align=justify>But more than that, she'd made a life with Eric, and she'd married a football coach, but all these years later, she still loved him, and football wasn't the most important thing. She hadn't married a coach -- she'd married Eric. <P align=justify>They'd always made it work, in small towns and in El Paso and in sickness and health and playoff games. They'd make it work this time. <P align=justify>They always did. <P align=justify><center>*</center> <P align=justify><small><strong>author's notes:</strong> the title is a bastardized line from an old 97s song; the first line of "west tx. teardrops" is <em>the road maps of west texas never gave me good advice</em>, but i like the way i hear it better. jay did beta duty.</small> </P> <P></P></FONT></TD></TD> <TR> <TD> <P> <P><FONT face="arial, helvetica" size=2><A href="mailto:%20minervacat@livejournal.com?subject=the romance of west texas">feedback always welcome</A>.</FONT> <P></P></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <CENTER><FONT face="arial, helvetica" size=2> <P> <P><A href="http://minervacat.stormwerks.net/otherfic/index.html">stray fandoms</A></CENTER></P></FONT></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></CENTER></BODY></HTML>