A/N: This is an edited re-post of a story I removed from the archives over two years ago to scavenge it for parts for an original novel I was writing. I never ended up finishing that novel, and I decided to leave it in a drawer. So I'm reposting the fanfic. There will be some tweaks as I re-post it, but likely no lengthy additions. If you missed it the first time around, please read and comment! (Or, even if you want to read it again...) Your feedback is much appreciated!

I know I write a LOT of Eric and Tami backstories, but I have fun exploring different possibilities of how they got together and what their parents might have been like. We are given so few hints in the show. Tami's a lot different in this story than in some of my other backstories, but I know she told Julie she was a "wild child," so I am exploring that possibility here.

[*]

Mo McArnold's 1985 Chevy Camaro was in the shop. That was a shame, because his father had just bought it six months ago for his sixteenth birthday. But Mo had been out doing a bit of joy riding with Tami on Saturday night, and while he was kissing her rather than watching the road, he'd lost control and hit a guardrail. Thankfully no one had been hurt, other than Mo's baby, the car, but that meant Tami needed a way home from school until it was repaired. God knew she wasn't taking the bus. Mo lived a half mile from the school and could walk, but she was eight miles out, more in the country than in the town.

"Don't worry, baby doll. I'll get my second string to give you a ride," Mo said.

"Your what?" Tami asked.

"Taylor. QB2." Mo, though only a junior, was the starting quarterback of the high school football team, and he'd owned the field all season, leaving Eric Taylor to hover on the sidelines and occasionally venture to suggest plays to one of the assistant coaches, the only one who didn't tell him to shut up and sit down.

"That guy who never drinks at the football parties and always leaves thirty minutes into them?" Tami asked. Taylor was always rushing off to his night shift at the gas station.

"Yeah. Nicole's boyfriend."

From what Tami had heard, perky, pretty, conventional Nicole Thomas had been dating that Taylor kid ever since eighth grade. Seemed like a match made in heaven, given how boring he must be. "Fine, if that's my only way home."

"Well, he's got his own pick-up. Sort of. I just hope you survive the ride home." When Tami shot up her eyebrow, Mo explained, "Piece of shit, but Taylor's damn proud of it. He scrimped and saved for the thing. He's had that paper route since he was twelve and he must mow five lawns a week on top of the gas station gig." Mo smirked. "I don't know how he also finds the time to keep that bench warm with his ass."

[*]

When Tami climbed into Eric's black, rusty, beat up Ford pick-up, settling down on the far right side of the passenger seat against the window to avoid having to sit on the duct tape that covered a large tear in the fabric, she lit up a cigarette. He asked her please not to smoke in his truck. She cranked down the window, let in the chilly early November air, and flicked the cigarette out testily. "Sure," she said, "I wouldn't want to mar its pristine beauty."

Eric didn't respond to her sarcasm. Instead he reached out and adjusted the rearview mirror, which looked like it was hanging on by a thread.

She glanced at him and counted three pimples on his baby-smooth face. He didn't have that dark scruff that made Mo look like a half-man, and his lips were pressed tight. She hadn't run into Eric Taylor often, but she wondered if he ever smiled. If he did, she hadn't seen it. He turned and glanced at her, his lips twitching from a straight line to a near frown, as if he was biting down on his back teeth. She'd never been this close to him, face to face like this, and she was a little startled by the unusual shade of his eyes, all those varied flecks of color swimming in a hazel sea. Tami looked out the window.

When they got to her house, Eric didn't do what Mo usually did. The first thing Mo always did was to french kiss her, and of course Eric wasn't going to do that, but the second thing Mo always did was to peel off as soon as she slammed the door of his Camaro. Instead, Eric just idled there, waiting to see if she got in her house safely. Tami hadn't realized that was what he was doing at the time. She assumed he was probably just checking out her ass.

She rifled in her book bag and cursed. Where the fuck were her keys? She dropped the gray bag on the cement stoop that was cracked in four places and blackened all over in little circles by the snakes Shelley had lit off there last fourth of July. Tami's mom had bought her a pink book bag for her birthday, which she'd promptly deposited at the same thrift store where Mom had bought it, and then picked up this gray one.

That was Mom for you. Practical, recycled gifts only. And fucking pink? Seriously? Tami wasn't a little girl. She was seventeen, but her Mom wanted to pretend Tami wasn't a woman, that she was still innocent. So between lectures about the evils of boys and adding new rules to the "family rule list" (Mom liked to pretend they were still a real "family" too), she threw pink things at Tami. Not that Mom had time to make sure Tami used them. Mom was always at work, at one of her two jobs, either at the morning shift or the evening shift, or on some days both, and then there was the every-other weekend shift. What else could Mrs. Hayes (she still called herself "Mrs.") do with no husband, no high school degree, and two daughters?

"Shit!" Tami muttered, zipping the backpack up with a violent jerk. Shelley had a key also. She'd be home from the junior high in a half hour. Tami wouldn't have to wait long. She bent down again and pulled her pack of cigarettes from the backpack, and that was when she heard Eric Taylor's pick-up crank off, the hard sputtering of the engine grow suddenly silent, and the front door creak open.

Eric Taylor's footsteps crunched over the gravel that passed for a driveway at the Hayes house. Tami slapped her pack of cigarettes against her palm and turned slowly to look at him, her eyes lifted to the gray-blue fall sky. "What do you want?" she asked.

"Did you lose your key?" he asked.

"Yeah, Einstien, I lost my key. My sister will be home soon." The junior high got out twenty-five minutes later than the high school.

She slid the cigarette between her lips, and dug in her jeans pocket for the lighter Mo had given her. He'd had it engraved with a little heart. Romantic, that guy. She shouldn't be sarcastic about it. He was more romantic than any boyfriend she'd had previously. Not that she'd ever had a boyfriend for more than three weeks before. Still, she'd been hoping for flowers instead of a lighter. Not pink flowers. But flowers. She couldn't find the lighter. She'd lost that too. Fucking fantastic.

Uninvited, Eric Taylor sat on the stoop, next to her respectably gray backpack. Tami knew Eric was about as tall as her boyfriend, but she didn't realize quite how tall he was until he stretched his legs out over and down the three stairs and his heels rested on the barren patch of earth at the bottom. He must have had an inch even on Mo. Last year, Mo nicknamed Eric "Lanky," but he wasn't anymore. Sometime, somehow, he'd gotten muscles. Maybe it was all those lawns he mowed over the summer. Maybe he carried the lawnmowers on his shoulders from house to house. Still, he wasn't exactly lean now, not really, not like Mo. He'd gone from lanky to stocky in one summer.

"What are you doing?" Tami asked.

"I'll wait with you. Make sure you get in. If not, I can drive you to the library or wherever until your parents get home."

She snorted. "The library? Is that where you like to hang out in your free time?"

"I don't have free time. Or Mo's. I can take you to Mo's."

"I don't need you to wait with me," she insisted.

"I'd like to make sure you get in."

Tami shrugged and sat down on the stoop, the gray backpack between them, like a dividing line. "Got a light?" she asked.

"I don't smoke," he said. "It's not good for my game."

She laughed. "What game? Do you carve tic tac toe on the bench when you're sitting there?" Not that he actually sat on the bench. He was always standing and hovering on the sidelines, bugging the coaches. Mo said he had a thousand ideas for plays. Tami had seen Eric once, in the cafeteria, ferociously sketching play diagrams on napkins while his girlfriend Nicole prattled on cheerfully across from him about her day. Eric had nodded occasionally in her direction. It would suck to have a boyfriend like that, who didn't look at you when you talked to him. Mo looked at her. Winked at her. Licked his lips in her direction. Okay she hated that last one. And the winking. That was getting annoying too. But at least he looked at her.

But Tami wasn't Nicole. She wouldn't put up with that crap, and cheerfully prattle on like that. If her boyfriend dared to sketch in front of her when she was talking, she'd grab those napkins and shove them down her shirt. She knew how to get a guy's attention. Boys were all the same in the end, when it came to that.

"I did get some time on the field this season," he said tensely. "And Coach Mackey used one of the plays I suggested in the last game. That's how Mo got that surprise touchdown."

"Mo got that touchdown because Mo's Golden Mo." She half laughed when he said it. Mo had given himself his own nickname, and eventually the rest of the team had followed his lead. Maybe not Eric Taylor. She'd never heard Eric call him "Golden Mo," but then, it wasn't as if she hung around Eric that much either. Tami shifted on the stoop and felt a discomfort and realized she'd put the lighter in her back pocket. She fished it out and lit her cigarette.

Eric stared silently at his feet for a while. He was wearing knock-off Reeboks. Who did he think he was fooling? Just admit you're poor. Tami never had a problem admitting that.

She was picking a bit of tobacco off her tongue when he startled her with an attempt at polite conversation. "How'd you like the game last Friday?"

She knew Eric Taylor loved football and not just because he played it. She had overheard him gushing some stupid thing to Mo about how it was so much more than just a game, that it was a way to test your limits, a way to build character.

"I don't give a damn about football," she said deliberately. "It's a stupid game." Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him grow tense again. She liked making him tense, though she didn't quite know why. Maybe it was because he stood for everything she was determined not to be: clean-cut, studious, focused, dependable, boring. Or maybe she just wanted him off her stoop, and saying she didn't need him there hadn't worked.

"Then why do you go to all the games?" he asked. "Why do you date football players?"

"I can answer both questions at the same time – their asses look nice in those uniforms."

Now she'd made him really uncomfortable. His valedictorian-to-be, glee-club girlfriend never swore at all. Nicole Thomas was the sweet, cute girl, the one everyone knew would be voted "best to take home to parents" next year. Tami had also heard that Eric never cussed in front of girls, whatever he might say among his football buddies.

Well, if she was going to have to sit here and wait with him, at least she could amuse herself. She was going to get Eric Taylor to cuss in front of a girl. "Just a stupid game," she repeated. "Silly boys running around with a pigskin, giving all their energy to some stupid game most of them are going to be too broken down and out of shape to play ten years from now, wrapping their whole lives up around it, so they've got nothing left to define them when they grow up, except half of them probably aren't going to grow up, they're going to become boosters or coaches and stay little boys forever, always thinking some dumb game is important." She took a long drag on her cigarette and then blew the smoke right in his face.

"Why do you act like such a bitch?"

She shoots. She scores. Eric Taylor. Cussing in front of a girl.