The General Hospital Return That Would Restore a Key Family and Pry Open Ava’s Heart — and It Ain’t Nikolas, Either!
The General Hospital Return That Would Restore a Key Family and Pry Open Ava’s Heart — and It Ain’t Nikolas, Either!
It would take a brave man indeed to get involved with General Hospital femme fatale Ava Jerome. Two of her exes are serial killers, she “fatally” clobbered her last husband and is the prime suspect in her latest lover’s murder. Luckily, we just happened to know a certain brave man who’d be so wrong for her that their pairing would be entirely right.
An Overdue Homecoming
If ABC’s soap returned to the canvas Steve and Audrey Hardy’s son Tom, it would not only give the classic family a renewed presence in Port Charles, it could set up a delightful opposites-attract romance between the straight-laced doctor and the reformed mafiosa. Picture it…
Tom comes home for Bobbie’s funeral and, after the memorial, drowns his sorrows at the Metro Court… at a barstool next to Ava’s. “You look like you just lost your best friend,” she cracks.
“Everybody just lost their best friend,” he replies.
Knowing how beloved Bobbie was, Ava immediately guesses where he’s been. “Ah,” she says. “I’m sorry.” She then signals the bartender. “Next round’s on me.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” Tom tells her, “I’m not really in the mood for company.”
“I didn’t plan to drink it with you,” Ava fires back. “I was just being nice.”
When the bartender sets down a martini in front of Tom as well as in front of Ava, she has him give her both. “I thought you were buying me a drink,” Tom says.
“I was, when I was feeling nice,” she replies. “I’m not feeling nice anymore.”
Oil, Meet Water
Days later, Ava runs into Tom at General Hospital, where he’s been rehired, and apologizes. “You were being nice. I wasn’t.”
“Forget it,” she tells him. “Not a whole lotta people in this town are nice to me. I’m used to it.
“Hell, I probably deserve it.”
“Maybe you’ll give me a chance to try again,” he asks.
“A chance to what,” Ava replies, “miss out on a free drink?”
“No,” Tom says. “A chance to have a drink with you.”
In no time, Ava would correctly size up Tom as an altar boy, and she’s done with self-righteous goody two-shoes. He calls her on presuming that he’s interested in her romantically or sexually. “And you’re not?” she asks. “Looking at me the way you have all evening?”
“That doesn’t mean I’m interested,” he lies. “That just means I was deciding whether I was interested.”
“Let me save you the effort, Father Tom,” Ava says. “You’re not. I have what you’d call a questionable reputation.”
“Maybe I have questionable taste,” he replies.
“Even if you do, I’ll answer the question for you,” Ava says. “No. You keep looking, though. In this town, you won’t have any trouble finding ‘thous’ to be holier than.”
Game On
Needless to say, Tom, intrigued, wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about Ava. And the more he found out about her from his colleagues, the more he’d wonder why she’d so quickly cut him loose. Was she actually doing him a kindness? Did he bore her? Was he boring? He’d have to figure it out!
As if the push/pull of Ava and Tom’s budding relationship wouldn’t be tantalizing enough, the actor who scrubbed in as a doc would have to be a soap heavyweight, someone like Maura West’s former As the World Turns leading man Michael Park or Young & Restless alum Linden Ashby.
