She smiles at me, but I can tell it takes some effort. “I’ll try.”
I tap a few notes into her file, and then turn back to face her. “So. You said your schedule this year is a little ambitious. Do you feel comfortable with it? I think there’s some wiggle room to move things around if you want.”
She shakes her head. “It’ll be a lot of work, but it’ll keep me busy, and that’s a good thing. I can do it.”
I take her hands and squeeze. “Great. I’m glad to hear you sound so confident in yourself!”
“I’m a work in progress?” She says this as if trying to sound hopeful.
I squeeze her hands again. “We all are, Jen—we all are.”
We arrange to meet again in a couple of weeks to check in, make sure her schedule is still working—and so I can evaluate her mental and emotional well-being. She leaves, and my next appointment comes in hard on Jen’s heels: Michael Prescott, a close friend of Rob Krasansky’s, another star football player—Michael is a young man in whom still waters run deep, and I always look forward to chatting with him.
My day is filled with meetings and appointments, one after another in such quick, nonstop succession that I barely have time to catch my breath let alone ruminate about my run-in with Jamie this morning.
And the next week is the same—I’m pretty much the only guidance counselor at the school: there are, technically, two others, but one, John Ward, is retiring at the end of this year after forty-five years at the school, and has pretty much checked out, and the other, Allison Howell, is the kind of guidance counselor who’s just in the wrong line of work…she doesn’t like kids and is angling for a job in the district office so she can get away from the day-to-day grind of having to talk to teenagers all day every day. Which leaves me to take the lion’s share of actual counseling work—resolving scheduling conflicts, listening to upset students, reading college entrance essays, advising athletes on academic probation toward being eligible to play again, and a million other odds and ends that fall between the cracks of the administrative staff.
Which means, for most of that week, I’m too busy to think about Jamie. I run Aiden to school, go to work, pick Aiden up, take him to football—he’s playing in a tackle youth league this year, and my poor mama’s heart has a hard time watching him spend all that time getting roughed up, but he loves it and is thriving—and then we swing by Grandma and Papa’s for dinner and then we go home and start it all again. Sometimes, in the small hours of the morning right before my alarm goes off, Jamie’s face flits through my mind. Sometimes, as I’m drifting off to sleep, I drown in a half-formed memory of his hands and mouth and body. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up aching and needy with his name on my lips.
And I tell myself it’s just loneliness and lust.
It will pass.
It has to pass, doesn’t it?
