I had never told her our relationship was over. I’d never warned her I wouldn’t call again. I’d simply stopped. I owed her an apology and an explanation, and I wanted her to hear it.
“My son needs to come first,” I explained.
She walked around her desk and turned to face me, her back and shoulders straight. “Of course he does,” she agreed. “Christian is what’s most important, and we were wrong. You made the right choice.”
I narrowed my eyes on her. Why was she acting like that? Where was the sharp tongue? The temper?
At least yell at me when you tell me you don’t care.
“Are you attending the Greystone Ball on Halloween?” I inquired.
She shook her head. “No. Why would I?”
“Your brother is interning with their firm, right? I thought he’d be taking you.”
“How did you know about the internship?” She squinted her eyes at me.
But I ignored the question. I wouldn’t tell that I’d made the call after the luncheon to get him that position.
She waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, she sighed. “I’m not going.”
I watched her, wanting her to know so many things. That I thought about her every day, nearly all day. There was hardly a minute when she didn’t cross my mind.
That I couldn’t smell her in my bedroom anymore, and that I wanted to touch her.
If nothing else, I needed her to know how much she had mattered to me and still did.
Stepping up behind her desk, I hovered over her, seeing her breathing turn shallow. “Being a man is making hard choices and living with them,” I told her, “no matter how much it hurts.”
And then I reached out and ran my thumb across her cheek. “I miss you,” I whispered.
Her cold expression slowly started to crack, and her face turned sad.
Looking up at me, she shook her head. “You’re wrong,” she argued. “Being a man is having the wisdom – and the courage – to make the right choices.”
And then she took my hand off her face and evened out her expression.
“And you have,” she told me. “You’re a good father, Mr. Marek.”
So cold.
Her heart is a machine.
She turned away, but I reached out and pulled her in to my body, hearing her breath shake.
“Say you miss me,” I begged, whispering in her ear. “If you say that, then I can leave you alone. I can stop risking my relationship with my son, who is standing right downstairs, and my campaign, knowing that it wasn’t just sex.”
As I spoke, I held her cheek with my hand, turning her lips to meet mine. “Say you miss me,” I whispered against her mouth. “And that you won’t forget me. Ask me if I think about you and miss you every day.”
She softened and let her lips fall to mine, kissing me gently, and then looked at me with pity in her eyes.
“Oh, Tyler,” she lamented, speaking quietly. “I don’t ask questions I don’t want the answers to.”
And then she pulled out of my arms and calmly walked from the room, away from me.
TWENTY-FOUR
EASTON
I finished writing out Twitter handles for the students to follow for homework and capped my dry-erase marker, turning around and calling to the students, “Flip.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Marcus shouted, keeping his head down and holding up his left hand while he continued writing with his right.
The rest of the students flipped their papers over, protecting their work from wandering eyes, and then Marcus sat back, putting his pencil down and finally turning his paper over as well.
“Stand,” I instructed.
The students stood up, some rubbing their eyes and others yawning.
“Stretch.” I locked my hands above my head and pushed up on my tiptoes, leading by example.
The rest of the class did their own stretches, getting their blood moving after sitting with their constructed response questions. I made them stand every fifteen minutes to keep them alert.
“Jump,” I commanded, and we all started hopping or jogging in place.
I stopped, strolling up the aisle. “Now sit.”
They took their seats, the desks shifting under their weight.
“Attack,” I finished, issuing the last instruction and hearing their snickers and snorts as they continued with their tests.
“You have ten minutes left,” I warned them, and locked my hands behind my back, strolling up and down the aisles.
They’d had a selection of ten different constructed response questions and had to pick three to answer. Judging from the amount of writing going on, I was going to have a very long weekend of reading.
Normally, we completed a lot of assignments online or with a Word document, which they e-mailed to me when they were done. With tests, though, I liked to keep it old-school. There was too much at stake to run the risk of losing a document in cyberspace.
Christian held his paper up, pencil in hand, and appeared to be rereading his work. This was the last class I would have with him, since he’d been transferred into AP History starting next week.
Principal Shaw told me he had e-mailed his father to let him know, but I hadn’t heard anything from Tyler.
Christian’s mother was thrilled, and Christian himself seemed to just roll with it. He’d gotten the assurance from me and Principal Shaw that if he didn’t like it, he could come back to my class.
Part of me hoped he’d hate it. I wanted him back.
It didn’t escape me that with Christian out of my class, seeing his father wouldn’t be as much of a problem publicly – but that was never really our problem. Not really.