The Kissing Coach (9 page)

He was looking down at the sidewalk, seemingly embarrassed.

“I don't know much about you,” he said. “You're always asking the questions, and our sessions are all about me, me, me.” He looked up again and caught me in his gaze. As usual, he made me feel at home and far away at the same time.

I asked, “Are you out Shopping?”

“Going for lunch,” he said. “All alone. Perhaps you'd like to come to the same restaurant and we can wave to each other from our respective tables.”

“Or I could sit with you.”

“The restaurant would appreciate us getting only one table dirty.”

“Then it's settled,” I said. “Let's get a table dirty.”

We started walking, and he stopped at the end of the block, at an Indian restaurant.

“What do you think?” he asked.

They had a menu posted outside the door, with some appealing-sounding lunch specials, so we went in.

If memory served, the restaurant had served donair a few years earlier, but it had been transformed into a much more sensual space, with colorful fabric—either scarves or saris—draped from the ceiling rafters.

Once we were seated, he said, “Go ahead, you can ask.”

I smirked. “I won't, because some people find it rude.”

“I'm one-quarter Indian,” he said.

“Really.” I sipped my ice water. “I'm mostly German, some French. I always wished my background was more intriguing.”

“I just realized something,” Devin said, looking serious.

I expected a joke, like that he'd just noticed I was white, but he said, “This is a date. I've never asked a girl on a date before, and I just did. I am making astounding progress.”

Images and memories of us making out on my couch came flooding back, along with the feelings. My body was hot and heavy, my mind fuzzy. We'd been kissing, lips embracing, hands touching, and I'd reached for him through his jeans, massaged his sexy hardness while bursting at the seams with my need for him …

“Astounding progress,” he repeated.

I opened my menu to have something to look at besides his beautiful eyes. The menu was in English, but in my agitated state, the words swam as black dots on a sea of oh-shit-I-totally-grabbed-his-dick-when-we-were-kissing-and-now-I-will-die-of-shame.

I tried to focus on the words, looking for butter chicken, but my brain yelled
dick, dick, dick
!

“The lamb is my favorite,” he said.

I shut my menu. “That's what I'll have.”

The waitress came back to take our order. She was a pretty girl with dark hair and thick eyeliner—possibly Indian, or Greek, or mixed, like so many people my age.

Devin fidgeted as he ordered, and she leaned in close to hear his softly-spoken words.

She pulled back with a laugh, saying, “Devin, you can just say you'll have 'the usual' and I'll know!”

Horror splashed over me like a glass of ice water. Devin was in love with the waitress, and that was who he wanted to kiss. I looked her up and down: nice figure, great boobs, perfect skin, very little makeup besides the eyeliner. She was a natural beauty, and her movements had grace, like those of a dancer. No wonder he'd fallen for her. I wanted to die. Just die.

After she walked away, revealing a back side that looked as pretty as her front side, Devin said to me, “What's on your mind today?”

I adjusted the shopping bag at my feet. “A few errands.”

“No client meetings today?”

I smiled. “Nope.” I had nothing planned, but had ducked out of lunch with Steph so I could go home to a root beer float and sugar coma.

He said, “I can't help but be curious about what goes on with your other clients.”

My cheeks warmed. “None of the other sessions are at all like what we've been … working on.”

Our cups of chai tea arrived. Devin raised his eyebrows as he blew on the tea. The mug was enormous, which made him look younger, like an adorable little boy.

After a moment, he said, “What do you think of dinosaurs?”

“They're interesting.” I smiled and sipped my chai. The air conditioning inside the restaurant was powerful, and the warmth of the cup in my hands was comforting. “And you?”

“I try not to think about them very much,” he said. “Because even though scientists are still uncovering new details, like how some of them may have been covered in feathers, we'll never really know, will we?”

“If I could be a time traveler, I think going back to see dinosaurs would be at the top of my list.”

He grinned. “Me too. But you'd have to go back in a dinosaur-proof cage so they wouldn't eat you—”

“—and alter the timeline, right?” I finished. “Like, you'd give some poor velociraptor family indigestion and they wouldn't fall into the tar sands that day, and then there'd be a domino effect and your grandparents would never meet and you wouldn't exist.”

He kept grinning. “Of course, if you didn't exist, then you wouldn't be around to cause the indigestion. Hence the paradox.”

“That's why there are multiple timelines.”

“Oh, of course,” he said. “Infinite timelines and parallel universes. That's
so
much more reasonable than ruling out the possibility of time travel.”

I fidgeted with my chai, swirling the foamy milk on the surface so it resembled the surface of Jupiter. “In one of these parallel universes,
you
might be
my
coach.”

He reached his hand across the table to shake mine. “Hi. I'm parallel Devin. What are your top three goals for our work together? What can I help you with?”

I glanced around for something to change the topic to, but he kept waiting for a response.

“Dating,” I said. “Once upon a time, I wasn't fussy at all, and now I'm too fussy. All the good ones are taken.”

“Not
all
the good ones,” he said. “You have to put yourself out there, where the guys are. Have you ever tried climbing?”

“Mountains?”

“You can start with some indoor walls. It'll really increase your upper-body strength, and when you get to the top of the wall, you feel invincible.”

I stared at his beautiful face.
The guy could be a model or an actor,
I thought.
Damn, he's prettier than me. Why didn't I spend more time blowing out my hair this morning?

“That was
almost
inspiring,” I said. “But if you were my coach, I wouldn't come back for a second session.”

“Why?” He had the look of a burst bubble.

“Because I have zero interest in climbing, and you're pushing your interests onto me, which makes me want to resist you.” He crumpled a little before me. I continued, “Plus you're way too cute.”

His hands went to his hair, ruffling it around, and then splitting down the middle. He smoothed down his shiny, black hair so it was slicked flatter on both sides. “How about now? This is how I used to look as a kid.”

The waitress approached our table with fragrant plates. “Devin!” she said, laughing as she put our food in front of us. “You look so nerdy.”

“He was telling me about time travel and causality,” I said to her. “I'm afraid he might actually be a nerd.”

She reached over and ruffled his hair back. He closed his eyes, seeming to enjoy her touch, and I died a thousand times inside.

“That's better,” she said, then she walked away.

I tried to enjoy my lunch, but I found myself with little appetite.

I thought about the rules: Seeing a client outside of a session is a bad idea, unless it's a large social gathering.
Lesson learned
, I told myself. Unfortunately for us humans, we learn more from personal pain than from anything else. I knew, intellectually, that I should have declined a lunch invitation, but I'd gone and accepted, and now I had to choke down a spicy lunch while a pretty girl flirted with Devin, right in front of me.

The rest of lunch was miserable.

Devin shared some anecdotes about managing a hotel, but I put up my professional walls and steered away from sharing any stories about coaching, citing confidentiality.

After we'd eaten, I insisted on picking up the bill, telling him I could write it off against my taxes. I tipped the waitress a generous twenty-five percent, to overcompensate for my feelings of wanting to push her into a tar pit.

On the bright side, I did make it back to my apartment before the curried lamb made its dramatic and fiery exit from my digestive system.

Lesson learned, I told myself for the second time of the day.
Curry does not agree with me.

I didn't have any client appointments until six o'clock—people with actual day jobs tend to be the ones with the money to pay for coaching, so a lot of my work takes place after five—so I spent the rest of the afternoon on my computer, looking into returning to school.

My first time in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career, so my courses had been a scatter-shot assortment of general studies. At twenty-two, however, I was a much different person than seventeen-year-old me, and some of the specific programs actually looked appealing.

I had more of an idea about how the world worked, and what made me tick.

I filled out some forms to receive information on a few programs. All the details were available online, but requesting something on paper felt more likely to lead to something real. We humans are symbolic creatures, and we love the idea of a process, even if it's having readily-available-online information delivered to us on paper, by a person who wears blue polyester shorts no matter the season.

On Friday night, Steph invited me to go clubbing. I couldn't think of an excuse, so she and a couple of our other girlfriends came over to my place to get glammed-up and have starter drinks.

Our friend Kat was back in town, and she was smoking again, despite being paranoid about getting those vertical smoker lines around her mouth.

She stood directly under the fan in my bathroom, blowing smoke straight up, which in her opinion, was better than smoking on my patio with the door open, because “the smoke just drifts back in again, and this way it's gone, see?”

I applied liquid eyeliner to our other friend, Marnie, and tried not to argue with Kat. My house was made of glass, anyway. I'd also smoked for a few years, because it was such a convenient way for me to punish myself for not being more loveable, second only to an eating disorder, of course. I'd only dabbled in the latter for a few months, and then I'd met Steph, and we started kissing boys at parties, and I didn't want to have vomit-breath.

“Ow,” Marnie said in regard to my eyeliner-application.

“Sorry. My mind was wandering.”

She pushed my hand and turned to admire herself in the mirror.

Steph crowded her way into the mirror and got the four of us to pose for some photos.

“We look hot,” Kat said, giving herself a sexy look through her fringe of blue-black hair.

Marnie giggled. “We should have our own show.”

Kat said, “Marnie, you need to change that shirt. It makes me feel sad. You are making the whole group look five percent less attractive.”

Marnie rolled her eyes. “But it's comfortable. And it's on my body, not yours,
Kant
.”

We all giggled at the addition of the letter
n
to Kat's name. It was a juvenile thing to make her name sound like the c-word, but Kat seemed to enjoy it more and more each time. She took pride in being a c-word the way some people take pride in having a fancy car.

“Marnie, there's a reason Kat is putting pressure on you,” I said as we squeezed out of the bathroom. “There've been studies that a person's attractiveness goes up or down based on the attractiveness of the group they're in.”

“Huh?” she said. “In English?”

“You might think that being next to schlubby people makes you look hotter, but … if it's perceived the schlubby people are your
friends
, then you take on a score closer to the average of the group.”

“That's mean,” she said.

“Science is mean.” I put my arm around her. “So's Kat. You're a cutie, and I adore you, but this sweatshirt screams cat-lady. You're going to pussy-block us at the club if you wear it.”

We gathered together again in my kitchen, where we ran the blender to make another round of party beverages.