The door opens anyway, my silence ignored. I raise my head from the desk and find Hannah looking back at me with concern visible in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” She asks, and that’s all it takes for the dam to break and the tears to fall. I wipe at them maniacally, trying to get the proof of how broken I am to disappear. “Oh no,” she says, realizing her words were my undoing.
I keep wiping, but it’s not helping. The tears just keep on falling. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, apologizing for my outburst. This is work. I’m the head of this school. I just started last week. This is not the impression I want people to have of me. It’s not what I want to be known for. This drama was supposed to be over six years ago, when high school ended, yet somehow, it’s reared its head once again.
“It’s okay,” she says and I can sense her hesitation. I can tell by the look on her face that she wants to comfort me, but she just met me and has no idea how to deal with my outburst.
I clear my throat and somehow manage to get the tears to stop. I hold it all in. I can leave soon enough and break down when I get home, but for now, I have to keep it together. It’s my job. “Thanks,” I tell her because I don’t know what else to say.
“Are you doing okay?” She asks, looking behind her toward the door Christian exited from. Christian Cole. Heartbreaker. Christian Cole. A father. Though I know that Ari is his daughter, my heart doesn’t know how to process this. I had reason to get Christian out of my head before, but now, now I’m more motivated than ever. I need to get it out of my system. Get him out of my system.
I shake my head, deciding to opt for honesty because lying won’t erase the look on my face and the tears she’s already seen. “Not really.”
She gives me a sympathetic smile. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I give her a sad smile. “Not really,” I repeat.
Hannah nods. “Totally get it. Well, school’s over now, so you should go home. Grab some ice cream, watch a movie, and cry.”
“That sounds like a plan,” I tell her, continuing to smile through the pain.
“What are you still doing here?”
I point at the papers on my desk. “I’ve got work to do.” Not really, but I would hate being the first person out the door.
“It’s an elementary school. Nothing on your desk is so important that you can’t do it tomorrow,” she says, reminding me of my best friend’s earlier words.
Man, I really wish Emely were here right now. She would know how to make it better, make it hurt less. Or at least how to make me forget about it temporarily.
“You’re right,” I reply, giving in. It’s not like I was going to get any more work done with what I’ve just discovered. My mind can’t think about school trips or dances right now. All that keeps playing on repeat is Christian and the fact that he has a six-year-old daughter he claims wasn’t the product of a betrayal.
I pull out of the school’s parking lot and head toward my house. The thought of having to return to this place every day seems less exciting now. Now that I know that Christian’s daughter is one of my students. For a brief second, I think about what it’ll be like to meet Ari’s mom, the woman in Christian’s life, but I try not to linger on that. I don’t want to start bawling again. I need to keep the tears in check.
Blasting the radio, I start singing along to all the songs that play, skipping any songs that remind me of him. I play the anthems, the songs that make me feel empowered. Alive. The one song I don’t skip when it coincidentally goes on is Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood. I wish I were one of those girls who exacted revenge. The kind of girl who grabbed a bat and destroyed a guy’s car.
The last thing I need though is a headline about a school principal going wild and being charged with destruction of property. Better to shout the words from my car than regret the actions from a jail cell. I put the song on repeat, listening to it over and over until I reach my house.
Feeling emotionally drained, I park the car and enter my house. When I moved back to Forest Pines, I knew there was always a chance I could run in to him. Part of me hated that idea, but a smaller part of me had some hope. Hope that we could at least talk. That he’d explain to me what happened six years ago.
It was silly of me to think that an explanation from him would make things better.
I only briefly thought about him moving on. There was always the possibility that he would find someone else. That he fell in love with another girl. I always thought there was a chance that he settled down and had a family. Never in a million years did I expect that his family started back when we were in high school.
I slam the door shut behind me and walk straight to the kitchen. Kicking off my shoes, I grab the pistachio ice cream from the freezer and a spoon. Walking over to the living room, I grab the TV remote and turn it on. I lie on the couch with my blanket covering my legs and search mindlessly through Netflix for the next thing that’ll stop me from thinking.
When I finally find something I haven’t watched before, and won’t remind me of today, I hit play. I spend the next couple of hours eating my ice cream straight from the tub and trying to think about the plot of the movie and not the plot of my life.
Forest Pines is a small town.
People run in to each other all the time.
Considering his daughter is a student at the school I’m the principal of, the chances of me running in to him and his family just got bigger.
I’ll be professional. Courteous. I’ll treat him like I would any other parent. Like I don’t know him. I guess the reality is, if my Christian were capable of having a child around the same time we were together, then I didn’t really know him at all.
A couple of tears slide down my face, but I clear them out immediately. I’ve cried enough about Christian Cole already. I won’t allow myself to cry anymore. With that resolution, I decide to do the unhealthiest thing I could possibly do. I push my feelings deep within me hoping that will make them go away.
Except, I know it won’t.
Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I’ll always love Christian Cole. I loved him then, even after he broke my heart. And I’ll love him with all the little pieces he left behind.
12
CHRISTIAN
“See you tomorrow, Coach,” the last student says as he walks past my office and out the locker room.
“See you then,” I tell him when I finally register his words, knowing he probably didn’t hear my response.
Practice sucked today. I sucked today. I couldn’t help it though. If this weren’t a new job, a job I wasn’t interested in keeping, I would’ve gone straight to a bar and drank until I couldn’t remember my name… or hers.
Amari is back.
She’s back and I bet she thinks worse of me now than she did before. I know she does. She thinks I cheated on her, which I would never do to anyone. She’s wrong about that. But the fact that I didn’t cheat on her doesn’t make what I did any better.
I slept with someone weeks before getting involved with Amari.
I got that person pregnant.
I left the girl of my dreams without explaining to her why.