Calling it a relationship didn’t really seem appropriate or fair. I’d still felt inferior, sure, but I’d had a guy I was planning to settle down with. Maybe have a family with someday, even though I’d never given much thought to that.


My family was dear to me, although the majority of them lived some states away. It was easy to get lonely in my little town when Kim was the only one I could really count on. Though I suppose Kim’s new husband was more welcoming than I might have expected. I’d almost worried that he would say I was a bad influence on his sweet, little wife, but before long, I realized he knew a bit about her wild side as well.

Not that Kim and I had ever… experimented, as it were. She was as straight as an arrow, and I’d only ever dated men, myself. No, I’d never seen Kim even half-undressed – at least, aside from the times we’d changed clothes in the same room. The woman was too damn self-conscious to even wear a bikini.


I knew Kim’s wicked side on a much more superficial level. It was something of a tradition between the two of us, periodically emailing each other when the school day was impossibly boring. Granted, most school days seemed boring as far as I was concerned.


It wasn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy my job, although I never expected to have much of a way with children. I’d just gotten myself trapped in an English degree with few other options besides finishing up the remainder of my teaching certification. I’d actually been one hundred percent sure I would hate my job with the heat of a thousand suns going supernova.


And it had been an adjustment, but ultimately, I’d found myself a bit softer than I’d have liked. It never failed that at the end of every school year, I’d shed a tear over never seeing my little class again. From my fifth grade classroom, it was off to middle school, where they would be thrown into a world that would rip away their tenuous grasp on innocence.


I had a bit of a bone to pick with teenagers in general, honestly. My students would tease each other about passing gas or smelling funny, gentle ribbing that wasn’t intended to cut to the bone. I knew that kindness got sucked out of a kid when they moved up and out of elementary school. Either way, I valued the time I had with my students every year, even knowing they would soon be insufferable little assholes.

When Kim and I emailed each other, though, it was never to discuss our students. She taught kindergarten, and while there wasn’t much hot gossip between fifth graders, there was even less with toddlers. Not that either of us would be that unprofessional… at least, not in that sense. The emails we exchanged were admittedly crude and not at all befitting of our workplace, but it wasn’t as if anyone would see them aside from us.


Email was the one place I was free to let loose because I sure as hell couldn’t afford therapy on my salary. Kim was a good sport about the whole thing, and her engaging way of keeping up with a conversation was part of the reason we’d gotten so close. If there was anyone I felt free to share my woes with, it was my best friend.


Beginning to draft an email, I was getting into a really snide tangent about what a tiny prick Nicholas had.