Page 24 of Sam & Justin
“Yes. Currently, I do a lot of work with addiction.”
“Shit, that must be rough.” I’d done some of my licensing hours working with addicts. Figured it was a good base, and I had morethan my fair share of drug issues come through my door. I’d been right about the base. “You do individual counseling?”
“I do now,” he told me. “I work for a telehealth company. What about you?”
“Got my own practice. Up in King’s Bay.” He looked at me blankly, like he wouldn’t have been able to pick King’s Bay out on a map. I wasn’t surprised. The town wasn’t much bigger than Gomillion, and no one back home knew where that was either. “It’s this small town on the coast. Right on the beach. Ended up there for college, and I just never left.”
Actually, I ended up there a bit before college, but this guy wasn’t asking for my whole life story. Even if he had been, I probably wouldn’t have told it to him. I wasn’t one to go on about personal shit to people I barely knew. Some things never changed, and that was one of them.
“I used to think about going into private practice, but it seems so intimidating.”
I got that. I lucked out having Axel as a best friend. He’d already done all the LLC shit on his tattoo parlor. He knew all the lingo, knew what kind of paperwork I needed to fill out. He’d walked me through getting all the necessary permits and getting everything set up. I knew a lot of people, they didn’t have that. They had to deal with whatever the hell the Internet told them, and I knew firsthand that looking shit up online usually ended up with a bunch of conflicting information.
“There you are,” Justin’s voice interrupted. He looked at my conversation partner and then back at me. “Do you mind if I cut in?”
He didn’t seem to mind, and Justin stepped into line next to me. I caught the way his arm shifted, and I wondered if he was thinking about putting an arm around me. If he was, he chickened out. I pulled out my wallet and took out the business card for my office. I usually left them at the schools in King’s Bay, dropped a few at local hospitals and teen hangouts. But I always kept a few on me, and I handed one to the guy I’d been talking to. “If you want to talk more or if you have questions about starting a private practice, you can reach out any time.”
He took the card and looked back up at me. “Thanks.”
He let me and Justin get on with our conversation after that. The whole time, I was still trying to figure out who the hell that was. Maybe we should’ve had to wear our name tags from the night before all weekend. Would’ve saved me a lot of hassle. Justin and I got our pretzels and started making our way to the stands, looking for seats.
“I didn’t expect to find you talking to someone,” he teased.
“He was in our group, noticed your little ploy with the brochures.”
Justin looked all kinds of smug. “Then it worked.”
“It did.” I paused for a moment, wondering if the next words were going to make him think less of me. Maybe he’d think I wasa piece of shit. “Too bad I have no idea who the hell I was just talking to.”
I should’ve given Justin a bit more credit, because he didn’t think I was a piece of shit. Or if he did, he thought I was a funny one, because he laughed loud enough that someone we passed startled and almost dropped their popcorn. “That was Robert Dawson,” Justin informed me. “He was in mostly advanced classes with me.”
“He was in a shop class with me. Used to bitch about the oil and grease and all that.”
“That sounds like Robbie.”
Robbie. The nickname was like a lock turning in my memory, and I started remembering more about the kid he’d been. He’d bitched a lot, but he’d never really paid me any attention. The few times we’d talked in class, he’d been nice enough. Guess it made sense that he was nice enough to me now. He might have just been one of those guys, the kind that didn’t stand out much but treated people pretty well.
Me and Justin went and found a seat about halfway up the bleachers. The gym was more crowded than I thought it’d be. There was a good mix of students from my class, current students, and what I could only assume were townies looking for something to do on a Saturday morning. If there was one thing I remembered about Gomillion, it was that the basketball games could always draw a crowd. There wasn’t much to do outside of cheer for the high school teams back then, and I guessed it was on the list of things that hadn’t changed.
“You gotta do anything during the game?” I leaned over to ask Justin, trying to make my voice heard over the din of conversation going on around us. “Or do I get you to myself for a bit?”
Justin grinned one of those grins that made his blue eyes shine. “For the next hour and a half, I’m yours.” I’m pretty sure I had a matching grin. “Assuming, of course, that nothing hits the fan.”
“There a chance for that?”
Justin’s grin faltered, and he let out a heavy sigh. “What I’ve learned in my years of working for Rachel Mendoza is that there is always a chance that something could go wrong.”
Some people might have thought that was a pessimistic take, but I liked it. There was a shade of reality to it. It was the kind of sentiment I tried to pass on to the kids I worked with, because too many times, shit would go wrong, and they’d let it make them spiral. I didn’t think Justin was the type to spiral over things going wrong. If anything, I would almost bet on him having backup plans to his backup plans. Hell, even last night, when Theo misplaced the supplies, he had a backup plan figured out in under a minute. He was just that type.
But I wasn’t going to be thinking about the things that could go wrong. I was going to bask in the time I got with him. I already knew that it wasn’t going to be enough. In twenty-four hours, I’d be back on the road to King’s Bay, and Justin would be a figure in the rearview. Because I couldn’t close my eyes and imagine that he might show up in King’s Bay. He was too woven intoGomillion. It was deep in him, down to his core. Same way as the revulsion for this town was in mine.
So, the chances of seeing him again after all this? They weren’t good.
I realized just as the thought hit that I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t like the idea that today was it. We didn’t have anything planned for tomorrow. There wasn’t some big goodbye breakfast. There wasn’t any reason for me to do anything other than load up my car and hit the road.
“Where are you right now?” Justin asked, his voice breaking through the series of realizations I was having.
“Right here,” I lied.