Not Sarah's Number

Chapter 34: Therapy After Therapy

She began to ask us some more questions about our childhood, our dad, and about school. We told her that our mom did everything for us, and she was never not there. We told her that we had seen mom cry late at night after getting off a private phone call with dad. Landon revealed that he got jealous when his friends told him about their weekends with their dads going fishing or to the movies. I told her that I missed the opportunity to be a daddy's girl like so many of my friends were. Ali's dad did anything for her, and I was jealous of that too. It was hard to admit that.

She asked us how we felt about our dad coming home this Thursday. The answers ranged from excited to anxious to scared. We didn't really want anything to change.

In the end, she sent us home with an assigned reading and told us we had done a great job.

"It's really short. Take your time reading, but I encourage that you do."

She said goodbye to both of us and we left the office.

"Yeah, I'm proud of us too," Landon replied to my opinion of the therapy session.

We were both mentally drained. Talking for 50 minutes about our problems had really pulled the energy out of us. Luckily, our next session wasn't until after Thanksgiving break, which was next week. Thank goodness, because this week was going to be super stressful, with dad coming back home and all. I had a feeling our second session was going to be pretty tough.

"Let's do something like really fun that requires absolutely no brain power."

"Yeah! Let's go to the arcade!"

I nodded at my brother's response. "Yes! Arcade it is."

It didn't matter that I had just went to the arcade last week with Vince. I loved that place. Hey, maybe Vince was going to be working. He told me he was usually scheduled to work after school because he was trying to save up as much money as he could for college.

Speaking of, our date had gone really well. I could have stayed with him for hours, but my mom had put a curfew on me to be home by 9, so I only ended up hanging out with him for an hour and a half. We ended up texting each other late into the night, and when I woke up Friday for school I had been pretty exhausted. Ace had continued to stay his distance for the rest of the week.

Over the weekend, I had ended up calling Gavin, partly to brag about how cool Vince was, and then partly to get advice on what I was supposed to do with Ace. I felt like I couldn't really ask anyone else, because all the guys I knew were friends with Ace and they were probably going to take his side. I wanted someone completely removed.

Gavin's responses had been like this:

"Wow, the football player? I remember him. Didn't talk to him ever, but he seemed nice I think. That's cute y'all are getting along so well."

"Hmmm, you want my opinion about Ace? I didn't ever talk to him either, but I had some classes with him. I remember you didn't really like him that much because you said he bragged too much. It's kind of ironic you're best friends with him now."

"If you want me to be honest about Ace, I think he has no right to be upset that you didn't tell him about Vince. Are you sure there's nothing else to the story? That just seems so...unimportant. If you guys are best friends though, he'll come around. Just give him some space like he asked."

"Geez Jess, calm down. You're panicking again. Just because he hasn't texted you back in three days doesn't mean he's ignoring you. He literally asked you to give him time."

"No Jess, don't text him right now. Why don't you text Vince?"

"Jess, are you sure you like Vince and not Ace?"