“I’m willing to meet with your wife on her own, of course,” Dr. Lindstrom said pleasantly, “but couples counseling is most effective if both parties are present, committed, and working through the exercises at the same time.”
Dr. Lindstrom came highly recommended but Shane didn’t need an excuse to run back to work. “I don’t need counseling,” Natalie said hastily, cutting off this offered line of retreat. “We need counseling.”
“We are not college students anymore. We are professionals in demanding jobs,” he returned. “When you announced you’d made this appointment was the first I’d heard we were having problems.”
That’s because you don’t hear me anymore. I’ve been saying we’re having problems for months now. Natalie pressed her lips together and refused to be baited into a shouting match. Fighting released energy but usually ended in sex, which never solved any marital problem of substance.
Her lean body relaxed, Dr. Lindstrom made a note and Natalie briefly considered getting out her legal pad and taking some notes of her own. The firm, persistent, even tone seemed to work on Shane, and the therapist used it again when she spoke. “Will a lunch hour appointment work for you?”
Based on Shane’s glinting smile, he knew he was being managed. “I’ll make every effort to be here on time, but I can’t make any guarantees.”
“That’s fine. Tell me a little about your relationship,” she said. “How did you meet?”
This used to be a good story, told with private glances and laughter. Not anymore. “When I was a junior at Fordham I took his medieval history class. He was the teaching assistant and a student in the Ph.D. program,” Natalie said.
Sunlight glinted off Shane’s square, gold-rimmed glasses as he looked down at his hands. Probably wondering what to do with them without the BlackBerry adhered to his palm. The glasses suited the history TA he’d been when she’d taken the survey course in Medieval history, along with a hundred and fifty other, predominantly female, students. Most of his current peers wore contacts. Shane kept the glasses. Natalie thought of them as his disguise.
“I see. Did you begin dating then?”
“No,” Shane said flatly. “I was her teacher. She was my student. It was against the university’s code of conduct.”
Despite enough chemistry to melt steel, Shane had refused to do anything more than get a cup of coffee in the student union and discuss the week’s lecture. It was Natalie’s introduction to his iron will. He’d look at her through those gold rimmed glasses, his blue eyes glimmering with what she imagined was suppressed desire. As the semester progressed her skirts got shorter, her jeans and sweaters tighter, and her interest in medieval history went from I-need-a-humanities-credit to intense. She read every assignment twice, outlined lectures, pestered her English major roommate into proofreading her papers, bought glossy red lipstick and did her hair for an eight a.m. class three times a week. Other girls admitted there was something about him, but feared his mean face, his hooded eyes. Even his standard uniform of a button-down shirt, cotton sweater, and corduroys couldn’t tamp down his sheer male presence.
The day she turned in her final paper she asked him out. Expressionless as usual, he declined. That night she went to a frat party, got drunk, and did the walk of shame back to campus behind a pack of grade school children on their way to a field trip to see the Christmas tree at Lincoln Center. Two weeks later Shane called her at home.
”I turned in grades today.”
Her heart was pounding. “How did I do?”
“You got an A. Your final paper was excellent. The best work in the class.”
“Are you calling all your students over Christmas break to tell them their grades?” she asked.
“Just you,” he said. “I’m not your teacher anymore. Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
“I’m back in Hoboken,” she said.
“I’m calling from the PATH station.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
She told her parents she was meeting a friend for a drink, picked him up at the station, and drove to a hotel. Dinner came after, in the form of room service.
“We started dating when the semester ended and got married after I graduated,” Natalie added quietly. She looked past Dr. Lindstrom to Shane’s face, reflected dimly in the windows. Did he remember the passion? Was it gone forever?
“How long have you been married?”
“Eight years,” Shane said when Natalie’s silence made it clear it was his turn to answer.
An encouraging smile from Dr. Lindstrom. “When was the last time you talked to each other?”
“This morning,” Shane said with his first hint of defensiveness. “I kissed her goodbye on the way to the train station.”