Steckley, Iowa

As much as he hated to admit it -- Scott was worried. Tate hadn't been into the shop in almost a week -- which, under normal circumstances would have meant that he would have had a lot of down-time in which he would have just played with Facebook and Angry Birds a lot -- but it wasn't exactly as if people were walking in off the streets wanting tattoos.

Hence, why Scott was worried.

"Think we're fucked?" he wondered aloud, drifting towards the front of the shop and addressing Chantal. While she was still new he didn't want to scare her off, but, these days she was practically a veteran, and he wasn't particularly concerned with tattoo-shop politics.

Violet always rose with the sun, and it wasn't just because of the fact that her blinds were broken and wouldn't fully cover her window. She'd always had the tendency to wake with the sun, ever since she was a little girl, no matter how late she'd gone to bed the night before. So long as she got about five hours of sleep, she was fine.

So, naturally, it was a shock when she rolled over and the sun was already high in the sky, leaving a bright golden square on her holey bedsheet.

"Jesus," she croaked, stretching and making her way across her warm wooden floor. She wasn't even hungover or anything; a quick glance at the wall clock told her that it was about ten after ten, and this was the latest she'd slept in in...well, forever.

Whatever happened last night.

She padded quietly out to their tiny kitchen, to put the kettle on to boil.

It wasn’t easy for a fresh-out-of-the-box teacher to find a permanent position – even finding enough substituting jobs to sustain ones life was difficult. So, when Michelle receive a phone call offering her a semi-permanent substituting job, a maternity relief, carrying over until the end of the school year, she should have been thrilled. Quite the opposite, in fact. Michelle had secretly made a deal with herself, saying if she hadn’t found a position after one year, she’d go back to school and do what she wanted to do. She dreaded the thought of teaching, of being stuck with the same stupid kids day in and day out. It scared her that these idiots – idiots who didn’t know how to predict the formulas of the ionic compounds, and stared at her dumbfoundedly when she demanded they do so – would one day run the world.
( ... )

Tilting his beer slowly towards his lips, Adam took his eyes off the hockey game momentarily and glanced down the hall. His girlfriend was bustling between the bedroom and the bathroom, getting ready for what she liked to call 'Girl's Night Out'. Adam preferred calling it something a little more witty and a little less nice -- keeping it in his head, of course.

"I just don't get why you're going to to celebrate a divorce," Adam called down the hall as he made his way to the fridge for another beer. Flicking the cap onto the counter, he walked down the hall and leaned against the bedroom door-jam, watching Rebekah change her shoes.

"I saw Dave today," he added, mentioning the husband in the aforementioned divorce, and a fairly good friend of Adam's. "He's definitely not out celebrating the end of his marriage like she is," he told Rebekah, spitting out the word 'she' as though it had a bad taste -- which, to Adam, it did. For someone who believed marriage was a sacred thing, he didn't understand why Amy thought it was a good idea to have a celebratory girl's night out on the eve of the demise of her nuptials.

After nearly three hours of mindlessly dicking around on his laptop, Scott had come to the pretty firm conclusion that he could definitely not remember the last time it had mattered that it was Friday night. He typically worked weekends -- prime traffic times at Tate's -- opting instead for shorter shifts or a day or two off during the week. Most of the guys he'd run around with when he was younger had long since moved or done the 'family' thing -- and on the rare occasion that their wives took off the ball and chain long enough to let them grab a few beers, they never seemed to have much interesting to talk about.

He often found himself wondering if he'd have been in the same boat as his friends if Jenny were still here -- while they'd never made official plans, he'd always figured he'd buy her a ring once they were out of high school when the timing felt right. As tends to be the case with most young love, he'd never really considered whether or not they'd last -- all he'd known was that he was happy, and until that changed, there was no reason to stress out about it. It was probably naive on his part to assume that he'd still be crazy in love with his high school sweetheart ten years later -- but as Scott hadn't really gotten the chance to find out, he naturally assumed he would have been.

It wasn't as if Scott hadn't moved on -- it no longer stung when he heard 'their song' on the radio... and in truth, it didn't really get much radio play these days. He'd moved on emotionally; it was just that he'd yet to find a girl he wanted to move on with. The same thing that had happened to his friends also held true for the majority of girls in town -- and the more time that passed, the more of them went off the market, so to speak. And the ones that were on the market... well, it typically was safe to say they were there for a reason. As it was, the only female anywhere near his age he had much interaction with these days was Chantal, and while they'd been talking more and more since the silence brought on by last Friday's storm had kind of broken the ice... she didn't seem to show too much interest in dating. Maybe Bob from Maynard had put her off for awhile. Besides, Scott was kind of awkward about things like that.

Feeling somewhat resigned at what he was about to do -- something he'd been musing on doing for some time, in fact -- he opened a new tab and typed "match.com" into the browser.

( I'm getting too old for this... )

Tags: anna reynolds, scott wexler

"Mmm, yummy," Chantal said, rubbing her stomach as she pretended to chew the plastic piece of bread her son offered to her. "Thanks, baby!"

With a satisfied grin, Rowan stepped over to the other adult in the room, Chantal's good friend and fellow single mother, Dani, who appeased Rowan in the same fashion. "I go make eggs!" he told them seriously, holding his hand up as to indicate that he'd get the eggs done pronto before running back into Miley's bedroom.

"So, anyway," Chantal continued, tucking her legs under her as she took a sip of coffee. "Joe was supposed to come get Rowan last weekend, and didn't. He didn't even bother letting me know that he wasn't coming until freakin' ten o'clock," she added with a scoff. "He texted me yesterday, saying he'd come today, but I didn't even answer him. I'm getting freakin' tired of this bullshit! Pretty much ready to send a hit out for him," she told Dani, only half joking.

Scott was not terribly surprised that -- when taking into consideration the volatile Iowa spring weather -- they'd not seen a client all day.

He'd done everything he could think of -- disinfect his workstation,  alpabetize his library of books, fuck around on Facebook for an hour or several -- and yet, he still had six hours on the clock to get through.

Which is why he found himself wandering -- naturally -- to the front desk.  He'd worked with the receptionist -- Chantal -- for some time, although they'd never been particularly close.  But, as she seemed to be the only other source of human interaction in the building, he decided to bite the metaphorical bullet.

"Beautiful day in the neighborhood," he mused, sliding into one of the seats reserved for clientelle and picking up the latest copy of "Inked."