InsaneJournal

Who: Cole and Ileana
What: Their first official date
Where: Outside the building to start
When: Today at 3
Warnings: Probably none

Cole hadn't been on a proper date in at least a year. The last time he'd taken a girl out it was early spring, and she was a substitute teacher at one of the schools he was applying to. Her name was Paula and she was twenty-six, and they started talking about how hard it was to find a job in their profession and somehow that led to coffee. Two nights later it was dinner, and in the weeks after that they had been stuck in some awkward in-between stage.

Until she told him she'd found someone else, sorry you're a great guy but, and that was that. This time, though, he hoped it would be different. His luck hadn't been the best lately, but it could change. Maybe.

He woke up in the morning with bruises marking his abdomen and upper chest, mottled purple and green and painful to the touch, but he could handle those. They could easily be covered up with clothing, but the faint purple ring around his right eye would prove a little harder. He tried icing it for a bit, but it didn't work all too well and he was forced to go to work with it visible.

His colleagues joked about it, and he told them he'd recently taken up self-defense lessons - which wasn't a complete lie; he just hadn't actually started them yet - and a classmate had broken the rules and gotten him in the eye. His students seemed to think it was cool, and some of the boys even congratulated him on it.

Right.

Immediately after his classes were done he headed back to the building, making a last-ditch effort to disguise the now dark purple marks around his eye to no avail. He was just going to have to think up some excuse that didn't involve mugging to tell her. Sighing, he changed his shirt-tie-and-dress-pants attire for a sweater and jeans, wincing a little at the bruises. Damn it, he really needed those self-defense classes. And maybe a knife of his own.

Cole wasn't really worried about anyone he knew seeing him with Ileana - teachers had their own lives outside of school, and it wasn't as if she looked particularly young. Frankly, who he spent his time with was none of their business, but that didn't mean he didn't care. He just didn't think he would run into anyone he knew anyway.

He was waiting outside the building early, and he spent the minutes before Ileana arrived glancing nervously at the alley and wondering what had happened to the man who'd saved his life.