Tami holds up one finger when Eric walks into the office because she's on the phone. It must be an important call, because she's standing up as she talks. Tami's professional voice washes over him like a hum as he looks around her office. There's her framed diploma from Texas A&M noting her magna cum laude honors. She always blamed Eric for not making summa cum laude. He was, she claims, too much of a distraction. He eked out of college with only a 2.8 GPA himself, but it hasn't seemed to hold him back any.
Tami finally hangs up, so he goes over and extends her the rose.
"Aww, isn't that sweet. I'm going to put that right in this vase, sugar." She plucks it into a metal travel coffee cup and grabs her briefcase. "Now where are you taking me for lunch?"
"The sky's the limit. Or the $150 you need to make sure I get paid. Whichever comes first."
She laughs, tells him to leave the paperwork on her desk, and she'll get it to the right person.
They split a bottle of wine with lunch, which might not be the best idea, given that she has to go back to work. But he doesn't have to pick up Gracie until dinner time. He talks to her about the class and listens to her day and by the time he gets her back to her office, she's a little buzzed. He locks the door behind them and pulls the shades.
"What do you think you're doing, sweetheart?" Tami asks him as she sets her briefcase down. He looks at her desk, and then down at her high heels, and then up again at her skirt. "Oh hell no," she tells him.
"C'mon."
"I have work to do. And these walls aren't that thick."
He sighs. "How about a goodbye kiss, then?"
He gets more of a goodbye make out session, but when he starts to unbutton her blouse, she pushes him away.
"Sobered up now?" he asks.
"I was never not sober," she insists as she plops down into her chair. It rolls back a bit. "So you want to audit Adrian's class?"
"Yeah, think you can set that up for me?"
[*]
Eric's consulting business begins to gradually take off, although it's still a part-time gig, leaving him plenty of time to be home for Gracie when she needs him. The money doesn't match his old salary, but it's close. One class audit turns into another class audit which turns into another, at which point Adrian, who has become a friend to him, asks, "Why don't you just go back to college and get your Master's in Sports Management?"
"They have that here?" Eric asks.
"Well, not here, but there are a lot of Universities in and around Philadelphia."
When Gracie is in second grade, Eric becomes a full-time student again. On the eve of his first day of school, Tami teases him from the master bathroom as she washes up for bed, "no stopping by the sorority house on your way home."
She slides under the covers with him and kisses him. "Who thought you'd be going back to school?"
"I know. I hated school. But speaking of who'd have thought it…Yeah?"
Tami beams. She's being seriously considered for the position of Vice President of Student Affairs at Braemore. It will be a position that allows her to make more use of her counseling experience. "It's been a long strange road, hasn't it, hon?"
He slides down under the covers and wraps her up in his arms. "Well, I don't think our journey's over quite yet."
In the quiet of their Philadelphia home, with the crickets chirping cheerfully in the backyard, they fall into the familiar rhythms learned from a lifetime of lovemaking, and fall asleep flesh to flesh, dreaming of their future together.
THE END
A/N: Okay, I apologize. I know this ending was completely abrupt and this story totally undeveloped. But I encountered a problem here. I always start my fanfiction with a general idea, and it always ends up writing itself. The plot just unravels as I write and ideas grow on ideas. But with this story, for the first time, that didn't happen. I don't know why. I don't know if I've just been away from FNL too long and it's been off the air too long so the passion has waned, or I've just written too much FNL fanfic over the years so nothing sounds original to me anymore. But I wanted to wrap this up somehow rather than leaving it hanging in an "In Progress" position with people waiting on it for weeks and weeks. If this is the first of my FNL fanfics you've read, please don't write off my other stories based on it. Take a look at my profile and choose another story – there are lots of good ones! And happy reading.