[January 2-11, 1992]

This spring, Tami was doing a counseling practicum at the Student Health Center for four credits. For the first few sessions, she was nervous every time she went in, but she soon felt more confident in her abilities.

Meanwhile, Eric had started a new part-time job. Gone were his days at the bookstore. He was currently coaching for an after-school, youth flag football program at a nearby community center. The program had children ranging from second to fifth grade. Some of the kids had been deposited there for day care and just wanted to play around, but others were serious about learning football. Eric would come home from work in the evening and jabber excitedly to Tami about this kid or that, and how he'd help improve his blocking, or his passing, or his rushing.

"You'd make a great coach," she told him one evening as they were washing and drying dishes together and he'd just finished telling her about his day.

Tami had thought, If you don't make it to the NFL, but she'd omitted that part. She knew how sensitive he could be to the suggestion that she was uncertain about his future in professional football. So she was especially reassured when he was the one to say, "That's my back up plan, if I don't go pro. Well, that and teaching history or P.E." He handed her a clean, wet plate. "Coaching doesn't pay much at the lower levels. I'd need a full-time teaching salary until I could work my way up."

She put the plate in the cupboard. "I bet you'd make a great teacher, too. Think about what a good tutor you were to me."

He smirked and wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her neck. "I tutored you well, didn't I, babe?" he murmured.

Tami giggled and squirmed away before smacking Eric with the dish towel. He grabbed the free end of the towel and yanked her close, into a kiss.

"No!" exclaimed Julie, who had just toddled into the kitchen. "No!"

Eric looked down at her and chuckled. "I'll kiss your mother anytime I like."

"No! Daddy weed book."

"I'll read you a book, Monkey Noodle," he said. "Just as soon as I'm done kissing Mommy."

Tami was assaulted by a dozen playful pecks, while Julie shot up a chorus of no's.

[January 15, 1992]

When Eric came home from work today, he had nothing to say about the youth football program. Instead, he enveloped Tami in a hug (she was setting the table in the breakfast nook) and kissed her deeply before asking, "Guess what?"

She smiled, happy in his happiness, even though she didn't know the cause. "What?"

"I got my invitation. To the NFL Scouting Combine. In February."

This was an incredibly good sign. Not every eligible player was invited. Someone, at least, was seriously considering him.

"I'll have to make up a lot of class work when I get back," he said, "but my professors are being really understanding. I stopped and got some wine. When Julie's in bed - "

"- An early table date night?"

"Yeah." He smiled and whispered, "And possibly a congratulatory blow job. You know. If you want."

Tami shook her head, chuckled, and smacked him on the ass.

From where she was playing in the living room, Julie said, "No mama! No spank daddy!"

[January 18, 1992]

One evening, when Tami emerged from putting Julie to bed, she found Eric at the table in the breakfast nook, papers spread before him, a pencil in his hand. He asked her to help him study for the Wonderlic, which was the written test he would be given as part of the NFL evaluation process.

"I haven't had a math class since high school," he told her. A B.A. required at least 6 math or science credits as part of the core requirements, but they'd counted his Sports Medicine and Exercise Physiology classes for that requirement. "I just need a refresher. I need to be able to do these math problems quicker. Can you talk me through a few?"

She sat down next to him and smiled. "You need me to tutor you in math?" she asked.

"Just a quick refresher," Eric insisted.

She pulled the sample questions to herself. "Good Lord, Eric. These are easy. This is very basic algebra. You taught me Algebra II. You don't know how to do this?"

"Tami, I stopped taking math after high school. You took pre-Calc and Calc and those two semesters of statistics for your psychology major. I'm sure if you don't use it for the next four years, you'll forget it too."

"I don't think I'll forget it."

"Fine. Sure. Thirteen years from now our high school daughter will ask for help in math and you'll know exactly how to explain it." He motioned to the sample problems. "Help. Please."

They went through fifteen sample problems. Then he worked ten on his own. Satisfied, he put his pencil down. "I remember how to do math now," he said. "Thanks."

"Is the entire test this easy?" Tami asked.

"Well, babe, keep in mind that I have twelve minutes to answer fifty questions."

"Oh!" She hadn't realized the time limit was so short. "What are you expected to get?"

"They usually want quarterbacks to have at least 23."

"How can you correctly solve 23 math word problems in just twelve minutes?"

"Well, it's not all math. There's general knowledge and logic and verbal stuff. I'm fine with that."

"Yeah," she said, "You're good with verbal stuff."

He smirked in reply. Then his smirk grew into something more like a lecherous grin. "Hey," he said. "You want some kind of payment for that tutoring session?"

She smiled to recall their early days of fooling around, when she had no idea how much he liked her, and they weren't yet officially dating. She'd been so painfully aroused at each of those "sessions," so excited to start them, so on fire during them. There was something special about those initial explorations that she knew they could never quite recapture again. Of course, the more he got to know her body, her likes and dislikes, the more skilled his lovemaking became. She would never trade what they had now for that time, but part of her missed those days, when everything was new.

She titled her head at him. "Fifteen minutes," she said. "I keep my panties on, and you keep your boxers on."

It was surprisingly thrilling, going into it knowing there was a limit, that it was all going to end at the beep of his watch. They hadn't dry humped since high school. They enjoyed a heated time of making out like virgins in their marriage bed, but in the end they cheated. When Eric's watch began to beep, Tami, heavy with breath and heady with desire, ordered him, "Ignore it."

She unbuttoned the flap of his boxers and drew him out. He pushed the edge of her panties aside just enough to ease into her. Both, stretched to the limits of their arousal, panted and grunted their way to a quick satisfaction.

After collapsing beside her, he hit the alarm button on his watch and the beeping stopped.

"Well," she said, "technically, we did leave on our underwear."