A phone buzzed against a hard surface, cutting into their discussion.“Whose is that?”Tish asked, letting go of Misty’s hands and glancing around the room.
“It’s coming from over there.”Misty got up and moved to the desk, where she’d actually remembered to charge her phone for once.The name on the screen surprised her.
Spencer:I was such an ass the last time we spoke, and I’m so sorry.Can we at least have one more conversation before you decide to never talk to me again?
Curiosity more than anything else prompted her to touch the button that would call him.The call bounced, and another text immediately came in.
Spencer:I need FaceTime for this.
“Tish is here.”
Misty didn’t realize she’d said her reply out loud until her friend said, “Yes, I am.What about it?”
“It’s Spencer.He says he needs FaceTime but doesn’t say why.”
Tish dug around in her suitcase.“I’ll get in the shower and leave you to it.Heaven knows I’m overdue for a wash, and a deep condition couldn’t hurt in this dry air.”
Part of her felt like telling Tish to stay because it would save the trouble of telling her everything later.At the same time, Spencer hadn’t said why he needed to talk this way, and this could get awkward with someone else, even Tish, watching.She sighed and accepted the request, feeling warier than the day he’d plunged her into the ice bath.
Spencer’s face popped up on her screen.He looked like he’d skipped a day or two of shaving, but he could pull it off.However, his slumped posture and reddish eyes detracted from any sexiness.And instead of the resting drill sergeant face she’d known so well during their sessions, his expression looked defeated, if not ill.Apprehension gave way to alarm at the sight of him.
****
“What is it?”Misty’seyes looked closer to gray than blue tonight, possibly because of her pajama top, and had widened at the sight of him.He should’ve pulled himself together better for this.
“I need to tell you how sorry I am for the way I acted the last time we talked.I saw how hard you worked for this during our sessions, I know how hard you’re working now, and I was way out of line.I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t look moved.“You could’ve said all this on a regular call.Why did you need FaceTime?”
“Because I always want to see your face, and so you could see my old good-luck charm.You showed me yours, I figured I should show you mine.”
Misty rolled her eyes at his attempt at innuendo but stayed on the call.Spencer held up the small, gold-toned medal he used to carry to every event but had buried in a drawer after his injury.One side had a Taekwondo event from twenty-two years ago engraved on it.He turned it over to show the name, and she looked confused.“Who’s Jason Whitford?”
“Me.”Spencer brought the camera back up to his face.“Spencer’s my middle name, my mom’s maiden name, but I’ve been going by it for the past few years.”
“Why?Are you on the run?”Her words might have been teasing, but her tone was too full of concern for the joke to fully land.
“You might say that.I told you that before I got certified as a trainer, I used to be a professional kickboxer before I tore my ACL and needed surgery.”He sighed.“What I didn’t tell you is that the experience sent me into such a depression, there were days I couldn’t get out of bed.Not being able to compete anymore was bad enough, but the worst of it was suddenly not having any goals, losing touch with my friends, and breaking up with my fiancée because we didn’t have anything in common anymore.”
“That’s terrible.”
He couldn’t acknowledge her sympathy if he wanted to go forward with this.“I wasn’t world-famous, but enough people knew my name that they wanted to ask about my glory days, and it hurt too much to relive them.So I deleted all my old social media accounts and asked my family and remaining friends to call me Spencer, but the fresh start and new job didn’t help.I was so miserable without this and in that office that I could barely function.
“I had to go on meds just to go about my days and spent some time in therapy, but I let it all drop after I got certified as a personal trainer and got my first gym job.I felt so much better after not having to be at an office anymore, and especially after I used my winnings to move to a new city where I could introduce myself to everyone as Spencer, that I didn’t think I still needed help.”
He paused to take a breath, leaving room for Misty to speak.“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the past few weeks brought me back to that time.When you left for the combine and told me about how you spent your days training for this once-in-a-lifetime event, it was a little too much like when everyone I was close to was on the competition circuit and I was languishing at home.I could feel myself falling back into old, bad feelings.”
“And you’re blaming me for your problems?”She looked semi-outraged, and he couldn’t say it wasn’t justified.
“I’m blamingme,” he said firmly.“My first therapist promised that nothing I said would leave that room, so I used our sessions as a forum to vent about everything I hated about my office job.I always came away feeling a little better for getting all that crap off my chest, and we talked about what I could do instead that didn’t involve the worst parts of that job.But I never talked about what sent me there in the first place.”
“You told me a friend asked you to help train his brother.”Misty looked suspicious.
“That really happened.My therapist encouraged me to go for it, and the experience made me realize there were options for me outside the corporate environment.But now here I am in my element, and this still happened to me, which goes to show that I wasn’t all the way in before.If any of my clients did something similar—half-assed the program and quit as soon as they started to do a tiny bit better—I’d smack them in the head.And when you get back to New York, I invite you to do that to me for being so careless with my mental health and for the way I treated you.I should be cheering you on instead of dragging you down.”
“Yeah, you should.”She still looked furious.
