Chapter 4

When he got back to his residence after the soccer game and meeting with Faraday the phone was ringing as he walked in. It was Joe Barber.

"Belle tells me you were at the soccer game and had an incident with Derek." Joe said sounding miffed.

"Not exactly. He began to go off on me about stealing players and I set him straight as to my intentions and he was quite OK with it. I met with Brian Faraday and he had done as I told him, to inform his coach that he was speaking to me. Everything was above board and I assured both of them that we would not interfere with his soccer schedule at all. Joe, if he makes the football team you realize that it will only help the soccer program here." Jared explained.

"Don't help it too much, I have enough to do. Another schedule and 15 more players and that psycho Brit is more than I think I can add to my plate." Joe said sounding all too serious.

"I wouldn't say that too loud Joe. Administration may look for someone who can, and maybe add Lacrosse too. Having too much work is a better alternative to not having a job. Lots of AD's handle it. You'll get a bigger staff and delegate more. You know the money they paid me wasn't just because I was a nice guy. They want results from the Athletic Department and if it has to expand to bring in more money, welcome it. I have a contract, they won't fire me unless they want to pay me off first and that won't happen." Jared warned him.

"I guess I have a hard time realizing we're in the big leagues now with a lot more on the line. Thanks for centering me a bit. Gee, I bet you would make a good coach." Joe said with a little snicker.

"When Ger meets with Brian I'll be sure you're invited to the work out. He'll be able to tell us real soon if Brian has the aptitude for it. I won't be there unless it's really early or late. But, just watch and don't make any comments." Jared said finishing his conversation.

"God, I think I'll pull the phone from the wall, or maybe just let the machine get the calls." He thought, fed up with the hoopla and the meeting of new people.

He decided to sit on the screened in breezeway with a couple beers and his half-finished Dennis Lehane mystery novel. He started the book almost 5 weeks before, but hadn't had time to get past the hook of the first few chapters. Mystery reading was always an escape for Jared, especially when they were on the road, plus he felt it sharpened his strategy skills ... He just drew the shades on the porch when he heard a knock on the door. He stole quietly into the house and tried to see who it was on his porch. The wreath on the door blocked a lot of the little 4 by 6 window in the door. He could make out it was dark haired woman, but she was turned just right so as not to let him see her face. Suspecting a sales pitch or an inquiring student he opened the door to just get rid of the distraction. The door no more than cracked when the person turned toward him and he sighed.

"Barbie, what in hell are you doing here? I never got your email until a few minutes ago." He said, irritated.

"THAT'S how you greet me?" She said breaking down in tears. "Do we truly have NOTHING left? I thought you might be a LITTLE happy to see me!"

Jared opened the door to allow her in and took her into his arms although she stiffened like she didn't want to be touched by him.

"If you're so unhappy to see me don't bother appeasing me. I'll just go and try to forget all the years we spent together and dash the dreams we had of a life together when you were all I lived for." She said laying a guilt trip on him.

"Barbie, stop the pity party. You drove all this way on a chance that I may or may not be here. I'm just shocked to see you, not unhappy." He said, lying.

"Fuck you Jared, you walked out of my life without a regret in the world. I've been going over in my mind the mistakes we made wondering if they're worth fixing and I came to one conclusion. I still love you as much now as ever and I cannot believe you don't love me the same way. I take total responsibility for the last 2 or 3 years and how I let our love life slide, and how I took you for granted. But you never made one FUCKING EFFORT to challenge me IN ALL THAT TIME!" She said going into a verbal attacking mode.

"You could have pulled me out of the funk I was in, but you let me linger on. Didn't you feel any passion the last time we made love?" She asked through her sputtering tears.

"Barbie, that was two horny people fucking, not making love."

"So, you feel NOTHING for me?" She asked, her face scrunched up ready to bear the answer she didn't want to hear.

"I can't truthfully say that. We've had too much together, but I felt more like your brother than anything the last few years, and you seemed to be so happy with that. The few times we did "make love" it was just mutual use of each others bodies for masturbation." Jared said sorry his words were going to hurt her.

"How can you be so cruel, Jared? I came here to be encouraged by your feelings for me and instead you made me feel like a silly ass teenager who imagined a love that wasn't there. WE HAD A REAL LOVE DAMMIT!" She spat through her tears.

"I KNOW WE DID, but you let it slip away. I couldn't compete with your job, the television or your workouts. I would come home from work and you would be in your laptop, watching a soap opera you taped or in the den on the treadmill or stair climber. I would go to bed at 10 and you were still watching the crap you taped all week. I would cook you a nice dinner and put it on the table and you would take your plate and bring it in the living room. On nights you actually sat with me to eat you would inhale it and be off to the TV saying "Leave the dishes, I'll get them later." Does THAT sound familiar?" Jared said tapping his fingers in the palm of his other hand and he made each point.

Barbie seemed to melt in place as she began crying uncontrollably sinking to her knees, then to the side holding herself up with her arms. Tears were dripping onto the floor as she bawled. Jared couldn't bare to look and had to walk away.

She looked up from the floor and implored him, "Aren't you even going to try and comfort me!!"

"No, and for two reasons. One you will think it's all better then, and it's not. Two, how you feel right now is how I've felt for the past two years when I went to bed alone or tried to do something TOGETHER with you. That's why when I got this offer I was OUT." Jared said turning away.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SOMETHING??" She implored him once again.

"Because you seemed to be happy and content and you let me know how it would be if we got married, you happy and content in your little world of escapism, and me frustrated as a prisoner in a relationship with someone I knew too well and had loved too much to leave. However when 2 and a half million dollars called from 3 hours away with new challenges I found something I might love more and could leave you for with no regrets. Plain and simple there is the answer to the question you've been asking your self since you saw the newspaper that morning. I wasn't going to tell you until Wednesday to make the time of pain shorter for you. You wanted the whole truth and there you have it. Don't think I hate you, because I do not. If you ever discover within yourself the woman I loved and cherished please come back to me and see if you can sweep ME off MY feet." He told her without regard for her feelings or regret for any words.

Barbie sat for a few minutes as if dumbfounded as she filed the words away and thought about their application to hers, their, situation.

"So, you just told me in a long and round about way that you still love me and the life we had and can have." She deduced aloud.

"I guess you can read it that way." Jared said.

"But," he said after a long pause, "It doesn't mean I'm waiting for you or expect you to change back. My moving here without asking you to join me was my break off. I've moved on. I don't want you to come back and act like I want you to, I want you to come back and be who you were so we can be who WE were. I don't think that's possible for you to do. You were too content for too long. You need to search inside yourself and see if I'm what you really want. Your little world of TV escapes and work while curled up on the couch or running on the treadmill made you happy and content. You don't need me as I see it."

"Jared, the young girl who made love to you a couple times a day and sucked your dick all week after feeding you her pussy is all grown up and those times are past us." Barbie said defending herself.

"Who says they are? Are we 50 or 60 or 70? Have our sexual organs dried up and fallen off? We both have needs and wants and sharing them with someone you love makes them that much more intense, more rewarding. What's the matter with rolling over in the morning to be inside of you to give us each an orgasm to start, or finish the day. What's wrong with tasting each other's very core and making each other happy. It's the togetherness of our own little worlds colliding and becoming one. I can walk into a bookstore with you and look across the expanse of it and see you, your cute little ass wiggling as you shuffle from shelf to shelf and say to myself, "I'll be inside of her later and we'll both hold onto each other while the greatest joy a body can feel sweeps over us." I can notice a man looking at you as you pass by and say to myself, "Eat your heart out. I'll have her so hot for me later that she'll taste my cock and worship the seed that flows from it." That's all part of the love we USED to share and there's no reason why we can't have that again. But, I can't live on the memory of it. Wait, actually I can, because when we ARE at a time or an age when we can't actually make each other happy that way, we can hug and hold each other remembering the joys we made for each other. That's love. Hiding at your work station to obsess over your job, curling up on the sofa in a trance to watch mundane playhouse life's unfold on the TV and taping every insipid stupid movie to watch later isn't. I laud you for doing your best to keep yourself in shape, but less TV time eating junk food that you have to work off later would be even more time for us to spend together. Your priority used to be us, and now it's not. If that's the way you want it, fine. I want you to be happy, but I have to be happy too, and I wasn't."

Barbie heard his words and looked as if she were looking inside of herself, and then sprung up. Her tears had stopped and her feet found the sandals she had kicked off when she started her crying jag. She went to the front door saying she would be "right back." He saw her go to her car and get a box of things and return to the door with them.

She dropped the box saying, "Here, these are yours. I may or may not be back. It may be soon, it may be later. Maybe not at all. You were a fucking prick for never saying anything before, but I think I understand why and I can live with that, ... NOW.

You never gave me fucking answers." She said bitterly as she went out the door.

Jared went to the door and hollered for her to hear. "You never asked the questions."

She stopped in her tracks and came back almost to the porch. "If you're a betting person, bet that I'll be screwing Jar-Jar before long. I think I love you too much to let you go. I don't think you have enough passion to screw around with anyone else, so I don't have to worry about that, you'll hear from me one way or another." She said pointing her fingers with a smirk.

"Too late." He said to let her know he had already screwed around.

She stopped and turned. "Too late huh?" She laughed. "That's male ego bullshit."

"Come in and look in my hamper for my underwear, smell her pussy on it. No wait, she wiped me off with the towel I cleaned the cum off her back with. But you still might smell her." He said coolly.

She locked her eyes to his and waited for the blink, as it were. In a few moments she knew he was telling the truth. She wanted to lash out at him, but couldn't.

"No one will ever treat you as well as I have, as well as I did in the good days. No one will ever have Jar-jar but me." Barbie said before turning and getting into her car and leaving.

Jared was almost hopeful that she would take inventory of her life and come back. Her reference to Jar-jar was her pet name for him when they were in bed. She would use the name in a cutesy voice and ask dirty questions to make him crazy. "Does Jar-jar want to feed Barbie some sweet Jar-jar juice? Does Jar-jar want to warm his big hard cock in Barbie's pootie-puss?" He thought it was cute, until the Star Wars prequels came out and the character Jar-Jar Binks emerged. She stopped using it then and it never came up again, until now.

She drove away leaving Jared on the porch. He was very satisfied with himself for telling her off, in a way, but most of all he was happy that he told her the truth as he thought it was in his mind. He loved sticking it to her that he had already moved on and had a sexual affair. However it was not lost on him that the scent she briefly left as she passed him and that was in the clothes and things in the box, excited him. He took a small pile of t-shirts from the box, his t-shirts that she regularly wore to bed, and smelled them. Even if he hated the person who just walked from his home, and he was sure he didn't, the scent on the shirts was Barbie, the woman he loved so dearly not so long ago.

He went about reading his book in the breezeway and polishing off the 2 beers he promised himself, only to top them off with two more. With a big day looming he checked the TV for anything that might look interesting and opted for an ESPN show on Joe Paterno and other legendary college coaches. He startled at the strike of 10 in the grandfather clock that was part of the furnishings and realized he may have been sleeping for a half-hour or more. He went to bed after setting his alarm and had trouble sleeping. Barbie would have loved to get the information that he went to the sack of clothes she brought and took out one of his t-shirts she regularly wore to bed and put it over one of the pillows on the bed. After a few minutes of snuggling it to his face he jerked off to relieve the uncomfortable erection he could not help. Barbie still had an effect on him and he would freely admit it to himself, and probably no others for now

Monday morning left no hangover of thoughts about Barbie and what she meant to him, what she did to him. He was all work and his day was planned. His first meeting was with Ann Comeche and her staff to go over her plans to get the new refurbished football program off the ground at NEAT. At 8:45 he went through the doors of the Sports Administration office searching for Ann's office. He only knew it was upstairs over his ground floor office that led right out to the old practice field, a field he planned to put back into use. He wanted the players to feel special when the stepped onto the New England Meditek Stadium field. Only last pre-game practice and actual games would take place there. It was another reminder that they were students first.

He checked the directory and headed up to her second floor office. The halls of the Sports Admin building were busy but he saw her door at the end of the hallway. Just ahead of it he passed a larger classroom type room with a sign "Staff meets Coach Winslow 9:00 a.m." on it. As he passed by it to Ann's office he saw Connie Nixon, his seeming groupie among the group waiting for the get-together to begin.

He knocked on Ann's door and let himself in. She was busy at her desk writing on a legal pad when she looked up momentarily to acknowledge him.

"Good Morning Coach Winslow, I'll be with you in a moment. Normally I would have coffee here, but we're set up next door for a small get-together with coffee, doughnuts and pastries." She said barely looking up.

"You can leave your briefcase there on my secretary's desk, it will be safe there, I'll be locking this up when we go next door. We actually share a secretary, an intern. We can discuss that later." She said finishing her note, ripping it from the pad and putting it in an envelope.

"Oh, OK." Jared said. "I usually type all my own things up, but if I ever have the need for help..."

"We can discuss that later Coach Winslow. Very quickly, here is the outline of what I'll cover in this get together with staff and I ask you to just agree with everything for now and get them a little gung-ho. Only four of them will be here in the summer and the rest will re-join the staff in the fall. There will also be the box office staff there. There's six full timers who will be there the summer through and the rest are interns."