Free The Kissing Coach by Mimi Strong Page A

rules: Seeing a client outside of a session is a bad idea, unless it's a large social gathering. Lesson learned , I told myself. Unfortunately for us humans, we learn more from personal pain than from anything else. I knew, intellectually, that I should have declined a lunch invitation, but I'd gone and accepted, and now I had to choke down a spicy lunch while a pretty girl flirted with Devin, right in front of me.
    The rest of lunch was miserable.
    Devin shared some anecdotes about managing a hotel, but I put up my professional walls and steered away from sharing any stories about coaching, citing confidentiality.
    After we'd eaten, I insisted on picking up the bill, telling him I could write it off against my taxes. I tipped the waitress a generous twenty-five percent, to overcompensate for my feelings of wanting to push her into a tar pit.

    On the bright side, I did make it back to my apartment before the curried lamb made its dramatic and fiery exit from my digestive system.
    Lesson learned, I told myself for the second time of the day. Curry does not agree with me.
    I didn't have any client appointments until six o'clock—people with actual day jobs tend to be the ones with the money to pay for coaching, so a lot of my work takes place after five—so I spent the rest of the afternoon on my computer, looking into returning to school.
    My first time in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do as a career, so my courses had been a scatter-shot assortment of general studies. At twenty-two, however, I was a much different person than seventeen-year-old me, and some of the specific programs actually looked appealing.
    I had more of an idea about how the world worked, and what made me tick.
    I filled out some forms to receive information on a few programs. All the details were available online, but requesting something on paper felt more likely to lead to something real. We humans are symbolic creatures, and we love the idea of a process, even if it's having readily-available-online information delivered to us on paper, by a person who wears blue polyester shorts no matter the season.

    On Friday night, Steph invited me to go clubbing. I couldn't think of an excuse, so she and a couple of our other girlfriends came over to my place to get glammed-up and have starter drinks.
    Our friend Kat was back in town, and she was smoking again, despite being paranoid about getting those vertical smoker lines around her mouth.
    She stood directly under the fan in my bathroom, blowing smoke straight up, which in her opinion, was better than smoking on my patio with the door open, because “the smoke just drifts back in again, and this way it's gone, see?”
    I applied liquid eyeliner to our other friend, Marnie, and tried not to argue with Kat. My house was made of glass, anyway. I'd also smoked for a few years, because it was such a convenient way for me to punish myself for not being more loveable, second only to an eating disorder, of course. I'd only dabbled in the latter for a few months, and then I'd met Steph, and we started kissing boys at parties, and I didn't want to have vomit-breath.
    “Ow,” Marnie said in regard to my eyeliner-application.
    “Sorry. My mind was wandering.”
    She pushed my hand and turned to admire herself in the mirror.
    Steph crowded her way into the mirror and got the four of us to pose for some photos.
    “We look hot,” Kat said, giving herself a sexy look through her fringe of blue-black hair.
    Marnie giggled. “We should have our own show.”
    Kat said, “Marnie, you need to change that shirt. It makes me feel sad. You are making the whole group look five percent less attractive.”
    Marnie rolled her eyes. “But it's comfortable. And it's on my body, not yours, Kant .”
    We all giggled at the addition of the letter n to Kat's name. It was a juvenile thing to make her name sound like the c-word, but Kat seemed to enjoy it more and more each time. She took pride in being a c-word the way