Read Online Time Skip by Craig L. Seymour - Free Book Online Page B

again that he needed to tell Katie. That he would have to get it out in the open so that she would leave him alone, and he could move on. And as the semester ended and they prepared to go home, she could see that he was getting worse. The thought of facing Katie was overwhelming him. So Trina did what she shouldn’t have, but, what needed doing. She stole Katie’s number from his phone book and told her everything she knew.
    Then she confessed what she had done.
    “You did what?” Lovelle could barely contain his rage. “What gives you the right?”
    Trina stood her ground. “You weren’t going to do it and it had to be done.” She answered him calmly. He had never yelled at her before, and she didn’t want to give him any extra reason to do so. “She said that she would take your call whenever you were ready.”
    That was a call he wasn’t sure he could ever make. And Katie didn’t call him anymore.
     
    *****
    With Katie no longer the preoccupation of his life, Lovelle was finally able to function again. He was still plenty miserable, but, he was now functionally miserable. He looked over the past year and was amazed at how thoroughly he had screwed up nearly every plan he had set into motion, and in such a short span of time. Not only had he destroyed his personal life, but he had lost sight of his professional goal. He had spent three years trying to position himself for a career in the FBI. Then, over the last year, he had done nothing to further that goal. It was his junior year and he should have been intensifying his efforts. Instead, he was just coasting academically, not bothering in any way to do, or even to find out, what was necessary to become a candidate.
    His grades had suffered, but, taken as a whole with his other years at State, he still had a strong academic record to stand on. He just had to re-engage and put himself back on the right track. He set everything else aside and buckled down in his final year. While everyone around him seemed to be on a five year plan, Lovelle would graduate precisely on time, and with a solid final year behind him.
    Lovelle knew that joining the FBI was not just as simple as doing well in school and then letting the doors just swing open for him. They had very particular qualifications they looked for in a candidate, and they were not necessarily what one might expect. Academically they were primarily interested in accountants and people with higher degrees, particularly lawyers. Criminal justice, which was his major, did not show up on their list. He had known all this, but he was not simply looking for a career with the bureau. He was aiming for a very specific type of assignment that he didn’t see an accountant’s degree getting for him. The other avenues for people with undergraduate degrees included work experience, and language skills.
    He had discovered this anomaly pretty early on in his college career, so he tried to set himself up as the ideal non-traditional candidate. He took four years of Arabic and became moderately proficient at it. And, he minored in Accounting for good measure. If that didn’t work, he just figured that he would transition to plan B. That would mean getting some experience as a police officer. It would slow him down, but, it still seemed like a workable plan. So he gathered up all of his records, and applied.
    Lovelle expected the process would take several months, so he went back to living life as best he could. He got his old summer sales job back and tried not to dwell too much on losing Katie.
    That summer he took an unplanned break from his goal driven existence. For nearly six years he had made almost every decision in light of how it would affect his future with either Katie or the Bureau. Suddenly, both of these things were out of his hands. This was simultaneously depressing and liberating. Each time he found himself feeling a sense of relief from all of the pressure, he felt tremendous guilt. He told himself that it