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The man claimed to be a bit competitive, and that was why he was working so hard to keep up with her running pace for so long. Lee gave a slight shake of her head with an amused smile on her face.

But at least even he had admitted that it wasn't a very good excuse.

Lee hoped that he didn't take ‘losing’ too badly. Though, with the fact that he was still matching her pace, Lee was starting to wonder how long it would take him to realize that he had never even stood a chance.

And yet, he was still continuing to run beside her, stubbornly keeping pace despite the fact that he was really struggling to do so.

As they crossed the point that finished Lee’s first lap of the park, she glanced over at the man again. He was not going to be able to keep up much longer. No matter how hard he pushed himself. Not with the way that he was breathing.

Finally, though, he seemed to realize that fact himself, and that same amused smile returned to Lee’s face. ”Tonight,” Lee replied to him, the smile still on her face. ”I can guarantee that you are. Far out of your league.”

They were in the room, sitting on the couch. Dr Rossi had asked Tarin what the problem was that had brought him there. The problem that had prompted Lee to get this set up and have Tarin come in.

But Tarin just sat there. Silently. Still looking just as panicked, if not more so, than he had been in the waiting room.

Lee’s thumb rubbed slowly along the back of Tarin’s hand as she sat there looking at him. Trying to encourage him.

Eventually, Tarin just shook his head and sighed.

Lee knew that this was going to be hard. It had all been hard for her to talk with Dr Rossi years ago. It’d been hard for her to answer the woman’s questions the previous week when she had come in.

Tarin had never talked about issues before being with her, though. There were things that Tarin told her that he’d never spoken about before in his life, he had said. And though Tarin had seemed to open up more and more easily as the weeks and months had passed after that night, it appeared that it had simply gotten easier for Tarin to talk with Lee, not in general.

”Would it be ok if I tell her?” Lee asked Tarin, her eyes not leaving his face, her thumb still moving slowly across the back of his hand. ”Not everything. Just to get started?”

Tarin had agreed to at least try talking with Dr Rossi about what had happened to him. He was still very much doubting that it would help at all, but Lee was hopeful.

That was the good news, though. That Tarin was willing to try. When she had first brought the idea up to him, he wasn’t willing to even see the woman.

The other bit of good news was that Dr Rossi had an office in Manhattan, meaning that they didn’t have to travel all the way to Queens to see her. Because Lee was sure that Tarin would have used the distance as an excuse not to see the doctor.

But the day had come, and Lee and Tarin were sitting in a small waiting room outside the office Lee had had the session with Dr Rossi the previous week.

”Thank you for doing this,” Lee told him again quietly as she looked up at Tarin sitting beside her, giving his hand a slight squeeze.

A moment later, the door to the office opened and a man came out, followed by Dr Rossi.The man quickly left, and Lee glanced over to see Dr Rossi standing in the doorway. ”Tarin Brooks?” the doctor asked.

Lee looked over at Tarin again. ”I can go in with you if you want,” she reminded him softly. ”Or I can wait out here for you.”

The young woman on the other side of the counter looked confused when Lee ordered a large black. Lee was shocked into silence for a moment; surely ordering coffee at WcDonalds wasn’t that unusual that you had to spell out exactly what you wanted to that degree. Right?

It wasn’t like Lee had ordered a double double. At least then she would have understood the confusion.

After correcting the young woman and saying that she wanted a black coffee to go with her cookies, Lee paid, took her receipt, and stepped off to the side.

And saw that there was a free pie on the receipt.

Lee was about to step back up to the counter to say she didn’t need that pie, nothing had been messed up, the misunderstanding had been corrected before her order could have been made wrong when everything went south.

There was a man at the counter now, wearing a large coat despite the warm weather who was thrown against the wall by the man behind him.

Everything in the restaurant went into shocked silence for a moment as Lee sighed. This was why she had basically done nothing for six years beyond taking Kevin to school and stopping by the bar for paperwork and inventory. She couldn’t volunteer without a building collapsing on her and Tarin, and she couldn’t get coffee at WcDonalds without a mutant throwing another customer against the wall.

Then the man reached across the counter for the young woman, grabbing her by the throat, as the screaming started.

”Really?” Lee sighed. At least she still had energy from the night before and this wasn’t a pre-Tarin early morning coffee run where she was barely conscious.

Stepping forward quickly, Lee kicked at the back of the man’s knee, hard, hoping to drop him to his knees as she increased her siphoning. And if that didn’t get him to let go of the woman’s throat, she was prepared to make him.

Was Tarin actually blushing? It was really hard to tell with how close they were, his forehead resting against hers, but the idea made Lee smile wider than she already had been. She hadn’t been trying to get Tarin to blush, but it was a very nice effect of what she had said.

And Lee just continued to sit there with Tarin, foreheads together in silence as her fingers slowly moved through his hair until Tarin spoke. Even then, Lee was quiet for a few more moments.

”You already have helped,” Lee told him. ”But continuing this will help more.”

Lee turned toward the woman approaching as she got close, but before she spoke, and gave a friendly smile. ”Lee Smith,” she returned the introduction as she shook the woman’s hand. The science teacher’s hand. That made a lot more sense with the lab coat and apparent experiments around the room.

Did Lee have a current student at the mansion? No, but this also wasn’t a prospective school. ”Neither, actually,” Lee admitted before going on to explain further. ”My son is going to be starting here in the fall. But I realized that other than seeing where the classrooms were during his tour, I didn’t really know a whole lot about the teachers or specific classes or anything like that, so realized that it would probably be good to come over here for this today.”