12:45. What an awful time to organize anything. Perhaps it wasn't bad for a stay-at-home mom or something, but for a middle school English teacher, it sucked. But today was a half-day for the students, so he was in his car by 12:30. The fabric of the seats already stunk of smoke from years of exposure to it, but to Matt, it was merely another comforting smell like freshly baked cookies or a new book. Unfinished manuscripts and notebooks which contained other manuscripts littered the back of the silver Prius. Only the front two seats were kept empty: one for him and one for Rachel.
Right now, however, Rachel's seat housed his bag and a few packs of cigarettes that had fallen out of said bag. Presently, he flicked a lighter until a flame rose up to light the cigarette. It was a lighter he may or may not have borrowed and never returned from a fellow teacher. Either way, he had never been asked to return it. The first lungful of smoke began to sate the near-maddening hankering he had had for a cigarette. Mondays were always the worst in terms of his habit, for he refused to call it an addiction. Whereas he had the entire weekend to smoke without limitations, federal law prohibited him from smoking in the class room. Cigarette clamped between his lips, he pounded out a message on his cell phone for Rachel:
"Do you need me to pick you up to take you to the birthing class, or are you getting there yourself?"
In the meantime, he turned to one of the classic rock stations on Sirius XM in his car. His commute to and from work was his classic rock time, given Rachel's dislike for the genre. By then, the cigarette between his lips had worn down to a nub, and he casually flicked it out of his window before pulling out of the school's parking lot. Overall, he was quite unworried for the birthing class. There was, however, a nagging worry in the back of his mind that he might feel the urge to smoke but would be unable to with so many pregnant women around. Already, he'd begun to smoke outside instead of around Rachel, but the smell still clung to his clothing. The baby-blue polo and khakis he wore now just about reeked of it, but he was quite oblivious to the fact.
The nicotine patch on his arm itched. Wait. Shit. He'd worn the patch so that he wouldn't need to smoke in the first place. He'd worn a nicotine patch for a while now, trying desperately to ween himself off of them. It was a long process though, right? Any effort was admirable.