It's the summer break, and for the first time in his life, Mike would rather stay in the bloody classroom.<br><br>It's wedding season, and Mike is doomed to spend all summer sipping cheap champagne and pretending he likes tiny portions of posh food. From the passive-aggressive torment of Mike's mother-in-law to the insulting incredulity of his colleagues over what his mysterious husband actually looks like, Mike would voluntarily teach sex education to fourteen-year-olds for the rest of his life if it would only get him out of one more wedding. Even his husband in a kilt isn't going to save this one.<br><br>But there's nothing like watching someone else get hitched to remind him of where he's come from ... and where he's determined to go from here.

Married Ones

Of course Emma had been Ryan Mayhew back then.


Christ, maybe Emma was the kid his mentor had been talking about when Mike had started training.


“There’ll be kids you remember in forty years when you’re done,” she’d said. “Some kids will be shit kids who end up in the papers and prison. Others will be the kids who went off and played for England or whatever. But you won’t remember those kids. You’ll remember the kids nobody else will have ever heard of.”


Keys rattled. The front door popped open. Mike hastily tore his gaze away from the card and pulled his most aloof, disinterested, Alan-Rickman-worthy expression into place, just as a head poked around the living room door.


“And where,” he asked severely, “have you been?”


Chapter 3