Tampa (10 page)

“I have to get rid of this,” he said, looking down.

“Hold your backpack over it.” I placed my hand on his shoulder and began walking him to the door. “That will go away when you start walking. There’s nothing sexy about hurrying to class.”

Now I had to reveal a bit of planning on my part; I hoped it wouldn’t make things seem too contrived. I reached into my purse and handed him a prepaid cell phone. “Take this. My number is the only contact programmed in. Only use this phone to text me. No one else. Don’t call anyone else on it, don’t text anyone else on it.” The number was for a matching prepaid in my car that I’d bought with cash over the summer—an optimistic venture that helped me manage the long wait for classes to begin.

He looked at the phone in his hand like it was a living thing, a small animal he hoped might wake up soon.

“Put it away,” I urged. “Never bring it to school. Text me later if you can meet up.” With that, I gave him a kiss on the neck that ended with a small lick upon his pulse point, unlocked the door and watched him stumble out into the rain.

In that day’s
remaining three classes, time seemed to stretch and bend. I found myself constantly looking to the clock, then back out to the students’ faces. By sixth period my extended suffering led me
to audibly lament my predicament. “Do you ever feel like the school day will never be over?” The classroom became a landscape of
nodding
heads.

“You’re, like, the only adult who gets it, Mrs. Price,” Trevor said. My eyes found him in the back of the room and I smiled. He’d hooked up with a new girlfriend, a quirky thing named Darcy who hadn’t the faintest idea how to correctly use a comma. They sat
together
in the back, holding hands across the desks and playing
footsie
while passing a notebook of inside jokes back and forth. Now as I watched Trevor’s fingers rubbing Darcy’s palm with rhythmic small circles, I found that my jealousy at their ability to touch openly in the classroom was a nice torture, like running my finger through a lighter’s flame just a little too slowly; I liked the way it drove me crazy thinking about what could be in store with Jack tonight. Were Darcy and Trevor having sex yet? At least oral, I figured. Like two human leopards, their necks, as well as Darcy’s upper chest, were spotted with a series of hickeys ranging from maroon to a twilight purple.

When the bell did finally ring, all the students save the happy couple ran from the classroom. Trevor and Darcy were always the last to leave, each bogged down in the fog of consideration,
imploring
one another with offers of assistance and questions about
after-school
plans. Then they headed for my desk, where Trevor liked to make a comment that aimed to be impressive while Darcy stood by him silently like a conjoined twin. “Have you seen the movie version where Hester and Dimmesdale do it in a pile of wheat?” he asked.

I nodded. “It looks good but I don’t know if nudity and grain particles mix. It seems kind of like beach sex, right? There are some places where sand can be downright painful.” The shock on their
faces was sweet to devour. They began to laugh as the door swung wide, an opened drain that sucked all the levity and oxygen from the room. Assistant Principal Rosen walked in. Oddly, my first thought wasn’t of Jack at all but the joke I’d just told—had he been listening at the door? But then it came to me in a single blow that felt as though I might have an accident in my chair; my stomach twisted hot and sharp and the sound of my pulse swelled inside my ears. I licked my lips, feeling my armpits begin to dampen. “Trevor, Darcy, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Rosen scowled at the pair, examining their necks with a look of repulsion. His wing-tip loafers moved back a few steps to allow them a wider berth by which to exit. He seemed to think their
hickeys
were the contagious sores of leprosy. “No holding hands,” he called after them. “All students signed an anti-PDA contract on the first day of classes, remember? Page two of the conduct handbook?” Their hands fell apart momentarily, then rejoined with the force of attaching magnets the moment they stepped outside the classroom. I gave a nervous laugh.

“Young love,” I joked. He began an assessing loop around the classroom, stopping to examine each lame poster the textbook
companies
sent that I’d half-assedly taped to the walls in an effort to blend in. There was a timeline of Shakespeare’s life, the text of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” printed in microscopic lettering to form the overall shape of a large black bird.

“Celeste,” he began, his tone sullen, “I’m afraid we have a
problem
.” Scanning my desk, my eyes fell on the metal body of the
industrial
stapler. It might be possible, if I hit him hard enough with it on the back of the head to knock him unconscious, for me to escape if the police weren’t yet there. I pictured them leading me away in
handcuffs as Ford, having heard the location of the arrest on his CB, pulled up and ran toward me, suspecting there’d been a
misunderstanding
his connections might easily clear up. I stood and gingerly walked over to the window to peek through the blinds for cop cars.

“This is an awkward conversation for me,” he admitted. “I don’t enjoy this part of my job at all. No administrator wants situations like these to come up. But when they do, they fall on my plate.”

I didn’t see any vehicles on the east side of the building.
Crossing
the room, I looked out the blinds of a west-facing window.
Perhaps
the police hadn’t been called yet? Since it was one of the better school districts, I realized it was quite possible they didn’t want the arrest to take place on school grounds. Maybe things hadn’t reached the point of arrest—maybe they’d only heard hallway talk from a few of Jack’s friends, enough to summon Jack down to the office, but he’d denied it; nevertheless, such allegations had to be taken
seriously
and I’d be suspended pending an investigation. The fact that Jack had told others, and had told them immediately, was infinitely problematic. Could my instincts about him have been that wrong? Blinded by lust, I supposed, anything was possible. Perhaps what I was most guilty of was impatience.

“I know you’re new here,” he continued. “And I don’t want you to get the impression that this is a common occurrence. In fact this is one of the only situations of its kind we’ve ever had to deal with.” He walked up to my desk and rapped the knuckles of his balled fist against it a few times. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said, turning his back to me. “It pisses me off more than I can even say.”

The classroom door was close—mere feet away from where I was standing. I had the urge to run, though that would merely prolong the inevitable. It would also seem a positive admission of
guilt. Perhaps things weren’t as bad as I feared; maybe Rosen didn’t believe the rumors at all. It could actually be the students he was pissed at, the randy boys who’d let their imaginations go wild over the attractive young teacher during her first semester on the job.

“Janet Feinlog has got to go,” he said flatly.

“Janet?” Relief flooded my chest with a mentholated cooling sensation; I found myself smiling uncontrollably and even let out a little laugh. He turned his stern face to me and wrinkled his brow. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to recover, “excuse my reaction. It’s just that Janet is such a strange bird.”

He nodded. “Strange isn’t the half of it. She’s a horrible teacher. Her students’ section of the FCAT has been the lowest of the
district
for the past decade. Her classroom is unruly; we get more
parent
complaints about Janet than all the other teachers combined. She has no rapport with teenagers. Do you know what she told one of the parents at open house?”

“Oh no,” I said.

“Oh yes. She told a parent, a
mother
, that she has fantasies of working in a juvenile detention center where they make the kids wear shock collars.”

Objectively, I could see how Janet might excel in such a position.

“She can’t continue here. Now, this is pathetic seeing as you’ve been with us for all of two months, but I think you’re the best friend Janet has on staff.  You’re the only one I’ve ever heard her say good things about. Apparently you pushed some volunteer help her way?”

“I just want Janet to be as effective of a teacher as possible.” I smiled. “For the kids.”

“Well I truly appreciate that. But I think our efforts are lost on this one. I need your input on breaking the news to her. We’ll have
security escort her from the building, of course, but I’d still prefer to make as small a scene as possible. I just can’t read the woman. Do you think she’s capable of doing something violent? Returning to the campus with a weapon?”

I winced at how easily I could picture Janet holding an
automatic
rifle while wearing an oversized yellow smiley-face T-shirt. “Well …”

“Sorry,” he said. “My mind tends to go dark. On the brighter side, Janet’s departure will free up a classroom in the main building, and you’ll have seniority over whomever we hire to replace her. No more stepchild in the attic.” He smiled. “We can move you on up to the big house.”

Suddenly all the panic inside me that had recently drained gushed back in full force. The main building meant doors with glass viewing panels, other faculty constantly dropping in
unannounced
with their petty needs. Everything said in class would be audible from the hallway—no more sex talk veiled behind a thin veneer of literary studies. No more swearing. No more private
flirtations
with Jack after the bell rang.

“Mr. Rosen”—I smiled, running my fingers through my hair with a slow thoughtfulness—“I do absolutely agree with you that things have got to change. But I wonder if Janet might be able to turn things around with the further help of some mentoring. My student teaching days generated such … energy in me. And this Mrs. Pachenko who’s working with Janet … I’m really excited about that partnership. Mrs. Pachenko is completely by the book.”

He took a seat on my desk, his pants rising up to reveal trouser socks patterned with rows of tiny rainbow-trout icons. “Go on.”

“What if every few weeks I started observing Janet’s classroom
during my grading period? I could give her feedback and submit
reports
to you of her progress, or her lack of progress. And maybe I could get her to come observe my class during her grading period. It might give her a new perspective. Like you said, she and I have a good working relationship. I think she’d be open to it, coming from me.”

He shrugged. “Well that’s very generous of you. I’m ready to throw in the towel and burn it. But she certainly can’t get any worse. If there’s a way to avoid the headache of having to fire a longtime union worker, I’m all for it.”

“Thank you.” I smiled. “I’m glad for the opportunity.”

He tilted his head and gave a pleased nod in my direction. “If even a quarter of the faculty had your spirit, we’d have the best school in North America.” Standing, he offered his hand, which I embraced between both of mine. “We’re very lucky to have you here.”

On his way out, he stopped and pointed his arm across the rows of empty chairs. “But luckiest of all are all these kids. You’re
fantastic
with them. I know.” He winked. “I’ve got my ear to the ground.”

That night at 7:23
P.M.
, I picked Jack up for the first time in
front of a combination Taco Bell/Long John Silver’s. It wasn’t dark yet, but in the low light of sunset, eyes could easily be mistaken—passersby thinking they saw Jack entering a red Corvette might have to admit that it could’ve been any boy his size who looked similar, and though they were nearly certain of the make and model of the car, perhaps the color, tinged by the sunset’s pink glare, had only looked red in that moment.

“Thanks for coming.” I smiled. “Buckle up.”

He’d changed into a different, preppier outfit than he’d worn to school; in fact he looked ready to go to a casual job interview at a supermarket—khakis and a striped polo shirt—and the very ends of his hair were slightly wet, telling of a recent shower. His skin bore a soapy-sweet fragrance of cologne; I smiled thinking of the bitter flavor its spice would leave on my tongue. “I like your car,” he offered.

I began to head out of town toward the nearby bay area and its long rows of mangroves where we could park undisturbed. The traffic soon began to perturb me—it was an unwelcome contrast to the adolescent morsel strapped into my passenger seat. We
immediately
became trapped behind a livestock truck of chickens; when I was finally able to pass, a hideous woman simultaneously operating a station wagon and cramming a Whopper into her mouth came into view. “Aren’t people revolting in general?” I complained.

Jack offered back a polite smile. I noticed him eyeing the car’s center console, my hand gripping the top of the gearshift.

“Can you drive a stick?”

He shook his head. “I wish. I can’t drive at all. I can get my learner’s in February though.”

“Well we’ll have to give you some lessons,” I offered. This seemed to please him a great deal, although it wasn’t a genuine
proposal
. But I followed it up with a more earnest suggestion. “Jack?”

“Yes?” He was so nervous that it was hard for me to gauge his level of horniness.

“You can touch me, you know. Anywhere you want while I drive. My windows are tinted.” He swallowed and looked straight ahead for a moment, rubbing his sweaty palms against his pants while giving himself an inward pep talk.

“Okay.” He finally nodded. He placed a sweaty hand on my bare knee, then sat motionless for a minute before his fingers began to gently move in one direction and then another, sliding
incrementally
farther up my thigh. I began to moan but my enthusiasm was slightly dampened when we passed a graphic pro-life billboard, then an advertisement for septic repair service whose mascot was an anthropomorphized plunger. I sighed—Jack and I needed a
highway
all our own, devoid of reminders about life’s daily vulgarities. Even the rusted exteriors of the jalopies we sped by seemed
ominous
harbingers of unwelcome news, announcing that my time with Jack, that our bodies and everything we’d each ever known, would all inevitably decay and fall apart.

In an attempt to get his hand closer to my genitals, I lifted my pelvis off the seat, pushing it forward against his fingers in a way that forced me to widen the placement of my legs on the floor and
the gas pedal and hunch over the steering wheel for balance in a crablike pose. I reminded myself not to scare him at first with
outright
demands for more; instead I praised the very restrained
motions
he was managing. “That feels so good, Jack.” I stole a quick look at his face as I peered behind my seat to change lanes and get on the highway; his eyes were fixed wide upon my airborne lap. Not once did Jack ask me where we were going. He had a perfect sense of what wasn’t important.

Eventually his fingers found a rhythm of stroking my thigh, which made it hard not to close my eyes in pleasure for seconds at a time, but the distractions of the road did finally seem to fade. I didn’t feel like I was driving or even knew where we were going; instead it seemed the vehicle had been programmed to whisk us off to privacy and I was there merely to steer. Each time Jack’s
slippery
fingers massaged my leg I contemplated stopping earlier and choosing a closer place, but I knew I had to let strategy override lust for just a while longer—what we were about to do was dangerous enough; impulsive decisions would open the door to a whole new set of risky variables. I stayed on the highway until the planned exit, keeping my needs temporarily reined in, and made every
single
turn required to arrive at an outpost of the lost. Jack’s shaking had risen from a shiver to a tremor. “Are you cold?” I asked. Jack didn’t seem to know how to respond.

“I’m not sure,” he finally said.

Roughly half an hour after I’d picked him up, we pulled into the overgrown tree-lined drive of a long-abandoned farm. “It’s safe here,” I announced. He nodded back at me, eyes filled with eager uncertainty, looking briefly out his car window into the
pitch-blackness
surrounding us as if to scan for predators. “No one’s going
to interrupt us,” I stressed, my voice a honeyed invitation. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

With that I took off my shirt, watching his eyes lock onto my bra. There was a Christmas-morning feel to the way I slid off my shorts to reveal lace thong panties, then crawled over the console, purposefully arching my spine to push my left butt cheek inches from his face as I jumped into the backseat—every step of the
process
seemed like a new gift being given. “It’s a little cramped, but we can lie down.” I motioned to him. “Take off your clothes and come back here with me.” He removed his shirt, then his shoes and pants, lifting himself toward me with a visible erection beneath his blue boxers.

“You have a great body,” I told him. His build was the slender, undeveloped wiry sort whose tautness revealed the shadowy
promise
of muscles not yet arrived.

“I’m too skinny,” he began, but I quickly placed one hand across his mouth to avoid further speech and with the other began rubbing across his chest and down his stomach, dipping a finger inside the elastic band of his shorts to stroke the starting
delineation
of his pubic hair. I felt his lips part beneath my hand to breathe more heavily; his eyes were traveling a vertical circuit from my crotch up to my breasts. “Have you ever taken off a girl’s bra before?” He shook his head no. “They’re mysterious little
contraptions
,” I said, turning my back to him and raising the veil of my blond hair over my right shoulder to clear his view. “Go ahead and give it a try.” His hands shook as he stumbled with the tiny metal hooks; he was nearly panting as he bent in closer to my back, struggling to see the bra’s petite mechanics in the dark. I could smell the mint chewing gum on his breath—he’d indeed prepared
himself for a make-out session. Could consent have been any more transparent? Eventually I felt the release of its pressure and Jack gave a victorious sigh.

“Bravo.” I smiled at him from over my shoulder, then dropped the bra to the ground and turned back to face him bare-chested. “You’ve got me pretty worked up, Jack.” His hands were down at his sides, bracing; he’d scooted back over to the right, as far away from me as the tiny backseat would allow. I got up on all fours and crawled over to him, my breasts hanging level with his face. “Feel how hard my nipples are.” He started to reach out his hand but I pulled away and gave him a teasing smile. “Not with your fingers,” I said, correcting him. “With your tongue.”

Nodding, he scooted closer and stuck his tongue as far out from his lips as he could manage, as though he’d just been dared to lick a metal pole in the winter. His eyes were open wide, visually taking in the target—he seemed to be worried that he wouldn’t be able to find my breast if he closed them. I lowered my head and watched the pink-on-pink contact, my nipple beginning to glisten with Jack’s saliva. Dutifully, he fully wetted one, moved over and wetted the other, then sat back and looked up at me with eyes that awaited further instruction. “That felt perfect,” I said
encouragingly
. “I knew you’d be really good at this.” I sat down in front of him with my legs bent open; the thin lace string of the thong covered the tip of my clitoris but not much else. “Have you ever put your fingers inside a girl?”

Even in the dark I could make out the hot blush that was
covering
his cheeks. “I haven’t done much,” he said. The sound of his breathing suggested he was running away from something.

“Why is that?” I asked. “You’re certainly good-looking.” My
hands wrapped around the jersey of his cloth-covered penis and began to stroke. He folded a leg up and sat on it, squirming with nervous energy as the speed of my fingers increased. Compliments seemed to freak him out more than relax him.

“I’m just shy with girls I guess,” he said. I watched him swallow three times before speaking again. “I never know what to say.”

I lifted my hands from the wad of fabric swirled up around the shape of his erection and found the panel opening of the crotch, then slowly moved it down to reveal his penis. Lowering my head so my hair fell across it, I spoke just above it like it was a microphone. “You can relax, Jack,” I said, bathing its tip in my warm breath. “You don’t have to say anything.” With that, I licked my lips, then slid them down over him, slowly arching my neck and extending my throat until my mouth came to the base. He made a gasping noise and bucked a little, writhing in a disoriented way that bumped the head of his cock against the roof of my mouth. I gave him a quick thirty seconds of advanced sucking, my tongue fluttering against his underside until I could taste the salty bitters of pre-ejaculate, then sat back up and wiped my mouth off on my arm.

His face had transformed into a foreign mask of disbelief. He looked down at his erection as though he was trying to confirm it was still attached to his body. I grabbed his right hand, which was clammy and limp, bereft of all resistance. I felt like I needed to
continue
talking to him, the way one would a victim of hypothermia, to keep him conscious and prevent him from going into shock. “You’ve seen pictures of girls on the Internet, right?” I began moving his fingers across the sides of my exposed labia. “Did they have hair down there or were they shaved?” He closed his eyes for a moment, flipping through his mental catalog and trying to remember in
earnest
,
and I took this opportunity of blindness to guide two of his fingers inside me, pushing my hips forward to meet them. When he opened his eyes again, he did so slowly, like someone who’s seen an apparition and tried to make it go away by tightly squeezing his lids shut, hoping it might disappear if he gave it a chance to escape
unwatched
. “Well?” I smiled, my pelvis bucking up against his fingers in rhythmic movements. “Shaved or unshaved?” I couldn’t believe how close we were to actually doing it. I had the growing paranoia that some bizarre act of nature was about to intervene and prevent our sex from happening—lightning was going to strike down and bisect the car, throwing Jack and me to opposite, smoking ends, or a sinkhole to the center of the earth was opening just below the convertible, about to send the vehicle plummeting. I pictured us, airborne and naked in the backseat of the falling car, trying
desperately
to crawl toward one another against the forces of gravity so he could stuff his penis inside me for just one moment before death.

“I guess I’ve seen both,” he whispered.

Lifting off from his fingers, I stood upright on my knees and braced against the ceiling, gripping the garment hook above the door for balance. “You know what’s fun?” I asked, squaring my
vagina
in front of his mouth. “If you take my panties off with your teeth.” He glanced down at his wet fingers for a moment, taking in the reality of them, then brought his mouth to my underwear and grabbed at their elastic, lightly scraping the skin around it with his incisors. His head slowly lowered, his nose grazing my pubic bone, and I let out a relieved shout of ecstasy as the top of his head moved down my leg, my thighs nearly straddling the back of his neck. When my thong fell loose to my knees and he sat back, only a slight tilt of my pelvis was required—I leaned forward and in a
single moist click-and-lock was sitting atop him, fully impaled by every inch he had to offer: it had happened. It had actually, finally happened. In many ways, I realized, this was a bigger first time for me than it was for Jack. Sliding back, I pulled his torso down until he was lying nearly flat along the backseat, grabbed his hands and placed them on my breasts as I began to push against him with slow, rocking-horse motions. For an instant I felt like spontaneously
crying
at the release of it—in that moment I had everything I wanted; every action of my adult life had been engaged in setting up a
situation
that would allow me to feel exactly this: the slim, curious
pressure
of a teenage boy pushing into the center of my being.

Our orgasms were almost instantaneous. I looked down into his face and saw both ecstasy and loss—the running comprehension of his brain, always one long step behind his body, attempting to tally what had happened, what was happening, and what was
almost
over. His eyes registered a sense of bewilderment at his lack of control, then an involuntary and guttural noise of surprise left his mouth. The unpracticed wince of his face as it contorted tipped off my own; I dropped my hips and pushed into his erection with all my force as he began to spasm. Several moments passed before I looked down again at his eyes and saw fear—when I came, I’d probably screamed in a manner reserved for the fatally injured.

But my breath soon returned. I dismounted and felt the leather seat lock onto my wet skin. My crotch was a hot pool of spent
pleasure
; the slow drip of his fluid leaving my body felt like a deep ache inside me that had finally been purged. My mind immediately raced forward to after I’d drop Jack off at home—there would then be the additional delight, perhaps an act that would become part of the ritual, of stopping in a parking lot to wipe our fluids off the car seat.