Whiskey Sour Noir (The Hard Stuff) (4 page)

“That’s what we call it. Rubber room. Means the place public educators are assigned to while their questionable behavior’s being assessed by the teachers’ union. The proper term is reassignment room, but teachers call it the rubber room. The practice of reassignment is notorious. It’s been in the news a lot over the past few years. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”

I was surprised he’d let me push him off my pulsating vulva, but then again, women are from Venus and men are from the planet of the apes.

“I don’t care much for TV news,” I told him. “I see enough bad behavior at the DIC to know if you take a close enough look at any human activity, you’re gonna start smelling a stink.”

He chuckled and said, “Maybe so. Anyway, the rubber room they sent me to was packed with teachers from schools all over the county. And there were dozens of rubber rooms there, in this big gray high-rise on Federal Highway. Department of Education offices.” He rolled his eyes. “What a fantastic farce. I had to report in every school day and stay for the entire school day, sitting at a crummy metal desk from seven to two. Like one of my kids. I was still getting my full pay and benefits, but all I could do was read books or fool around on my laptop, sitting there for hours on end, waiting for a decree to come down from the high office. The whole thing was ludicrous.” He
tsked
, shook his head. “One guy in my room had been accused of kissing an eighth grade girl. No witnesses, his word against hers. He’d been on hold from teaching, waiting there in a rubber room, for three years. Three years!”

“Wait,” I said. I was sitting up straight now, listening carefully to this load of nonsense. Rubber rooms? Full of still-employed teachers? “You told me you got arrested. Why weren’t you in jail? And fired?”

He shifted on the bed, crossing his long muscular legs. I had a thing for his calves, especially where the muscles hunched up in a tight knot.
Yum
. I ran my fingers through the sparse blond hair on his thighs. I loved his thigh muscles, too.

“I got arrested, but they didn’t charge me right away,” he explained. “The cops had received a tip that I was sharing child porn. This kind of felony doesn’t go over well if you’re in a job with youth contact. So they hauled me in real fast and went through my hard drive. From my home computer. Then they let me go. They didn’t find any evidence to keep me there.”

He eased himself up and slid an arm around my head, realigning my position, leaning me against his big warm body. Parts of me ached for him, other parts wanted to run away. I wasn’t at all sure who to listen to.

“On a second anonymous tip, they got another warrant, this time to take a look through my computer at school. That’s where they found the files.” He laughed. The sound was so bitter I tried to move away, but he clutched me tighter and said, “As if I would be harboring illegal photos of naked children at my place of employment. I mean, come on. Nobody’s that stupid, are they?”

I would’ve shrugged, but I couldn’t. Talk about a captive audience. If he’d handcuffed me to the bedpost, I would’ve had more breathing room. But there were no bedposts at Love House. Another missing amenity.

“My boss at Coconut Palms High had access to my computer. He had the key to my office and could have downloaded those files at any time when he was alone at school. He works long hours, gets there before everyone else and leaves after. But I can’t see him doing something like that. Not Mr. Super-straight with his ramrod posture, his no nonsense attitude, his beady little eyes on the superintendent position. Not that Eagle Scout leader and ultra-marathoner. No, he’s not the bad guy in all this.”

He was talking to himself now. I didn’t even have to nod in encouragement. I could’ve been a flat pillow he’d been hugging back at the fed pen. He’d worked all this out years before. Now he chewed it over like old grass in a cud.

“For a while there I was pretty sure it was Frieda. But my wife didn’t come by the school very often and, when she did, I don’t remember ever leaving her alone in my office. Plus, there wasn’t anything in it for her. Who wants to be the ex-wife of a convicted sex offender?”

He was right there. Even if you were switching sides, there were easier ways to leave your husband for another woman. Getting your partner on a S.O. charge wasn’t much of an option for the savvy woman seeking divorce. If you wanted a pay out, you weren’t apt to get one from a guy wearing the scarlet letter “P” for the rest of his sorry life. “P” for pederast, pervert, porn hound of the under-eighteen variety.

“So that leaves Rindle Champion, who was in and out of my office all day long. Who I befriended and mentored, invited into my own home. Who maybe is a sick fuck who manipulated me and screwed me over. In order to get access to my job during a down market. After all, the way I figure it, Champion was the only person to benefit from the nasty mess my life turned into.”

I shuddered. Could it be true about Rindle Champion? How could a young guy be so evil, so desperately evil, that he would devise such a twisted scheme simply to steal a man’s job? How could he ruin his friend’s life like that? Were men really that competitive?

Cat Avery relaxed his clutch on me a bit, enough that I breathed easier. I rolled on top of him and stretched myself out, trying to absorb the bitterness, allowing it to leach out of his every pore and enter my own soft body. His heart beat slowly in my ear, the calm drumbeat of a strong, healthy animal. He smelled earthy, like sex sweat and high tide. I kissed his breastbone, then sat up and ran my hands over his hairless chest, his taut belly, his angular hips, petting him, stroking the hate out of him. I brushed my fingers lightly over his penis, fondling his tender balls until I felt his growing erection pressing against my wrist. I took him in my mouth for a minute, using the tip of my tongue to make him grab my hair and groan. I wanted him to say my name loud, louder, and he did. He did. I had this man, he was mine. But I wanted more.

Oh, Cat Avery. So handsome, so smart, so sexy and so full of his own life. Why should he spend the rest of his time on the planet leashed to the legal system? If his story was true, and I sure wanted to believe it was, Cat Avery needed to be proven innocent. He needed his freedom. And I needed him to regain what was rightfully his. So that he might be able to let go of the bullshit of his past and feel something real in the present. Something real for me. Something deep and lasting or that such.

I licked my way up to his face and we kissed wet and long, suckling one another. “This here is America,” I whispered in his ear, running my tongue across the salt of his neck skin. “You can rebuild your life. You can reclaim your innocence. All you need to do is prove who’s the one that did you in. You got to show who’s really guilty.”

I kissed the freckled skin on his meaty shoulder, then made my way down—slowly now, very slowly—flickering my tongue across the white-white skin of his inner arms, kissing each of the tiny black tats there. I made my warm, damp way over his broad rib cage toward his thickly muscled pecs. When I slurped a hard little nipple, he moaned my name again. Like he meant it.

I sat up and grabbed hold of his nice, fat dick. Then I studied his handsome face, the dramatic lines of his wide brow, the thick dark lashes, the perfect cleft of his chin, until he opened his beautiful blue-gray eyes. His expression was faraway dreamy, and he smiled at me. I wanted to love this man, but I would need him to be able to love me back. This wasn’t going to happen while he brooded about his crappy past. Avery’s past held his future in a chokehold, one that could eventually suffocate me as well.

While I eased myself up and down on his delicious erection—slowly, very slowly—I said, “Lemme think on this awhile, Cat. Because maybe, just maybe, I can help you.”

When I stopped moving, Avery gasped. He lay still, looking up at me, his sea-storm eyes full of a new gleam. He pulsed inside me and I wanted him to ride me hard.

I wanted it so bad it was like nerve pain.

“You are a surprise, Tami Lee,” he said with a sloe-gin grin. “A very sweet surprise.”

Then he fast-rolled me over and sucked my tats all the way down. He licked me to the edge, then took me from behind and gave it to me hard, so hard I forgot all about Rindle Champion, parole terms for sex offenders, and everything else that stood between me and a happy life with Cat Avery.

Chapter Three

Avery had to get permission from his P.O. to move in with me. From one bum motel to another, it was a lateral move. And the fit was tight. When we weren’t going at it, the tightness got on my nerves. Avery’s too. Imagine two feral cats in a room the size of a shoebox. Now turn up the air-conditioning to eighty-five and put the lid on. That was us two at Love Hotel.

The rules for probation were strict and Avery had to be either working or at home, else they’d want to know where, why and what for. I wasn’t out many nights, what with my early wake-up call to start my shift, but after a week of ten p.m. to six a.m. in our hot box, the situation felt like a noose around my neck. It’s one thing to hump a man in your room, and another thing entirely to have to live in it with him. The chokehold tightens when he can’t leave it for eight hours of every twenty-four and you have to endure his captivity with him.

Most of the time, I sat and listened to him talk. He entertained me, he educated me, but sometimes he bored the shit out of me. It didn’t take me long to understand that my new love was obsessed with getting revenge. That’s mostly what he went on about. That and the Gulf Stream, like they were the two final plagues of the end times.

After a while, both topics annoyed me so much I began to fantasize about hitting the road. I’d been hearing good things about New Hampshire and the Freestaters there, young people who offered refuge to those fleeing the climate crises in western Europe. If you agreed to vote for them in the local elections, they’d put you up and find you work in the state. The Freestaters’ master plan was to vote in the legalization of marijuana and some loose-as-a-goose gun laws. Plus, they were all for world peace. Perfect fit for my schizophrenic world views.
Maybe I need to get away from the soap opera I’m immersed in
, I thought,
and turn the channel to some other type of programming.

But I was infatuated with Cat Avery. He made great gushy love and he cooked the chunkiest and richest pasta sauce I ever did eat. He brought me a lovely pink rose one day for no reason at all. Yup, I know, it’s trite, a redneck cliché, but fuck it if I didn’t fall hard for a man who maybe didn’t love me back and maybe didn’t tell me all what was true.

So I stayed put. Because sure enough, I was crazy in love with the man. Plus, I had a job in west Dusky Beach, and that was something. Even though I thought about it, I didn’t run off anywhere. Instead, I hung where I was and held on to both of these things. I held on tight until I went under.

The thing about the DIC was, I was in over my head, but nobody seemed to notice. Maybe we all were unqualified. I mean, the clients were graphically violent or abused or both, people with scars on their faces and gaping wounds that would never heal. You needed a medical degree and a Ph.D. in treating self-abuse to even begin to help these poor people. Nobody willing to work for minimum wage had the proper training. All I had to offer were recycled clothing, a few words of cheer and a pat on the back, hardly enough to make anyone that broken whole again.

Not too long after Avery moved in with me, one of my clients was beaten so bad she almost died. This wasn’t the first time I’d visited a client in the poverty wing at Dusky Memorial Hospital. But Sister was a favorite of mine, and seeing her with all those tubes sticking out of the torn skin of her nothing but bones body filled me with a mighty despair. I hadn’t been able to say a single thing to convince Sister to stop the pipe and leave the drug pusher who supplied her meth. He was brutal and cruel, but she insisted he had a warm heart and true-loved her. Even though she was weak and useless, which is how she saw herself. How he told her to see herself. Nothing I said could convince her there was another way to live, another kind of love.

This depressed me to no end. I saw my own heart in this, in the partaking of a one-way love with a troubled man, and pondering the meaning of that truly disturbed me.

One morning I told Lulu I was thinking about quitting. I wasn’t succeeding in my job anyway. I mean, wasn’t it my responsibility to convince my clients to stay away from the things that hurt them?

Lulu put a thick arm around my waist and steered me to the vending machines. She bought us each a cup of boiled coffee with double creamer and sugar. We leaned against the pea green wall and blew on our putrid coffee while she mulled over whatever it was she wanted to say to me. That particular corner always smelled like bleach and piss. But I ignored the stink as I waited on my boss, holding onto my cardboard cup and my tongue. I knew I’d do right to heed her advice. Lulu had life experience in droves. She was steelier than any man I knew, twice as smart. Still, she’d been married to a loser and knew what it was like to let someone she loved leave footprints on her face.

“Listen, Tami Lee,” she said with a crooked smile.

I knew that look. Someone had told her I’d let a so-so move into my room.

She unclipped her plastic hairpin, shook out her black ringlets, and ran a big weathered hand through the tangles. “The clients all like you, that’s why I gave you the job. You don’t judge the people here, and that’s good. It’s wonderful, in fact.” She licked her wrinkled lips, attempted to drink her coffee and grimaced. I didn’t bother with mine. It was either too hot or too cold and either way was guaranteed to taste like clay. “Nobody expects you to be able to work miracles here, Tami Lee. But if you yourself can’t stay away from poison, how can you expect your clients to walk the walk-away?”