Jaywalking

by Rachel Ember

  “Why can’t it be both?”

  He snorted, rearranging his knees so that they weren’t pressed up against the underside of her dashboard, even though it was a lost cause. It really was a terrible car.

  They went into Topeka, then threaded their way down increasingly smaller roads and into a desolate little neighborhood where he could see a combination of residences and businesses, about half of which appeared to be vacant. Bria pulled into a small, gravel parking lot behind a short strip of faceless buildings. One proclaimed itself a beauty salon but appeared to be closed for the night, and the other three were obviously unused.

  “Are we going to get murdered?” Jay asked, only half-joking, but he was too eager to get his cramped body out of Bria’s car to hesitate when he had an opportunity to climb out.

  Bria wrinkled her nose at him. “What? Didn’t I just tell you it’s invite-only, with a vetted guest list?”

  “Yes, Bria,” Jay said with exaggerated patience. “But even if we were here for a tupperware party, I’d notice that it seems like we’re in a pretty rough part of town.” He’d lowered his voice, too, like the empty buildings might overhear and take offense.

  “Don’t be such a snob. Besides, at least two of the guys who are coming are cops. And one is a bail bondsman.”

  Jay wasn’t sure what kind of oath to protect the innocent a bail bondsman took, but he didn’t argue with Bria as she locked the car and led him around to the front of the buildings, then to a glass door made opaque by a layer of black paper tacked onto the inside of the pane. Bria tugged it open, and Jay followed her inside.

  The building had seen better days, but it appeared to be clean, at least. Jay suspected some kind of cleaning crew had made a pass at the chipped tile floors and the nail-riddled drywall. He imagined the last bar that had operated in the dim, cramped space would have looked a lot like the Roadrunner, a roadside spot thirty-five miles from where he’d grown up, and which his friends had liked to sneak out to because the proprietor never checked IDs. This place, thankfully, didn’t have the baseline smell of spilled beer and sweat, with or without a heavy overtone of fried food, that Jay remembered from the Roadrunner.

  A few men were already around. One of them—a tall, handsome guy who couldn’t have been much younger than his parents—waved at them from over by the cleared-out bartop, hopping off a paint-splattered stepstool that looked to be the only stick of furniture on the premises.

  The guy gave Jay a cool once-over, but then he smiled at Bria. “Hey, Bree.”

  Jay tensed, fully expecting Bria to viciously rebuke him for daring to call her by a nickname, but instead he was baffled to find her smiling at the guy; he even saw a flash of her teeth. She reached up and petted the short hairs above the man’s left ear with her knuckles, and he briefly tilted his head toward the touch, smiling back at her. “Hi, Pete. I thought you couldn’t make it.”

  “Plans changed,” he said with a shrug, glancing appraisingly at Jay again. “Maybe you don’t need me, after all?” His gaze wasn’t exactly unfriendly, but was definitely reserved when he switched from looking at Bria to Jay.

  “You’re much more qualified than your substitute,” Bria said. “This is Jay. Jay, Pete.”

  “I’ve been meaning to meet the one who took you off the market,” Pete said—good-naturedly enough, but with an edge of regret.

  Jay turned to look at Bria, his eyebrows raised. “Someone took you off the market?”

  “No,” she said with emphasis, dividing a poisonous glare between them. While Jay was immune, Pete seemed briefly startled before Bria added with a wicked smirk, “Jay isn’t my sub. He’s my protege.”

  Gleaning her meaning, Jay felt a little annoyed, like he’d been outed or something.

  Pete’s expression shifted from guarded to one of playful interest. “Is that so?” he asked, looking Jay up and down again, and this time with an entirely different look in his eye than had been there before.

  “No time for that,” Bria said, snapping her fingers a few times like she was trying to break a trance. “Besides, he’s all hung up on someone already.”

  “Aw,” Pete said, frowning at Jay in a way that seemed to be both apologetic and flirtatious. “Poor baby. You wanna talk about it?”

  “We,” Bria said pointedly, “have a job to do. Stop sniffing after my friend. I promise you’ll just get your feelings hurt.” She patted the middle of Pete’s chest for emphasis, and Jay couldn’t help comparing them. Bria was tall but slender, and with her hair in a thick braid and her freckles showing through a dusting of make-up, she looked even younger than she was. And then there was Pete, the kind of burly, middle-aged dude who someone would cast in a movie as hired muscle. Imagining them together, and Pete submitting, took more creativity than Jay had.

  Not that he doubted it was true. Still, he couldn’t get his head around it.

  There wasn’t more time to wonder, anyway; Bria and Pete talked about logistics for a minute or two; people would come in through the back door, where Pete would match their IDs to Bria’s list of participants, all of whom she’d vetted, complete with checking references. Pete would go over the rules with them, make sure they didn’t have anything on their person that they shouldn’t—like cameras or even their phones, which were going in a basket by the door just to be safe—and then he’d let them in.

  “Is he already here?” she asked when they were done.

  “Yeah.” Pete nodded toward a closed door in one corner of the space. “Changing in the bathroom.”

  From the back of the building came a knock, so Pete clapped his hands together. “That’s my cue!” He went into the back, and Bria headed for the door that Pete had indicated led to the bathroom, leaving Jay standing alone and feeling unsure what to do with himself. If he’d really been intended to be Pete’s replacement, then he was relieved as hell that Pete was there. He tried to imagine himself reviewing a checklist with a dozen strangers who he knew were all there to fuck someone they didn’t know and egg each other on, and felt a wave of nerves.

  Generally, he wasn’t sure how to feel about what he’d stumbled into tonight. The elaborate roleplay felt unpleasantly impersonal, and about a thousand miles distant from the kind of thing that he and Emile did together.

  His mind got wiped clean when Bria walked out of the bathroom followed by a man wearing a black bathrobe and flip-flops, like he was coming from the showers in Jay’s dorm.

  “Blake?” he asked hoarsely. He hadn’t expected to recognize the sub Bria was supporting, and he definitely hadn’t expected to see the guy who was technically his boss. But there he was, shedding the robe without shame, instead wearing his usual, unimpressed frown.

  Blake rolled his eyes at Bria. “You said he wouldn’t make it weird.”

  Bria gave Jay a reproving look as she answered, “He won’t. Will you, Jay?”

  Personally, Jay thought it would have been only fair for Bria to give him at least a heads-up, but he just shook his head. “No. Of course not.” He couldn’t help watching them walk over to the bar, speaking quietly, with Bria’s hand resting in the middle of Blake’s back. An absent, gentle gesture that wouldn’t have seemed so incongruous if she’d been anyone but Bria.

  Blake nodded and handed Bria a piece of heavy cloth that she used to blindfold him. There was something about watching them together that was unnerving to Jay. Though they had a friendly ease together, knowing what was about to happen, Jay again found it hard to trace a path from what Bria and Blake were doing—and what the other men would be doing—that could be connected to what Jay did with Emile.

  Jay’s phone buzzed, and he was grateful to be distracted. He found a text from Emile that was just a picture of Godot, pausing mid-roll in the rough, browning grass beside the sidewalk somewhere, his tongue hanging out in bliss, with the message: Godot throwing a fit because you’re not the one walking him. I might need to increase your shifts.

  Jay grinned as he typed back, Fortunately, I happen to b
e available seven days a week. He hit ‘Send’ and then wondered if it was too much, except that Emile’s reply came within a few seconds.

  Excellent. Would it be presumptuous to ask if you could start tonight?

  Before he thought about it, Jay had typed out an all-caps YES that he then had to stop and delete. There was no way he was getting back to Canton tonight; he’d come with Bria, and they obviously weren’t going anywhere for a long while. Damn. I wish I could. But I’m helping Bria tonight. It had taken him a while to arrive at the word helping, and he almost felt disingenuous using it. But he didn’t think this bizarre excursion was something he should try to explain over text, even though it might not be as strange to Emile as it was to him.

  Understood, Emile replied. We’ll miss you.

  Me too, Jay typed out, and then the sound of a door opening and voices emerging from the back room made him look up, even as he was slipping his phone back into his pocket.

  Fourteen

  Emile

  November

  Emile had thought he’d catalogued all of the issues with having Jay in his class and sleeping with him at the same time, but as it turned out, there were some practical considerations that hadn’t occurred to him.

  Like how distracting Jay would be when they were in class together.

  Of course, he’d been distracting before they’d slept together, too. Emile had been guilty and anxious whenever Jay had been nearby. But now it was worse; now that Emile allowed himself to look at Jay, and now that Jay was more willing to be invited into the conversation and share his insights. When Jay said something astute, reminding Emile that his mind was as interesting as his quick smile, his strong, golden-haired body, and his dominating nature, Emile’s already dizzying attraction reached new heights.

  Today, for example, Emile had asked a question that Natalie had answered, only for Jay to raise his hand and neatly counter her point before Emile could. Jay was particularly engaged since they’d begun the unit on poetry. As Emile had already suspected, given that they’d met at Mac Talley’s reading in Andersonville, and as Jay had since confirmed expressly, poetry was what Jay liked. He rarely read novels for pleasure, but he loved reading poetry as well as listening to it being performed.

  “Can I read something that you wrote?” he’d asked Emile one evening when they’d found themselves, as they so often did, in his living room with Emile on the floor at Jay’s feet, and Jay’s hand in his hair.

  Emile had instantly felt shy. “I’m no Mac Talley.” He’d never assembled an organized volume of his own poetry, either; he only had a notebook where he’d copied down all of his finished poems. Though he doubted he’d ever be well-known enough to interest a publisher in printing a collection, it had felt to him that they should all live together in one binding. The published pieces had been printed in their respective literary magazines and journals, and he had copies of each of them filed on his shelves, but that was it. When he read his own work, he always read it out of his notebook.

  It had surprised him that, even though Jay’s request made him shy, he’d found he wanted to share the notebook with him. He’d gotten up off the floor, gathered his notebook, and chosen one of his favorites. He’d handed the open notebook over nervously, and then sat in the other armchair rather than back at Jay’s feet.

  “I’d ask you to read to me,” Jay had said with a quick smile before he began, “but I remember that you said you only read your poems to your dog.” Godot had settled close to Jay, on the part of the floor that Emile had been occupying, and Jay reached out his bare toes and rubbed the dog’s back while Emile rolled his eyes and tried not to fidget.

  He’d watched closely while Jay bent over the page, his eyes scanning back and forth, and grown alarmed when a frown had curved his lips down by the time he’d finished.

  “You hate it,” Emile had said with a nervous laugh, jumping up from his chair to reach for the notebook and snatch it from Jay’s hands, snapping it closed. “At least now we know,” he’d added, rubbing his hands over his knees and feeling startled by how upset he was.

  “I don’t hate it,” Jay had insisted, getting up from his chair and gently touching Emile’s shoulder. “But it was very… stark. Sad.”

  Emile had been surprised. “Well… yes. That was the point. So, you did like it?” he’d asked tentatively, less fishing for a compliment than feeling confused.

  “It’s beautiful,” Jay had said, studying the notebook’s worn cover without opening it again, to Emile’s relief; he’d handed it back then, and bent and kissed Emile warmly at the same time. When he’d pulled back, he’d smiled. “Of course, it is. It’s a little part of you, right?”

  Reflecting on that exchange now, Emile could confess that his poetry was a bit dark. Somber moods and chilly aesthetics were what he’d come to associate with his own writing, with only brief flashes of warmth and comfort. The closest thing to a hopeful poem he’d written was the one that he’d been writing in bits and pieces since the start of the semester. “Inter-season.” But as that one was both unfinished and more or less about Jay, he did not intend to mention that it existed, much less read it to him.

  Natalie swiveled toward Emile with her eyes narrowed, and her sudden attention drew Emile fully back into the present moment with a start. She was a freshman like Jay, but she was also an English major and a front-row affirmer. Jay seemed to be enjoying the argument for its own sake, but Natalie was clearly frustrated.

  “Professor Mendes, aren’t I right?” she demanded.

  Emile looked back at her and struggled to regather his thoughts. Inconveniently, he’d just been remembering how, after he’d read that poem to Jay, Jay had pushed him onto his back on the living room floor and asked him to describe every filthy thing Jay had done to him in poetic verse. Which had quickly devolved into laughter, and then a slow and gentle exchange of handjobs that had been the most satisfying vanilla sex Emile had ever had.

  That was the thing about Jay. Sometimes, the sex wasn’t about the kink; and sometimes, the kink wasn’t about sex. Emile had never let himself separate the two, and there was a wonderful vulnerability in it. And, strangely, when Jay did dominate him during sex, the kink and the sex together were somehow more intense for Emile than they’d been before, when still unmerged.

  “Isn’t it essential,” Natalie was insisting, “that the poem is about something beyond what it says it’s about? Otherwise, what makes it a poem, and not just… I don’t know, an essay or something?”

  Emile couldn’t help a smile, considering that Natalie was more or less echoing the premise of the topic he’d be presenting on the following week in Chicago. “About a half-century ago, a well-known poet posited that it is necessary to find a thread of interpretive chaos in every poem. He called it the ‘irrational element’ and said it’s one of the key ways that poetry is made distinct from other prose.”

  Natalie looked smugly at Jay.

  Emile gazed around the room to include the rest of the class. “If the lines are only their meter, or their rhyme, or even the described subject, then is the poem successful? Or is it just words on paper?”

  “But does one reader get to decide that?” Jay was frowning, but the challenge was clear in his voice. “Like, what if there’s, I don’t know, a line that describes a flat tire? And to you, there’s nothing more to it. But to me, every time I think of flat tires, I think of the time I got a flat during my driver’s ed test, and I had to change it because the test-giver had his arm in a cast. But I didn’t know how, and he wasn’t that great of a teacher, and we both almost had heat exhaustion before he was finally convinced I’d done it right and that it was safe for us to drive on it.”

  The class was tittering, and Emile was grinning; that story felt too specific to have been a spur-of-the-moment invention, and he was delighted to know that Jay presumably knew how to change a tire since Emile himself had no clue. And then he was a little taken aback at that offhand thought—by what it betrayed, lurking in
his subconscious… that on some imagined, future road which Emile might be traveling, Jay would be with him.

  “Can a poem be a poem to one reader and not to another, is what I’m saying,” Jay finished.

  Even Natalie looked thoughtful over the question. The room was quiet for a moment or two.

  Then, Bria spoke up. “Maybe it’s like porn,” she said nonchalantly, not even looking up from whatever she was doodling. “You just know it when you see it.”

  The class burst out laughing, and Emile couldn’t help joining them for a moment. He shook his head, but his smile lingered. “I’ll have to get your permission to use that analogy in my presentation,” he told Bria, and glanced at the clock. “On that auspicious note, everyone, we’re about out of time. Just a reminder that I am attending a conference, which means there’ll be no office hours until next week. If you have urgent literature-related questions that you absolutely can’t contain until then, you may email me. Take care.”

  He gave them his usual deep nod in dismissal and then watched them slide folders and laptops into their bags, chattering noisily with one another.

  He did manage to catch Jay’s eye, but at Emile’s request, they indulged in nothing but brief eye contact when other people were around. No extra visits to Emile’s office, and no staying after class. Emile knew it was for the best, but still felt his heart sink as Jay went out the door.

  Then, he smiled when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket with a text message notification, and instantly knew it would be from Jay.

  Could I come by tonight?

  It had been a few days since Jay had been scheduled to walk Godot, and when Emile had invited him to come by anyway two nights before, Jay hadn’t been free. Emile had been unsure about inviting him again. Even though he had no reason to believe that Jay hadn’t been helping his friend with something, getting turned down had still left him a little insecure. That Jay had asked before Emile had to was a relief, but although Emile knew better than to ascribe too much tone to text communication, he couldn’t help feeling like there was a certain clipped quality to the text.