Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

  When we got into the house, he opened a beer and sat in front of the television; I went directly to the bedroom. I was hardly into my pajamas when I heard his deep openmouthed snores begin. The next afternoon he showered and went to work with no discussion of the previous evening’s conversation; he asked about dinner and I told him I’d make pork chops and leave a plate for him in the refrigerator. He nodded, gave me a quick kiss that smelled too strongly of aftershave, and left. One thing I could always count on with Ford, despite his occasional outbursts, was his ability to suppress the uncomfortable—his breaking point was deep and not often reached, but whenever he got there I knew that as soon as the air cleared I’d have another long stretch of time where all his angst would stay buried.

  Jack’s concerns were a bit more out in the open, and they included Ford. I hadn’t told Jack that my husband was a cop, though I wouldn’t have lied if Jack had asked. What worried Jack most was my physical relationship with Ford. The Wednesday after Ford’s outburst, Jack and I were having an extended hangout at his house, which had proven a wonderful arrangement. In fact, since our first completed tryst in the car, Jack’s house was the only place we’d met. His single bed was deliciously narrow, forcing us to either be fucking or otherwise pressed together simply to both fit on top of it. On Wednesdays Jack ordered pizza—we always laughed as I’d hide in the hallway when the deliveryman came to the door—then for the second course we’d eat chocolate pudding cups without spoons, dipping our tongues down into their cool centers and watching one another’s pink flesh skate around the cups’ plastic rims.

  Today we were naked in the pool, careful to stay submerged to our necks lest any passersby feel the need to peek over his fence in the twilight of fall’s dinner hour. Facing each other with twined legs, Jack and I bobbed in the warm water with a circular foam tube pressed between us to help us float.

  “It sucks how we won’t get to go do stuff together for like four more years,” he said. Jack had already adopted the illusion that we’d date through his entire high school career and beyond, a fantasy I didn’t attempt to ruin. In truth, our relationship’s shelf life was closer to that of an elderly Labrador. One more year seemed to be the most realistic to hope for; two was very unlikely. He’d grow, his voice would further deepen, defining muscle would thicken and broaden him. I couldn’t imagine remaining attracted to him beyond fifteen at the latest. “I mean even stupid stuff, you know? Like getting dinner or going to a basketball game.”

  I tilted my pelvis up and wrapped my legs around his waist, rubbing myself against the smoothness of his stomach. “But you can do that stuff with friends. We get to have the very best part of a relationship be our whole relationship. With us it’s dessert for every meal.” I could feel his erection beginning to form beneath my ass cheeks, so his next question surprised me—I figured his mind was drifting somewhere more pleasant.

  “What’s your husband like?” he asked.

  I didn’t have to feign indifference. “He’s just a husband.” I shrugged. Worried his interview might go in a direction that could derail the evening’s merriment, I decided to play upon Jack’s sympathy. “The other night he was drunk and swearing at me. It’s more of a living arrangement. He pays the bills, takes care of all the boring adult stuff.” I laced my fingers between Jack’s, looking at their pruneish tips. Despite the warmth of the evening, our time in the water had given Jack’s lips a blue hue and covered his body with goose bumps. I loved how timid it made him look, as though he had just been rescued from the bottom of a well.

  “Do you guys still … you know?” Jack asked. I wanted him to say it—I loved to hear Jack use the vocabulary of lust in any context.

  “Still what?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Have sex and stuff.”

  “Not often. But when we do, it’s nothing like you and me. There’s no passion like there is with us. When I have to have sex with him, I just think of you.” With that I swam to the pool wall, then motioned Jack toward me, grabbing his arm the moment he got close and pulling him in, pinning myself between him and a cold jet of water. “So give me some more to think about.” Obligingly, Jack began to kiss my neck, an activity that, guided by my moans, he’d quickly become rather good at. Reaching down I used my fingers to guide his penis into me, helping him through the initial, awkward rubbery stage of underwater entry. The sky was just dark enough that I could make out the beginnings of a few stars, but the whole world soon reduced to the simple sound of Jack’s thrusts and the water, responsive, lapping.

  *

  Jack and I were always cautious, even on Wednesdays, when our schedule was extended: his father’s training night went until 8:00 and it then took him an hour to drive home, but I was always out of the house by 7:50, save for the night that Jack had begun his cunnilingus studies in earnest—it was nearly impossible to look down at him, the flesh around his lips marinated in my enthusiasm, and not grant his smiling request to do it just a little longer. That night I left at 8:15 and it was worth every second of the risk.

  I’d hoped some of the safeguard restraints I’d implemented would have a secondary side effect of helping to keep Jack’s emotions compartmentalized. But less than a month into our affair his shyness when we were alone together had fully retracted, and he didn’t hold back when talking about his feelings for me or his plans for our life as a couple. I’d stressed early on that there could be no written notes, no text messages, no wordy ruminations of ardor. He ended up bypassing this rule though, writing terrible poems in a notebook (When you leave / My heart falls asleep in my chest / and has nightmares of death until you return), which he’d give to me to read after sex. They were harmless enough—if they were found, it would be obvious only that he was smitten with someone; none of them mentioned my name. He frequently told me he loved me, a behavior I didn’t like to encourage with a response—I claimed I didn’t want to use the word “love” because it should be felt and understood rather than said. This, too, became a point of contention with Jack.

  One night I asked if I could watch him jerk off and he agreed, but explained he was used to looking out his window at the sky while he did it. “I stand to the side of the window now instead of in front of it though.” He smiled. “I guess it worked out that you saw me but I sure don’t want anyone else to.”

  “Go ahead,” I urged. “Do it exactly like you’d do it if I wasn’t here.” Taking a seat on the bed behind him, I watched his buttocks clench and his head lift up as though he was having a conversation with God. When he was finished I told him to come rub his semen on my breasts and asked him why he liked to look out the window.

  “Are you sure you’re looking at the sky?” It did seem to be the only thing visible save for a few distant hedges. “Not peeping in someone’s window?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I dunno. At clouds or stars.”

  “Why?” I cradled his balls in my hand; even their wrinkled exterior still held the incipient softness of youth. His balls, I realized, were softer than the skin on Ford’s stomach.

  “It just makes me feel overwhelmed or something. A good overwhelmed. Like I’m such a small part of the world that I don’t ever have to worry about anything.”

  I gave him a wide grin. “You’re really young.” He play-pushed me in a teasing way; he hated when I brought up his age.

  “You don’t look as old as you are,” he countered. “In a few years no one will even know there’s an age difference when we’re together. When I’m in college everyone will think you’re my college girlfriend.”

  “Don’t fast-forward,” I said. “We need to enjoy every second of this.” The phrase “when I’m in college” made me feel kicked in the skull. It was like seeing a plate of my favorite meal that had been left out for a week and now was rotting and festering with maggots—I wouldn’t be able to enjoy a second helping of Jack tonight with that image in my head. I began to kiss his chest, closing my eyes and tucking my nose beneath his arm, hoping the odor would act like a
smelling salt and wake me up from the horrible vision of Jack matured.

  But he’d just orgasmed, which meant my power over him was at its lowest—he didn’t want to stop gazing in his crystal ball just yet. “I say we get married the day I turn eighteen,” he suggested. “We’ll already have been waiting forever by then.”

  With this second mention of advanced age, I slumped back onto his bed, taking comfort in the faded basketball graphic of his sheets that he was already too old for. A yawn slipped past my lips.

  “You do want to get married, don’t you?” he asked.

  “I’m already married, Jack.”

  A confused look came over his face. It was not an attractive kind of naïveté, just a perplexed one, like a customer who orders chicken salad at the deli but gets home and opens the container to find a pound of macaroni instead. “Well yeah,” he said defensively. “But you’ll leave him when I’m old enough for us to be together for real, right? I mean, you don’t love him. You love me.”

  “This is tedious, Jack.” I started to reach for my bra but he placed his hands on my shoulders, imploring.

  “You love me, right?”

  “What do you think?” He nodded and stepped back but wasn’t sated.

  “If you feel it, then why can’t you say it?” he demanded. “It’s not like saying it will make it untrue.”

  “But saying it doesn’t make it true either,” I reasoned. “People throw that word around all the time. It’s meaningless.”

  He began to pace at the end of his bed in a way that made his genitals lightly bounce; their hypnotic sway made me feel slightly more favorable toward him. “It’s not meaningless to me,” he stressed. “This is … it’s hard what we do, how I have to see you in class without touching you or saying anything real to you. How we can’t talk on the phone more than a second to make plans, and it has to be on a secret phone I keep in a box under my bed. How we can’t tell anybody or go anywhere together. And you can’t even say three words to me?”

  “Let me show you instead,” I offered, reaching for his arm.

  “I know,” he said, pulling back. “I know that. I just want to hear it out loud.”

  I didn’t want him to hear it—the more he heard it, the more he’d believe it, and the more he believed it the harder it would be to break things off when the time inevitably came. But, I figured, it would be more than slightly hypocritical for me to belabor the conversation further by taking some odd stance on an insistence of honesty. There was no need to prematurely ruin things.

  “Just this once,” I said. “You know I don’t like it. It makes us seem just like everyone else, and we’re not like everyone else.”

  He buried his fingers in the back of my hair and brought his lips and eyes in close and level with my own. “I love you,” he said, his voice stupid with hormones.

  “I love you too, Jack.” As soon as I said it he was kissing me. He didn’t give one second of pause for analysis, had no desire to read the veracity of my expression. Before I knew it he was fully inside me, my legs balancing wearily on his shoulders like an oversized harness on a young ox.

  *

  Pictures were another sore spot for Jack—I insisted that I could have none of him nor he of me, not even a fully clothed shot of me snapped surreptitiously on his regular phone in the classroom. “I can’t have a photo of you standing in the front of our class in a turtleneck?” he asked. “One picture to look at between our visits?”

  I was firm. “It’s just not smart, Jack. Say your father sees it, or a friend. One question leads to another. Suddenly they’re watching you watch me in class, or they catch me staring at your crotch as you walk past my desk. We don’t want to invite scrutiny.”

  But his father soon saw more of me than a photo. This also happened on a Wednesday, a bit after 6:40. Jack and I were in his bathroom, the shower still running—he’d soaped up my breasts with shampoo, rinsed them using the detachable wand, then liked the visual so much he’d repeated the lather. Jack was standing up on the edge of the tub, his hands lifted to hold the curtain bar for balance, so that he could see my squatting ass in the mirror and my blond hair trailing down my back while I gave him a blow job and theatrically touched my foamy breasts. Given the running water and fervor of Jack’s escalating moans, we only barely managed to hear the sound of the garage door opening.

  chapter nine

  We allowed ourselves just a moment of shared disbelief, me staring up with his cock still between my lips and Jack looking down in horror, before beginning to jump into action. I killed the water as Jack threw on pants and a T-shirt. “Grab your books and go sit at the kitchen table,” I ordered. “Tell him I’m here helping you with a paper and that I just went to the bathroom. Go right now.” He ran. Whether or not his erection had time to soften I wasn’t sure.

  I put my hair up into a bun, trying to towel-dry it as much as possible. The side door opened and a muffled conversation began. When I was convinced I looked put-together enough that I couldn’t possibly have been getting a titty bath just minutes earlier, I took a deep breath and walked out to meet Jack’s father.

  Gratefully, Buck and Jack Patrick looked nothing alike. At fourteen, Jack was already as tall as Buck, who stood squat and front-loaded with a growing beer gut that seemed to force apart his hips and made his legs seem even smaller and farther back upon his body than they really were. His light brown hair had the barbershop-haircut shape of a young boy’s standard trim; it was shaved slightly too close on the sides. When I walked in and extended my hand, he made a show of looking me up and down from my head to my feet and back again. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t put my shoes back on—I’d left them under Jack’s bed.

  “Lovely to meet you, Mr. Patrick. I’m Celeste, Jack’s English teacher.” Buck gave out a low whistle.

  “I did not have teachers like you back in my day, I’ll tell you that right now. Jack, do you realize how lucky you are?” Buck turned around and gave his humiliated son a wink. Jack’s face had boiled to a crimson. “And house calls to boot!” Buck exclaimed. At this point, the titanic knot of worry inside me relaxed. Most parents would have been so suspicious to come home and find their child’s teacher there, unannounced in a session of impromptu tutoring, that they’d have called the school the next day. But it certainly didn’t seem to be raising flags on Buck’s radar. Especially not when the teacher looked like me.

  “Well,” I reasoned, “I live close by and Jack’s research paper is getting very close to a solid outline.” Jack was sitting fully upright at the dining room table and had set up the first things he’d grabbed from his backpack in front of him to form a guise of studying: a history textbook, a chemistry textbook and a notebook turned open to a blank page. Buck didn’t seem to be concerning himself with specifics though. “Jack’s a very smart kid,” I added.

  Buck decided to equivocate. “When he focuses, he can do all right,” he said, nodding. There was an uncomfortable pause as Buck’s concentrated stare settled on my breasts. Jack was trying to seem absorbed with the blank page of notebook paper in front of him. To his credit, I saw that he had added the following title to the top of the page as Buck and I were talking: “Outline.”

  “Well, Jack and I were just wrapping up,” I said. I’d need to ask Jack to check for my shoes and claim I’d left them in his bathroom.

  “Stay for dinner!” Buck said encouragingly. “I was just going to order some takeout. After you coming here to help Jack, it’s the least I can do. I know they can’t be paying you worth a damn. Although from the looks of your car you’re doing all right. That’s a beauty. I can see why you didn’t want to park it on the street.” He gave me a judging smile, as though I’d broken the law by having something nice. “That’s not a teacher’s-salary vehicle.” It was then, despite the wedding ring on my hand, that Buck truly began to get to the chase. “Now are you married-married or just married?” Buck asked. Thankfully, he didn’t give me time to answer. “Let me tell you, I
know exactly how it can be.” He tilted his head toward Jack, as though by avoiding the phrase “Jack’s mom” he was being subtle and not clearly going to say something awful about his son’s mother. “A couple years back I barely escaped alive from a real nasty situation.” His eyes refocused on my breasts yet again and he tried to make an impressive show of lifting his cell phone from its external holder on his belt. “Marriage can be so confining,” he said, giving his lips a slow lick, his eyes trained at nipple level. “Sometimes you just need to let off a little steam.” With that he placed a call to the restaurant and started to walk into the kitchen. Jack stood and began packing the books on the table into his backpack; when his father was sufficiently far away, he whispered that he was sorry.

  “Your father is a horror show,” I whispered back. Jack nodded solemnly. I badly wanted to give him a victory kiss—we’d done it together, partners in crime who’d managed to deceive, but Buck quickly circled in again, pointing to line items on a colorful menu for my approval; I nodded vigorously and he began to wander away once more, unable to talk on the phone and stand still. “Jack,” I called quickly, wiggling my foot, “get my shoes.”