Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

  His toes stayed fixed in the doorway until the very end, when Buck let out a protracted wail that sounded like a large draft animal readying to sneeze. The noise startled me; my head snapped upright and my eyes landed on the shelf above Buck’s bed that held a series of bowling league trophies. When I looked back, Jack was gone.

  I was hoping that the two of us would get to sneak a simple good-bye, no matter how small—a wave and me mouthing I’m sorry, or perhaps I’d even resort to the juvenile phrase he was so adamantly fond of—I love you. But his door was shut when we emerged from the bedroom and I worried about forcing contact before I left. If I made an excuse to go into Jack’s room, there’d be the risk that Jack was inside crying hysterically. And he certainly might, in his grief, begin a loud confrontation. Instead I let Buck give me a farewell kiss on the neck—“You’re a goddess,” he gushed; I simply turned and opened the door to leave. The sound of the garage door lifting as I started my car felt traitorous. Where had that noise been an hour ago when we needed it?

  “Hey,” Buck called. “Can I get a ride up the street to the mechanic?”

  I rolled my window down a crack and peered out at him. “I’m sorry; I can’t. If my husband saw us, he’d put a bullet between your eyes.” With that, I rolled the window back up and peeled out of the drive.

  *

  In the middle of the night I woke to the soft buzz of Jack’s cell phone going off inside my purse beside the bed. Ford was snoring and didn’t hear it. For a moment I looked at him as I held the glowing device in my hands—his slack jaw was open with a troutish indifference; his left arm was buried beneath his head to reveal the gaping maw of his armpit and its garden of long hairs that rose out from his body like visible fumes. I shut the phone’s vibration alert completely off, then sat for nearly an hour watching Jack’s repeated calls light it up again and again and again, its green glow sounding a panicked alarm that only I could hear. Ford seemed securely unconscious; I was half tempted to go out to the pool patio and actually pick up, to whisper my devotion to Jack in hushed tones and calm him down. Thinking about the very hormones that coursed through Jack’s veins and made his reaction so drastic was itself a turn on—he was out of control in all the right ways, a mind steered by his body. It was almost enough to tempt me to sneak from the house and go to his window in earnest, but getting caught by Buck a second time in one night might be more than sexual bribery—no matter how enthusiastically delivered—could make him overlook.

  I barely registered the first two class periods the next day; I had the students all do freewriting about their holiday break. Most of them worked for ten minutes, then began to rampantly text message. I certainly didn’t care. The first class was half-asleep, used to the up-all-night schedules they’d established the past three weeks playing the video games they’d gotten for Christmas and having sleepovers with friends. The second class was a bit more alert.

  “When are we going to talk about Lord of the Flies?” one girl asked.

  “Talk away,” I said. Out of nowhere I suddenly remembered the feel of Buck’s sausagelike fingers upon my shoulder. An acidic stripe of vomit moved up my throat in a way that made me picture mercury rising inside a thermometer.

  “None of that stuff would’ve happened on an island of girls. Spearing a pig in the … butthole?” She made a visceral “no thank you” face, as though the act were a party game we were actually playing and she was refusing her turn.

  “Yeah right,” said Lambert. He was a dorky kid who wrote long diatribes in his journals about how girls say they want a nice guy but he knew this to be patently false: I am one such fellow, he wrote, and my female peers will not come near me unless they’re trying to copy my homework. “If it were an island of girls they would’ve cannibalized each other in days.”

  I sighed, an autopilot recording of base-level literary analysis rattling through my mouth. “It’s an interesting book to help us think about our own barbaric tendencies, given the right circumstances.” I paused, hoping the conversation might turn to sex and lift me out of my depression. “What are some times when you feel out of control?”

  “When I go animal style on the dance floor,” one kid offered, standing up to goofily gyrate his pelvis while the class laughed. I sighed; it was always the older-looking students who made public displays of their bodies: his upper lip revealed he’d already started shaving.

  Another chimed in. “When I get into a fight with my parents.”

  I immediately thought of Jack and Buck. “Say more—what do you want to do, when you get into a fight with your parents?” I asked. “What about that makes you feel like you’ve lost it?”

  “I mean,” he said, shrugging, “I’d never, like, actually hurt them or anything. You know? But sometimes …” His fist began to grind against his closed palm with the memory of rage. “Like I just want to beat the crap out of them. I think about choking their lights out.”

  “Um, psycho?” one girl joked.

  “It’s not psycho,” another said, “unless you actually do it.”

  The thought sent a cold pang of fear down my center. Not once before last night had Jack ever called me so repeatedly, especially when he knew Ford would be home. Had his fury at what he’d seen me do with his father turned into an actual, physical argument? Had Jack done something terrible after I’d gone? I now remembered the stark image of his socked foot as his father’s pleasured grunts had filled the bedroom. If he’d murdered Buck and said I’d driven him to do it, would I be considered an accessory to murder? I wondered if that charge would bring more jail time than sex with a minor. How twisted it all would be if it turned out I’d slept with Buck for nothing—I was going to jail for one thing or another anyway. For a moment my stomach wrenched at the thought of a father/son conspiracy: Maybe Buck was smarter than I’d given him credit for. Perhaps he’d figured out what Jack and I were up to and Buck realized that if he caught us together I’d seduce him to keep him quiet. So he made a deal with Jack, bribing him with the promise of a top-of-the-line gaming system, or a new car as soon as he got his learner’s permit: arrange it so I walk in on you two and let me have her once before I call the cops. But then the guilt and envy had been too much for Jack’s teenage brain, and in a heated argument late last night he’d taken his father’s life.

  I had to get my mind into a better place. We were having a classroom discussion about lack of restraint—why wasn’t anyone bringing up libido? “So we understand a loss of control due to anger,” I summarized. “What are other times you feel out of control? Do any of you not trust your actions, say, when you’re alone with your boyfriend or girlfriend?” This caused the room to fill with nervous laughter.

  “I know if I ever met my favorite singer, I would do anything he wanted,” one girl confessed.

  “Yeah, that’s illegal,” her friend joked.

  “Whatever.” She laughed. “I’d make it worth the jail time for him.”

  This made me wonder—if things did all fall apart today, had Jack made the jail time worth it for me? He had done everything I’d wanted him to do, and as far as I knew had kept quiet. But no memory seemed enough to adequately sustain me through a boyless incarceration. When the bell rang, I remained frozen in place imagining the starch-heavy cafeteria meals, the formless jumpsuits whose color resembled traffic cones.

  I quickly took inventory of the worst-case scenario: Jack not showing up to class. I pictured him at home, weeping next to his father’s sheet-covered corpse, trying to think of how to dispose of the body. But an abnormal break from my daily routine would seem suspect: I couldn’t suddenly go home during the same class when Jack was absent. No matter how difficult, I’d have to make it through the school day, and only then, at the day’s very end in the privacy of my own car, could I call Jack’s phone (which might easily have a police tap on it now, if Buck had been found dead) and begin the conversation in a very straitlaced manner. I’d ask only why he hadn’t been in class today, nothing more. Such a call
and a question wasn’t out of bounds for any caring teacher. And no one could prove I’d given him the cell phone.

  But Jack did stumble in. He had the near-black eyes of someone who’d been up all night interrogating himself. “Jack,” I called to him from behind my desk when he entered, a bit perturbed at how needy I sounded—I didn’t like depending on him for resolution. He refused to stop or turn toward me and wore a crumpled shirt and sweatpants that he’d likely slept in. I made a mental note to ready the tin of mints from my purse when we spoke—he’d certainly forgotten to brush his teeth.

  Jack went straight to his usual seat in the back and stared at the ground with a scowl. In some ways, this tantrum made him seem more juvenile, and I allowed myself the pleasure of pausing to take in his sour expression: he looked like a child who’d been forced to share a toy. His outrage, I figured, was a good sign—if he’d gotten on the bus this morning after leaving behind his father’s dead body, he would likely have been antsy, guilt-stricken, wanting to talk with me immediately in private. Instead he was ignoring me. He wanted me punished for having given up a conciliatory offering to Buck. Finally I stood and very calmly walked over to his desk. “I have the essay you handed in before break graded,” I told him. “Can you stay after class and discuss it?” He gave a near-imperceptible nod, then further exaggerated his scowl in a way that seemed like a challenge. I was happy to take him up on it. As soon as class ended, I would fuck that pout right off his face.

  After fifty long minutes, when the bell rang and the other students dispersed, I grabbed my keys out of my purse and ran to the door, locking the knob, then quickly began to disrobe. I’d worn the French maid bra-and-thong set—the very one that had gotten Ford so worked up on Christmas that he’d helped himself to an extended session with my unconscious body. “Jack,” I said, my voice slightly too businesslike, “I’m very sorry I couldn’t pick up your phone calls last night. My husband really is a policeman. If he caught me talking on the phone in the middle of the night—it wouldn’t matter who I said it was—he’d get suspicious. Cops have resources, Jack. He’d have me followed. I wouldn’t be able to come over to your house ever again. I wouldn’t be able to pick you up and go places with you. None of it.” I walked over and began clearing off the top of my desk, all except for the small tabletop Christmas tree in the corner.

  I made sure to face away from Jack so he could see my thonged ass as I spoke. No matter how angry he was, could he really resist looking? Could any straight fourteen-year-old boy?

  “Think of the situation we’d be in right now if I hadn’t done what I did.” Jack’s expression remained unconvinced. I realized he needed to share in the blame. “It’s not like you left me a lot of choice,” I pointed out. “You told me he’d be gone for hours.”

  Jack’s eyebrows lifted incredulously. “So it’s my fault you slept with him? I didn’t know he’d come back so soon. When he gets his car worked on he’s usually gone half the day.”

  I backpedaled a little. “I’m not blaming you. I’m just reminding you of the fact that you thought we had more time than we did.”

  Even before he spoke, I realized I’d miscalculated; his level of anger at the situation wouldn’t allow for any contrition. “You had sex with him,” Jack yelled. “You slept with my dad. You didn’t even give him time to say anything.” As he began pacing from side to side, I started to worry. It wasn’t safe for Jack to be this upset at school. One offhand remark from a pimply smart-ass in the hallway and Jack could throw a punch. Then, when confronted about his uncharacteristic aggression in the assistant principal’s office, Jack would lose it and begin spilling details. “Maybe he wasn’t even that suspicious. But you just started crawling all over him. You wanted to. I heard you guys in the bedroom. You liked it!” Jack started toward the door and I let him go; it was locked. He turned the knob a few times, then gave the door a frustrated kick when it didn’t open. “Let me out,” he finally said. He didn’t turn back around to face me.

  I needed a new plan for a truce—I had to give him a peace offering. I softened my voice, adding a new tone of apology. “He watched me pull up my pants, Jack. The human brain can do amazing things with denial, but it has to have enough incentive. Me staying for dinner and watching television with your father is a little ego boost for him, but it’s not the type of leverage needed for him to block out questions of what I may have been doing with my pants halfway down in the kitchen with his teenage son.”

  I took off my bra, then said his name. After a long moment he turned around to face me. “Come here,” I said.

  Jack’s eyes fell to the floor. “Are you going to fuck him all the time now?” he asked.

  I couldn’t help but let out a small chuckle. “I would rather be sprayed with bear mace than touch your father again.” Carefully, my heels still on, I climbed up onto the desk and got on my knees. “Are you going to come here?”

  “He’s going to want it all the time.”

  “Well he’s not going to get it. You and I will be more careful. I’ll have to be around far less when he’s home. And when he is home, I’ll tell him that things are going a little fast for me and I need to dial it back a bit.” Jack nodded but stayed fixed next to the door.

  “Come here, I’m going to let you do something special.” I wanted to tell him that the act would be exclusive to us, but doing that meant bringing up my sexual relationship with Ford—it was a risk to talk about sex with another person right now. But I wanted him to know this was certainly out of the ordinary. After a moment of debate, I decided it was worth it. “I don’t even do this with my husband,” I added. This wasn’t entirely true of course, but I doubted that saying We do this when I want Ford to feel indebted to me and I’ve doped myself to the moon on barbiturates would have the same persuasive vigor.

  The gamble paid off. Grabbing his backpack, he walked up to the desk and dropped it to the floor dramatically, like a soldier shedding his duffel bag upon entering the house after returning from war. He unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down to his knees along with his boxers. “Climb up here with me,” I said encouragingly. I turned and sloppily began to lick the length of him, wetting him up as much as I could. With that I squatted down onto his penis, letting it slip securely into my asshole before kneeling down on all fours to be fucked on the desktop. It was an act I’d never enjoyed, but I figured with Jack there would at least be the pleasure of getting to see his surprise and enjoyment as he experienced it for the first time.

  I was wrong. Jack wasn’t gentle or slow and he remained completely mute throughout the process—there were no moans of how great it felt or expressions of gratitude at how I was subjugating myself for his pleasure. Perhaps in his naïveté he wasn’t aware of the pain involved on my behalf, or maybe he was completely mindful of it, trying to repay me for the agony he’d gone through in the last twenty-four hours. Either way, his silent anger made it a true punishment. It was the first time we’d had sex that I was glad when it was over.

  When he finished and slipped back out, there was a small amount of mucus and blood that I dried off with a Kleenex. I wiped myself off and readied a small plug of tissue to put between my cheeks so his semen wouldn’t visibly leak out and stain my pants later in the day. Too late I realized that Jack was digging around in his backpack; by the time I looked over to see what he was doing his personal smart phone was already extended toward me. I didn’t have time to move or cover myself in any way before the damning click of its camera echoed through the room. He’d snapped a shot of me completely nude, spreading apart my ass cheeks in an act of inspection.

  “Very funny, Jack. But you’ve got to delete that. Better yet, let me do it.” I held out my hand, motioning for him to pass me the phone.

  “I’m keeping it,” he demanded. “I’ve got to have more than he has.”

  “Come on, Jack. You’ve had me a thousand times and he’s had me once. Think of all the things we’ve done together. All I did was let him tuck it in for a
minute while I looked at the wall and thought about my grocery list.” But he didn’t appear to be in the mood for bartering, not even after the sexual concession I’d just given him in the middle of the day on school property. “Fine,” I agreed. “Keep the picture.” It would only be a matter of time before I had an opportunity to delete it.

  When Jack left I Febrezed the room profusely, but our act seemed to have left behind a hormonal cloud that had a full-moon effect on the classes afterward. Trevor, having been dumped by Darcy over the holiday break, did a freewrite that obliquely referenced suicide and proceeded to read it out loud to the class as he stared at her across the room. When class ended he sought counsel at my desk while I tried to get comfortable in my chair; though the ache left from Jack’s fury felt raw and sharp, it also seemed a reminder of forgiveness. Hopefully Jack would feel I’d done due penance and we could go back to the way things had been.

  I offered weeping Trevor a tissue as I adjusted against the cum-soaked wad of it in my pants. Suddenly the classroom door opened. I worried that it would be Jack, that upon seeing me with Trevor he’d convince himself I was holding dual trysts with other students. But the sound of heavy footsteps and the labored breathing relieved me of this scare. It was Janet.

  Waddling in, she tilted her head back to look at Trevor through her Coke-bottle glasses. “Someone failed a quiz, huh,” she barked.

  Momentarily ignoring her, I turned and spoke to Trevor in a dramatic manner I knew he’d like. “If I have any worry you might harm yourself, I’m required by law to report it,” I said. “Now, you and I both know she isn’t worth this suffering. You will have a long list of women in your life, Trevor. It hurts now,” I said, clenching my asshole in empathy, “but that pain is temporary. What I need to know from you is whether or not you’re going to be okay until I see you in class tomorrow.”