by R.S. Grey
“Oh thank god. That tile hurts! That’s the last time I try to be sexy on a shower floor. From now on it’s a soft mattress or nothing, unless I can find those rollerblading kneepads.”
13
S A M
I’ve decided to take a newfangled approach to life in which I don’t think ten steps into the future and instead live in the moment. I endured four days without Ian and it sucked completely, so if I have to give him a blowjob in his shower to keep him around, so be it.
I want him. It’s obvious. What could possibly go wrong?
After our shower, I cook dinner in some clothes Ian loans me—an oversized t-shirt and baseball socks that stretch to my knees—and then we sit on his couch and watch The West Wing. The show holds 5% of my attention, the other 95% focused on Ian’s lips.
He’s aware of this because midway through the episode, he pauses it and turns to me. “We aren’t going to do anything else tonight.”
This is news to me. I was hoping we’d both at least make it to third base. I shaved my legs before coming over for a reason.
“Why’s that? Y’know, in Western society, the BJ is typically a quid pro quo sorta thing.”
He shakes his head and stands to collect our dinner plates from the coffee table. Ian is a cleaner. His house is always immaculate, and he hates how messy I am when I cook. He thinks I use every pot and pan and cutting board he has just to spite him. Little does he know, that’s only half the reason I use them.
“It’s not that—believe me, I am looking very much forward to…returning the favor, but don’t you think if we continue at this pace you might…I dunno, spook?”
“Pfft. Whatever. How about we just do a nice slow-jam make-out while R&B plays in the background?” I ask. “Spotify has playlists for every occasion.”
“No.”
“Okay, what about a light massage, oil optional, with an accompanying cool jazz playlist? I have one of those too.”
“Not happening.”
“We could just hold hands in silence? Does Spotify have a silence song?”
At that, he pauses the dishes and props his hands on the counter. I think he’s either laughing or trying to calm himself down. I can’t see his whole face, but his eyes are definitely pinched closed. Poor guy.
“I’ll make it easy for you: I’ll just get naked and you can come graze, nibble, take what you’d like. I’m like a reasonably priced Chinese buffet.”
His head whips around as if to confirm whether or not I’m stripping on his couch.
I’m not. I’m smiling fiendishly.
“Sam, we aren’t friends with benefits. I want to make that perfectly clear. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right.”
I laugh. “Well I hate to break it to you, bucko, but we’ve already screwed up. Phone sex and a blowjob before our first date? As Shakespeare said, Shit’s fucked, yo. No point in trying to correct it now.”
He turns back around, straightens his shoulders, and now suddenly, I know the discussion is closed. “Not happening, Sam.”
Fine. I push off the couch and stomp to his freezer where I know I’ll find a pint of his favorite ice cream: Rocky Road. I’m going to eat it all just to spite him. That’ll teach him to turn me down.
I also reach for a bag of peas for my knees as an afterthought.
True to his word, Ian doesn’t touch me all night.
I have to go home and touch myself to memories of him in that shower like a horny teenager.
I think our next kiss is imminent. It has to be. The next day, I moisten my lips with ChapStick every fifteen minutes. I make sure my breath is fresh and minty. I check for food in my teeth incessantly. Nicholas tells me I look different during first period. “Glowing” is his exact word. The kid is too observant.
At lunch, I wait for Ian in the teachers’ lounge with my food laid out in front of me on the table. He walks in, talking to another teacher, and my lungs collapse. I’m gasping for breath like a lifelong smoker.
Today he’s wearing a pale blue shirt that matches his eyes. His navy slacks are new and they fit his ass too well. His hair is coffee brown and thick. These are the details causing my asthmatic symptoms.
I’m not alone.
Ashley is sitting beside me, staring at Ian like he’s a juicy lamb chop.
“God, I love when he wears blue,” she says on a soft exhale.
If I had a weapon within reach, she’d be dead and I’d be facing life in prison, but no worries—I’d hire NPR to do a podcast about me. They’d unveil my passionate love for Ian and the audience would feel bad that he didn’t go down on me last night. They’d deem the murder a crime of passion and demand a retrial. The judge would overturn the conviction on an arcane cunnilingus law and I’d end up walking free in no time. Sorry Ash.
I watch as Ian curves around the room to make it to our table. Has he always been such a strapping lad? Have I always been in love with him?
I sit up straight and stare down at my food, hyperaware that Ian and I have some ’splainin’ to do if anyone catches me staring at him with hearts in my eyes. I don’t know if it’s against the rules for teachers to date. It’s probably just frowned upon, but still, I don’t want everyone to know our business. Gossip spreads like wildfire in this school, especially if it’s as juicy as this.
“Hey there, Ian!” Ashley exclaims as soon as he pulls out the chair across from me.
He nods in her direction as he takes a seat. Our knees bump and he might as well have just put his hand down my panties from the way I blush.
“Do anything fun last night?” she asks him. “I got sucked into a Real Housewives marathon. Ugh, I just can’t resist those catfights!”
“Oh, uh, yeah, my night was fine. Nothing memorable.”
“Not a single thing?” I snap before I can think better of it.
He wipes away a smile, busying himself with emptying his lunch onto the table. “Now that I think about it, it was just one of those nights that really sucked, y’know?”
I grunt out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cry.
Ashley is confused and staring back and forth between us. “Well I’m sorry to hear that. You’re always welcome to come binge Bravo with me!”
“I don’t know what that means.” He turns to me. “Sam, I brought the leftovers from yesterday. It’s a lot. Want some?”
“Yeah. Here, I don’t want my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You can eat it for a snack before soccer practice.”
“Leftovers? So you guys were hanging out last night?” Ashley asks Ian. “What were you up to?”
“Does it have raspberry jelly?” he asks skeptically. “I thought you ran out.”
I roll my eyes and shove the sandwich toward him. “I picked some up on the way home last night because every time I use grape you groan about it for four days straight.”
“Guys,” Ashley says, tired of being ignored.
“What?” I ask impatiently.
“What were you doing?”
I shrug. “Watching West Wing.”
Ian is wearing a secretive smile and Ashley notices.
“Well that doesn’t sound too bad. What sucked about that?”
My eyes go wide with fear. Since when are we under her microscope? Oh right, since she decided to have a crush on Ian.
“Just wasn’t a good episode,” he backtracks into a lie. Any true fan knows there is no such thing. “And I stubbed my toe.”
He’s trying to help, but he’s only making it worse.
“Oh…okay. Well I hope Sam here gave you a foot rub or something…”
She knows. She knows!
I act fast.
“Do you like pretzels, Ashley?” I ask genially.
She perks up. “Love them.”
I toss the bag her way and she drops it into her purse.
Then I watch as she realizes the power she suddenly wields.
“Y’know, I like chocolate too,” she says with a smile that’s too polite. Her point
is perfectly clear: give me the chocolate or I tell everyone you two were fooling around. I slap my dessert pudding cup in her hand and she gloats. “’Preciate it.” Then she turns to Ian. “Anyway, Ian, I was wondering what your plans are for this Saturday? I want to check out this new nature path near my house and you seem outdoorsy.” She wags her eyebrows. “Could be fun.”
Wait. What?
“As friends,” she clarifies, testing the waters. “I’m inspired by how friendly everyone is around here.”
Ian tells her he’s busy this weekend and then Ashley blabs about something else I don’t care about. I’m too busy watching her spoon my goddamn pudding into her mouth. She dribbles a little bit on her lip. I chew on my fingernails. She licks the spoon and I resist the urge to slap the container out of her hand. Then—THEN—she doesn’t even finish all of it.
“Ugh, I’m so full.”
My fingernails dig into my palm so hard, I draw blood.
Ian is smart enough to buy me a chocolate bar from the vending machine on the way back to our classrooms. He slaps it into my hand and tells me to eat it all.
“And calm down. No one cares about what we’re doing. You’re being paranoid.”
He’s right, I am being paranoid, but it doesn’t matter. Soon, my life implodes on itself anyway.
14
S A M
The INCIDENT is largely Ian’s fault. I will blame him because it feels better to deflect, and really, it is his fault. The day after our shower fight/love sesh, I think Ian’s going to kiss me. When he doesn’t, I grow restless. I try to get creative. After his soccer practice, I show up at his house in a trench coat. I’m wearing clothes underneath, but he doesn’t know that. I think he’s going to fall to his knees and beg for it, but he doesn’t. In fact, he completely turns the tables on me because when I arrive, he’s just out of the shower, shirtless and wet and tan and how does someone have such clearly defined muscles?
I reach for them like a toddler reaching for candy. Gimme. He shakes his head, drops his hands to my shoulders, and locks his arms, holding me at a distance like I’m contaminated waste. He deposits me carefully on the couch and then goes to put a shirt on. When he’s finished, he drags me out of there with the promise of pizza.
It’s intentional on his part.
“Did we leave your house so nothing could happen?” I ask in between bites of pepperoni. “Because I don’t have any qualms about doing it in the bathroom at a sleazy pizza joint.”
He swallows his bite and stares at me like I’m from Mars.
“You have sauce on your chin, and on your shirt, and there’s a little on your cheek too.”
Point taken—I’m not at my sexual peak while shoving stuffed crust down my throat. Next time, I’ll order a salad.
After pizza, Ian drives us back to his house and leads me straight to my bike. He hoists me onto the seat and leans down. I brace for it. THE KISS. I’m going to rock his world. I’m going to do things with my tongue he’s only ever read about on the dark web.
Then I realize he’s buckling my helmet for me and making sure it’s secure.
“Go home, Sam. This weekend, we’ll go out on our first date. Saturday morning, I’ll pick you up and take you to breakfast and I’ll ask you about your hobbies.”
“I don’t have any hobbies.”
“After, we’ll hold hands and stroll around the park.”
“Will this park have dark corners for doing dark deeds?”
“It’s going to be 85 and sunny. Children will be flying kites.”
“It better not be the park where I learned how to rollerblade. I still get funny looks.”
“It’ll be any park you want it to be.”
“And then after?” I ask, urging him on.
“After, we’ll go back to my house and I’ll kiss you for as long as you want to be kissed, and maybe we’ll see about getting to second base.”
“Can’t we just start at home plate? The batter starts there anyway. That way you don’t have to bother running around those pesky bases.”
“Sam, I swear…”
He pinches his eyes closed and I poke his chest.
“I’m kidding.” Kind of.
Anyway, that’s how we leave that night, and to his credit, Saturday is great. It’s one for the books. We meet at our favorite breakfast spot in the morning. I’m there early, sitting in a booth and chewing my fingernails down to nubs. At 9:30 on the dot, Ian strolls in, and I reach for my coffee so I appear calm and casual rather than deranged and lovesick. He spots me and smiles. Dimples flare and my stomach flips and I hold up a hand to wave at him—wave, like I’m on a parade float.
“Morning,” he says as he slides into the opposite side of the booth.
“Hello.”
“That your first cup of coffee?”
It’s my third.
“Yup.” I shrug coolly. “I just got here a few minutes ago.”
Our well-meaning waiter blows my cover. “Oh, look! Here’s your friend. I was beginning to wonder if you’d been stood up.”
Ian smiles like he’s just discovered some deep, dark secret of mine.
I tell him I think our waiter is on something.
After breakfast, Ian fulfills his promise to take me to a park, except we never make it out of his car. It’s too hot to take a walk and I’ve been a good girl, sitting across from him all morning long, completing full sentences when what I really wanted to do was toss my scrambled eggs and bacon at the wall and leap over the table at him.
Now, we’re in the parking lot at the park and Ian is about to open his door, but I reach over and grip his forearm. It’s solid, strong…more tantalizing than a simple body part should be.
“Don’t.”
He pauses and turns to face me, brow arched with interest.
“I don’t want to take a walk.”
“What do you want to do?”
A slow, devious smile spreads across my lips.
We make out in his car for what feels like hours. I straddle his lap and my elbow hits the horn so a roving group of kids turn and stare at us. A minivan pulls into the spot beside us and a family of five scrambles out. I fold my body down, trying to hide, but one of the kids presses his face right up to the window.
“Mommy, come look! She’s sitting on his lap! Is he Santa Claus?”
Ian hauls ass out of there before the police get called.
Unfortunately, come Monday, we’ve still only done a lot of kissing. The kissing is great, but I’m ready for more. So, being the impatient idiot that I am, I decide to tease Ian a little.
He emails me a recipe that morning before school, asking if I can grab a few things from the store on the way to his house. They’re innocuous items: oregano and olive oil. I email back: Sure, but what’s for dessert? ;)
FletcherIan@OakHillHigh: Have any ideas?
After a stroke of genius, I email back a photo of myself shooting whipped cream into my mouth. It’s cheeky and hot. There’s a teensy bit on my nose too. Below it, I type, I’m all out of chocolate chips. We’ll have to get creative. It’s not really meant to be sexy. It’s meant to make him laugh, but, I mean, if it turns him on then all the better. Bonus: I got to have whipped cream for breakfast.
I don’t think twice about it until I’m sitting in my classroom before first period and the teacher one classroom over, Mrs. Orin, dips her head past the doorframe.
“Hey, Sam. I think it’s really brave of you to show up today. Most people wouldn’t have the guts.”
Then she holds up a fist for solidarity.
Okay, well, that was the weirdest experience of my life.
Ten minutes later, Logan comes by. For some reason, he can’t meet my gaze. “Hey, sorry, I would have never asked you out if I knew you and Ian were together. Friends still?”
All of the blood drains from my face. What the HELL is going on?
When he leaves, I scramble for my phone and check my email only to find that the worst possible thing in t
he history of the world has happened to me: I didn’t send the whipped cream photo to FletcherIan@OakHillHigh. I send it, along with the rest of our conversation, to FullStaff@OakHillHigh.
NO.
NOOOOOO.
NoOoOooOO0O0O0O0O0O0O.
I clutch my chest. I can’t catch my breath. I look around for some kind of defibrillator, but there’s only a fire extinguisher. It won’t help in this situation unless I hit myself in the head really hard and give myself brain damage. Actually…that’s a pretty great idea.
Here’s exactly how this happened:
I thought I hit reply, but I must have hit forward.
I hit F and Gmail autofilled the wrong email address.
I was too distracted at the time to check who I was sending the emails to and now I’m going to go hit my skull with a fire extinguisher and hope I go into a month-long coma.
This sort of thing has happened to other teachers before. Last year, our nurse accidentally emailed the entire school a copy of her W-2, letting everyone know how much money she makes. She was mortified. The year before, one of the volleyball coaches sent us all a gym selfie that was meant for his wife. We teased him mercilessly. Those don’t hold a candle to this.
THIS IS MUCH WORSE.
Teachers started replying to the email right away, making jokes and trying to lighten the mood. I can’t read a single one of them. My hands are shaking. I fight down the urge to vomit all over the lesson plans on my desk.
Ian calls my cell phone twice and I ignore it.
I put my head between my knees and practice breathing exercises.
Students are starting to filter into my classroom for first period. I’m supposed to teach, but I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I want to pretend like this isn’t happening, but that won’t work. Instead, I decide the best course of action is to nip it in the bud. I shoot out an email quickly, trying for honesty: “Well, this is extremely embarrassing. Please disregard my last email. It was a bad joke made in poor taste.” I decide to not even address the fact that I was openly flirting with Ian. I’m hoping if I don’t draw attention to it, no one will notice. I’m wrong.