In retrospect, lying about knowing Robert was probably a bad idea. There was really no reason to lie. I have students; he has teachers. No big deal. I just felt a little naked standing there and my knee-jerk response was to lie. No harm done, though.
When Kiki runs off to play with another little girl on the Mc-playground, I send him a text. I don’t have to worry about him getting it during his group session; his battery is dead. But I want it to be the first thing he sees when he charges his phone tonight.
I surrender. Please delete.
I’m back home and in bed when he texts back.
Robert
Ms. Momin has always been super nice to me. And I feel a little guilty about ejaculating in her entryway.
I’m also finding it hard to focus on the kids today because I keep remembering the way his hands felt on my skin, and I’m sitting here in front of three special-needs kids and a woman who is my sort-of boyfriend’s ex-wife, and I’m primed and ready to go again. I shift uncomfortably, hoping she sees me as too much of a kid to ever let her eyes drift between my legs.
“Good job, guys!” I say when we finish the lamb was sure to go. Patrick is out of his seat again and flailing his arms about and almost beans Sophie.
“Take it easy, Patrick,” I say, capturing one of his bent arms. He puckers up his mouth like he’s waiting for the word he wants to say to build up inside him, then explodes with a “Bah!”
“Yeah, it was really good.”
“Bah!”
Ms. Momin winks at me over Sophie’s head, and I wonder if she’s ever had Andrew’s penis in her mouth. And just when I’m starting to get things under control again, suddenly I’m not.
Stop thinking about it!
I keep hoping Andrew and Kiki will get back before we finish, but they don’t. And maybe that’s for the best. But if I don’t get my hands on him again soon, I’m likely to lose it and give us both away.
By the time I get home and plug in my phone, I’m already making plans. His text—I surrender—drives away any lingering doubts. I text back.
LOL. About time. I’m deleting.
Chapter 32
Andrew
Not even Stephen can ruffle my feathers today. He could drop his pants and tell me to kiss his ass first period, and I’d still be smiling.
When he asks why I wasn’t there for tutoring yesterday, I beam as I tell him I didn’t think he was coming, and the next time he’s even one minute late, I won’t be there either. You little piss ant.
I almost stay in my room during lunch, hoping maybe Robert will stop by, but that’s about as stupid as you can get. So I lock my classroom and hurry off to the lounge, just in case.
I’ve continued to set my lunch down next to Jennifer every day, even after she went off on me. I admit, it’s just to piss her off. I expect her to go away in a huff today, just as she’s been doing for almost two weeks now, but she doesn’t. In fact, she pulls out the chair for me and pats the seat like we’re best friends again.
She’s up to something, I know it. I just don’t know what to do about it. I can leave and not know what she’s up to, or stay and at least have a chance at heading her off.
I smile and sit.
She takes a bite of her salad and casts a smug kind of smile at me.
“So how are your classes?” I ask.
“They’re all right.”
Okay. I squirm. Around the table are my colleagues. I wouldn’t call them friends, but they are people I work with every day, and we are generally friendly. I focus my attention on them. My department chair, a middle-aged woman named Ilene, says, “I hear they didn’t approve your application for the admin program.”
Old news, but apparently new to Ilene. There are no secrets in public schools. Well, there’s at least one, and I intend to keep it that way.
“No. They sure didn’t. That’s okay,” I say cheerily. “I’ll apply again next year.”
“Well, I just want you to know, I gave you a great recommendation.”
“Thanks, Ilene.”
“Let me know if you apply again next year, and I’ll—”
She doesn’t get a chance to finish, because Jennifer chooses that moment to ask rather loudly, “Why didn’t you tell me you’re gay?”
All conversation in the room comes to a screeching halt. And all eyes in the room fix on me.
The peanut butter kind of sticks in my throat, and I have to take a sip of Powerade to force it down.
“I, um, guess you didn’t ask.”
“Don’t you think maybe you should have told me that before you asked me out?”
I set my sandwich back on the plastic wrap spread and dust my fingers while trying to remain calm, trying to look nonchalant, and trying not to be sick to my stomach. Finally, I look at her.
“Can we talk about this some other time?” I keep my voice low, hoping she’ll follow suit. Like that was going to happen.
“You know what? No, we can’t. Not that I care who you bang, but I don’t appreciate being humiliated, and I don’t appreciate you playing your little games with me.” She shoves her chair back and snaps the plastic lid back on her salad, then snatches her water bottle off the table. “You need a cover, go to Penney’s. I hear they’re having a sale.”
She takes her lunch and storms out of the room. For a moment, no one speaks, then slowly the conversation returns. By the end of the lunch period, it has almost reached a normal volume. I don’t engage in the conversation, and no one tries to engage me. When the bell rings, I flee to the relative safety of my room.
Her question is a fair one. If I worked anywhere else other than a public school—an engineering firm, an accounting office, an insurance company—I wouldn’t have thought twice about admitting to my colleagues that I am, in fact, 100 percent queer. But public school is a world unto itself. It’s okay to be gay; you just don’t talk about it. It’s an unspoken rule, but it’s pretty hard and fast down here. It’s one of those things you just know. I honestly don’t care if my colleagues know; I just didn’t want to be the subject of their gossip. So much for that.
I haven’t quite gotten back to my happy place by sixth period, but seeing Robert walk through that door does give me a little boost, and I have to remind myself to play it cool.
Today he smiles and says, “Hey, Mr. Mac,” and I swear I want to kiss him right then and there, not because I want to kiss him right then and there, which I do, but because it’s normal kid-to-teacher stuff—a smile, a greeting, the use of my name in diminutive. No winks, no full-body scans. Normal feels safe.
At the end of the period, he straightens the desks in his row, then gives me a shy smile (which I find so endearing, considering where that mouth has been) and drops a note on my desk.
Chapter 33
Robert
Longest week ever. It’s hard to play student when you’re this hot for teacher.
I’m the first one to the parking garage Friday evening. I find a spot in the shadows at the end of a dead-end row on the top floor where there aren’t many cars, and get out, then I take a quick stroll around the floor just to be sure there are no bodies in the cars that are there. I’m leaning on the trunk when Andrew finds me and parks about eight spaces away.
He glances around, then hustles over to me. His huge smile mirrors mine. “Great place to rendezvous. So, what’s the surprise?” he asks.
I tilt my head toward my car and hit the Unlock button. “I’m taking you out tonight.”
“I don’t—”
“I’m not taking any chances, okay? Trust me.”
“All right, then.” He opens the door. “Let’s go.”
When I get back in the driver’s seat, he says, “I’ve missed—” But that’s all he manages to say before I am over the console and all in his space. We are not going there in this parking garage, but I have to kiss him and I have to touch him and I have to hold him and I have to soak up everything he gives me back. And he does give back.
A
nd then we do go there, because we can’t not.
“Curse this damn console,” Andrew mutters.
“Well, if you hadn’t given up your apartment, I’d be stretched out naked on top of you right now instead of giving you a hand job in the front seat of my car.”
I feel his grin against my neck.
“As long as it’s your hand, baby, I’m good with that.”
“You called me baby again. Like.”
When a car comes up the ramp on the other side of the floor, we reluctantly disengage. But I think I can focus on the road now.
“Where are we headed?” he asks as we leave the parking garage.
“Downtown.”
“Are you sure you’re checked out to drive on freeways?”
“Oooh, that’s cold.”
He laughs and buckles his seat belt. “I am at your mercy tonight.”
“I’m going to remember you said that.”
On the way, I get to pump him for information—pets he had growing up (an ancient basset hound named Einstein), favorite way to waste an afternoon (pushing a two-year-old on a swing at the park, which I think is cheating), best movie he’s seen in the past year (Donnie Darko, rented from Netflix—I didn’t get the movie and neither did he, but he can’t get the image of the evil bunny out of his head, thus best movie for its staying power).
“First guy you kissed?”
He doesn’t answer for a couple of beats and I throw a quick glance his way.
“You,” he says finally.
“You’re lying. You’re telling me you never had another boyfriend?”
“You didn’t ask me about a boyfriend. You asked me about a first kiss.”
I need to keep my eyes on the freeway. The traffic is heavy for a Friday evening, most of it heading north, but plenty heading south too. Still, I can’t help another glance.
He takes a deep breath and flutters his lips. “Oklahoma makes Texas look liberal. I didn’t date in high school. Facebook and My-Space weren’t very big back then, so I was pretty much encapsulated in my little world. I only knew a couple of other guys, but they were not my type, trust me on this.”
I smile at the road ahead.
“So my first boyfriend, I guess, was in college.”
“Why you guess?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“And you never kissed.”
“Nope. We never kissed.”
I try to wrap my brain around that—a boyfriend, but no kiss. I want to ask more questions—questions like, Just what did you do?—but I don’t know if I’m ready to hear the answers. At least I don’t want to hear them while we’re hurtling sixty-five miles an hour down one of the worst freeways in the state. His tone tells me there’s a story there, and it might not be a very pretty one.
“So tell me about Ms. Momin.”
“Maya. You want the CliffsNotes, or you want the whole unabridged version?”
“I want the forty-minute version.”
“Okay. She’s been my best friend since junior high. We were close. Really close. We are close. We even went to college together. I think now she always had a crush on me, but I didn’t really see it for a long time. I guess things really started to change after Kevin.”
“The college boyfriend?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure I want to tell you this next part.”
I glance at him. “Thirty-nine minutes. I want to hear.”
He flutters his lips again and seems quite serious. I slide over into a more open lane.
“Maya was like my sister. No, not like a sister. Ick. More like a buddy, a pal, you know. I mean, she used to sit on the toilet in the bathroom and talk to me when I took a shower. It was no big deal. That’s just kind of how we were.”
If he sees me raise my eyebrows, he doesn’t react.
“So, after Kevin, I was feeling kind of damaged.” He stops and stares out the window.
“And?”
“And, then one night we were having a sleepover like we did all the time. I was feeling pretty down, and, well, she pushed and I didn’t fight her.”
He seems embarrassed, like this is some great revelation. Like I don’t know where babies come from.
“After that, things really changed between us. There were no more massages—”
Massages?
“—no more conversations in the bathroom while I showered. It was awkward. About five weeks later, she found out she was pregnant. It changed things again. We just kind of went back to being best friends; no benefits. She had Kiki, we got married, we moved in together, things got awkward again, I moved out. And that’s about it.”
“And now you’ve moved back.” I glance at him. “Why?”
“Because she asked. Because I was scared.”
I think about the way he reacted when he saw my birth date on my driver’s license. It had been such a one-eighty. For a while, he’d been focused on me, just me, his heart pounding in unison with mine as he gave in to all that passion. But even as he lay on the couch, his head in my lap, I could feel the fear creeping back in. And then, suddenly, he couldn’t get away from me fast enough, like I was a flame he was standing too close to.
But to move in with Ms. Momin?
“Has it ever occurred to you that she’s manipulating you?” I ask. It’s actually hard for me to reconcile the Ms. Momin I know with the Maya he’s talking about. It’s like they’re two different people. When I think in terms of Maya, the manipulation is so obvious. When I think Ms. Momin, not so much.
“No. I don’t think so. It’s just an arrangement that works for both of us right now, or at least it seemed like it at first. There’s nothing going on between us. She has a boyfriend. It’s all cool.”
“You really expect me to believe that?”
“Okay, well maybe it’s not all cool. She groped me last weekend.”
“Holy shit! She did not.” I feel like I’m going to go blind even thinking about Ms. Momin doing that.
“I think I’ve really screwed up, Robert. And now I don’t know what to do about it. It’s not Maya. It’s Kiki. When I moved out the first time, she was too little to know anything. But now she’s had her daddy there long enough for us to develop routines again. I know it would be hard for her if I leave. She’s old enough to know if I’m gone, but too young to really understand why.”
I feel partly responsible. If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have moved back and wouldn’t be in this position right now.
When I say so, he reaches over and fiddles with the short hairs on the back of my neck. “Yeah, thanks a lot, pal. Next time I relieve you of your clothes, be the grown-up and walk away, okay?”
The club is near the university’s downtown campus. Andrew is still wary, but I convince him that he won’t see any former students here. Last year he taught strictly freshmen, and since it was his first year, it’s highly unlikely that anybody here will know him. And I don’t know anyone who’s attending school at the downtown campus. I don’t know if either one of us is 100 percent confident in my assessment, but the allure of dancing together is enough to make us at least pretend we are.
Andrew hooks his arm around my neck as we make our way through the college crowd gathered on the sidewalk out front. He’s wearing one of his Friday T-shirts (Math Geek), jeans, and Vans, and he looks like I just plucked him out of his dorm room. A group of co-eds break to let us through. Someone wolf whistles.
“I hope you brought your Usher tonight, stud,” he says in my ear.
“Oh, I brought him. You hauling out your tired old Mick Jagger again?”
“Low,” he says, pretending to strangle me. “As a matter of fact, I’m unleashing my Adam Lambert tonight since you seem to like him so much, friend.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll go blind?”
“You might. But then you’ll have to feel your way to me later tonight.”
I stop and he swings around to face me, grinning. “Okay, we’re going back to the car,” I say, turning to go.
>
“Uh-uh,” he says, grabbing my hand before I can take a step away. “We’re dancing. You can feel me up later.”
“One condition.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
“You don’t call me ‘friend’ anymore.”
He studies my face a moment, then, “Come on, baby, let’s dance.”
I don’t know which I enjoy more—dancing or watching Andrew, who has completely unplugged from the grown-up grid for the night. He dances close to me on the packed floor. We grind, we make out during slower songs. I’ve completely forgotten that this is my teacher until a curvy girl with a lip ring and pink hair approaches us between songs and says, “I know you,” to Andrew.
He stiffens, and I can tell from the look on his face that he’s searching his memory bank for an image that matches the face and hoping to hell he doesn’t find one.
“Dunn Hall, right?” she goes on, pointing a finger at him. “You were at the fall mixer with Kruger. You hooked up with some drunken redhead as I recall.” She appraises me, then looks back at Andrew with raised eyebrows.
Andrew raises his brows back at her. “I’m flexible,” he deadpans.
“Hmm,” she says, giving him a full-frontal scan with her eyes. “See you at the spring mixer, hot stuff.”
“Yeah,” he says. When she turns to go, he grabs my hand and tugs me in the other direction. “Let’s get out of here,” he says in my ear.
Hot Stuff and I spend the next hour seeing just how flexible he really is in the backseat of my car.
Pretty flexible.
We’re basking in the afterglow when I tell him, “I have a confession to make.”
Andrew
Is this what I missed in high school? Making out in the backseat of a car in a dimly lit parking lot? Banging our heads on the armrest when we try to stretch out on a seat that is about two feet shorter than we are? Holding our breaths every time we hear a voice, every time a door slams or a light sweeps across the windows?
Where You Are Page 21