Thou Shalt Not

by Jj Rossum

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Then I added, “What if we come back sometime this week, maybe Friday? Just for dessert.”

  “If you’re going to ask me out on a date, you have to actually ask me.”

  “Well, wasn’t this a date? Sort of?”

  “No sir,” she said. “You told me this was a celebration dinner. Big difference.”

  She smiled, and my heart melted like the butter on the sweet potato.

  “You are right,” I said. “Fine. April, would you go out with me on Friday night? I know a great place we can go.”

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  I wanted to run around the restaurant and high five everyone. I might have even chest-bumped Martin.

  I was worried that she would back off once we had sex. Get weird, or regret her decision. Agreeing to another date was a good sign.

  God. I was dating a married woman.

  I paid the bill, left Martin a tip I wouldn’t have envisioned giving him in the first few minutes, and we began the drive home.

  We crossed the bridge, and it dawned on me that I had gone the entire dinner without once worrying what would happen if someone from the school saw us. I hadn’t been paranoid about getting caught. Maybe I was evolving. Maybe I was becoming reckless.

  “Thank you for dinner, Luke,” she said, taking hold of my hand as I drove.

  “It was my pleasure, April.”

  “When I told Marco I had gotten the job, he flipped out. Wasn’t happy for me for a second. It’s weird to be around a man who wants to celebrate something like this.”

  “You make me want to celebrate the ability to breathe.”

  After I said it, I nearly facepalmed myself. Then, I nearly facepalmed myself for thinking the word “facepalm” in my head. But, the students always used it when they did something stupid. What can I say? They have rubbed off on me.

  “You’re a good man,” she said.

  I was waiting for a “but,” but it never came. We drove in silence for a little bit, until we neared the main road that led toward the beach, and toward both our homes.

  “I need to stop by my house and get a few things,” she said. “I might even get my car, so that you won’t have to drop me off in the morning.”

  “Okay,” was all I could say. But my mind was racing. She had no intention of going home, obviously. She wanted to spend the night again. And hadn’t even bothered asking. She was perfect. I didn’t even have to work at this.

  I wasn’t ready to take her home yet, though.

  There was a specific neighborhood about three minutes from mine that I had frequented as a kid. When you turned into the neighborhood, a massive oak tree in the middle greeted you, creating a natural median in the road. The road winded back through many more oak trees, none quite as big as the first one. But, it was a beautiful neighborhood. The houses were visually impressive, although not quite mansion caliber like you would see in April’s neighborhood.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. She was looking up at the trees as we drove. Her question seemed more like an afterthought.

  “You’ll see.”

  “You really like your surprises.”

  The sky was clear and the moon was full. Moonlight shone through the tree canopy, piercing the road with occasional light.

  After you passed the first six houses, you turned left. If you were walking the neighborhood and were unfamiliar with it, it would have been easy to lose your bearings. And you most certainly wouldn’t know how close you were to the water. But after the turn, and down the road a little ways further, there was a break in the trees and houses and you would find a large fishing dock that stretched out over the Intercoastal.

  Friends and I used to come fish here late at night, after the residents had gone to bed. Technically, the dock was private property. But, we were young and carefree.

  The dock that I had fished on was wiped out during Hurricane Charlie a few years before, and a brand new one was in its place a year later. I hadn’t been on the new dock yet.

  We were still dressed in our Bern’s attire as I parked along the street, and we walked through the grass to the dock.

  “Full moon,” I said as we walked. “All the crazies come out tonight.”

  “God, it’s so true,” she laughed. “It’s like clockwork with him. He’s always a little nuts, but when there is a full room, I do anything in my power to avoid him.”

  “Well then, thank God for Cuba,” I said. “We should have him shipped there every full moon.”

  “Let’s just ship him there permanently.”

  She took my hand, and we walked onto the dock.

  Since the dock was new it didn’t smell of fish, and there were no shrimp heads or squid guts or anything else littering the floor of the dock.

  “It’s beautiful out here,” she said.

  “We used to come out here to fish,” I said. “Never took much stock at the time of how nice it was.”

  “This would have been such a great area to grow up.”

  There was a bench along the railing and we sat down to look out over the water. I put my arm around her and she laid her head on my shoulder. I absently started playing with her hair.

  “You know,” I said, “I have a friend I graduated high school with named Laura. We both went into teaching, but after she graduated college she moved to North Carolina, got married, and started working in a high school up there. At the end of last school year, she sent me a message on Facebook to tell me that one of their English teachers was leaving. Asked if I would be interested in applying.”

  “Did you?”

  “I thought hard about it. I mean, after Carrie died I kind of wondered what my place was here anymore. Yeah, I’m from here, but after going through all that I was tempted for a long time to just drop everything here and go somewhere new. Start fresh.”

  “You rarely answer a question directly, you know,” she said. “It’s kind of frustrating.”

  “Not the first time I’ve been told that,” I said.

  “So what made you stay? Did you apply and they turned you down?”

  “Laura sent me the paperwork. I filled it all out. I was on my way to send everything out, and Robin called me. Her tire had gone flat on the bridge to Tampa. It was during the day and her husband was at work. So she called me.”

  “But, you still could have sent them afterwards, right? Or even the next day.”

  “Yeah. But I’m kind of, I don’t know, maybe superstitious is the right word. I had told Robin I was going to apply. She thought it was a great opportunity and was excited for me. She said that she and Walt would be praying. And as I was driving, I remember even thinking how smoothly everything seemed to be going. How it seemed like nothing was going to stop it. I had even started looking at houses up there.”

  “Slightly premature,” she said, rubbing my chest with her hand.

  “Yeah, but you know how it is. I was mentally preparing myself for the idea. And then, bam, tire goes out. They had just put new tires on the car a month before. And so I drove out there and spent the afternoon fixing her car on the bridge. Finally, I got her back on the road. And Walt called me from work and was beyond grateful. I guess Robin hadn’t even told him until afterwards because she knew he couldn’t have left his job to help. So she didn’t want to worry him.”

  “What does Walt do?”

  “He’s an air traffic controller at the Clearwater airport.”

  “Oh wow, Yeah, he wouldn’t have been leaving work then.”

  “Exactly. So, he called and was so thankful. And I guess because they had always been so good to me, I felt like I was a little in debt to them. Not in a bad way, just that I wanted to repay them for how they had treated me, you know?”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  “So, for whatever reason, I just took the tire popping and me losing the day as a sign that maybe I wasn’t supposed to get to the post office to send out the paperwork. Then Robin got sick. And then y
ou walked into my life.”

  I decided to just go for it. Fuck it.

  “And I know that her tire popped for a reason.”

  “You knew right away?”

  “I knew you were something special. I knew I had never met anyone like you. You turned around that day and it was like a scene from a movie. The ones where the guy sees the girl and she is brightly lit, like the light is shining only on her. Everything else goes blurry and fades out. I swear I thought you’d notice that I froze and think I was a creep.”

  “I think I was too nervous about working again to notice that. Obviously, I did notice you check out my ring.”

  “Sorry for making that so obvious.”

  “It was cute. And I remember thinking I never had a teacher who looked like you when I was in high school.”

  I laughed.

  “Yeah, you were probably thankful!”

  “I probably would have flirted my ass off.”

  “I’m not even sure how to respond to that,” I said, laughing again. “I can’t say I would have flirted back, or that would make me a pedophile creep.”

  “True. Creep.”

  I turned around on the bench to face her. Her skin was so pale I could see the veins in her neck. She looked like a ghost in a red dress.

  “Look, I’m going to be honest here...not that I haven’t been honest up to this point, but you know what I mean,” I started.

  She just smiled and nodded. Her dark hair shifted around her face and for a moment I lost track of my thoughts.

  “I loved Carrie.”

  April immediately perked up at the mention of my late wife’s name. These were things she wanted to know about me. These were things Holly wanted to know about me. But, I so rarely shared thoughts or feelings related to that period of my life. I felt like I needed to say this though.

  “She was controlling.”

  April cocked her head to the side. “In what way?”

  I rested my elbows on my knees and stared at the water. I wished I had a toothpick.

  “I had this big—no, huge—movie collection,” I said. “I’m a movie snob.” I grinned and looked at her out of the corner of my eye so she’d know how serious I was.

  “Surprise, surprise,” she said. I leaned up to kiss her.

  “I added to it while we were married. She used to get upset sometimes at the movies I used to bring home. I always risked a lecture when I walked through the door with a new DVD. I started sneaking them in. It was pathetic. But, eventually she’d see them on the shelf and I’d get a lecture anyway. They were too violent, too sexually explicit, too immoral. She wanted me to be like her, I guess. Watch Disney movies…”

  April groaned. I imagined Disney movies were the bane of a mother’s existence.

  “Anyway, one day I came home and the shelves were empty. She’d thrown them all out. Years and thousands of DVDs.”

  “Oh my god, Luke. What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” I shook my head, even now disgusted at the memory. “I didn’t do a damn thing. Pretended like it never happened. I didn’t want the fight. I was hurt, but I just took it as my compromise. She wanted me to give up movies. I gave up movies. Because I loved her.”

  I looked at April. “There is a point to all of this, believe it or not.”

  She nodded and touched the back of my head, her fingers lightly running through my hair. I closed my eyes for a second and allowed myself to enjoy it. Holly and I fucked. All the ways we touched were sexual. But, a woman hadn’t touched me like this in a long time.

  “I don’t think real love tries to change you. The movies were part of me. When a person tries to strip you of the things that make you you—only to make you more like them—it starts to make you bitter.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. She tilted her chin toward her lap and one dropped onto her dress.

  “I like you,” I said. “I don’t feel judged by you. I’m not trying to sound like a teenage girl and ask you what exactly ‘we’ are. But I want you to know that you make me want to get up in the morning. Seeing you every day at work gives me something to look forward to. And now, actually getting to spend time with you is messing with my head. You are married, and you have children. This is complicated any way you look at it. Truthfully, I don’t even know what you want out of all this. But, it’s only fair to tell you that the more time I spend with you, the more I find myself falling. Hard. I don’t just want to be a plaything to you.”

  She had been looking at me, but now she turned and looked out toward the water. The moon reflected off the surface. The effect was eerie.

  “I am happy, Luke. Right now. I am happy. The last twenty-four hours have been the best I can remember having in years. Maybe ever. And it’s easy to get caught up in them and not have to think. When I’m with you, even when we are just talking at the school, I sort of lose all worries about anything else. I focus on you and how you make me feel.”

  She paused, and let the words linger between us. I knew there was a “but” coming, though.

  I was right.

  “But, then when I’m sitting in the classroom, or I’m driving around town, or I’m at home alone, I think about him. I think about the kids. I think about what would have to happen for us to ever be able to try something. And it scares me. It wears me down to even think about. “

  She turned back toward me and took my hand.

  “You aren’t a plaything,” she continued. “Although, I think I’m going to want to play with you all the time now. I find myself wishing I had known you before I married the biggest asshole I’ve ever met. I was young, and stupid, and knew in my heart I shouldn’t marry him. And now that I’ve found a man who makes me feel butterflies when he looks at me, I realize that I am going to have to pay for the mistake I made.”

  “You don’t have to punish yourself for those mistakes. You were young. But, continuing to live in a mistake once you’ve learned better is the worst thing you can do for yourself. You have no right to punish yourself any more for that choice. You have been punished enough just by having to live with him.”

  “I don’t mean it like that, Luke. I am going to suffer the consequences for my mistake. Even if I decided not to leave him. There will be consequences for my actions. I think about that a lot. My kids will be dragged through it. Marco will make things miserable for me. He could and would do everything in his power to make things miserable for you too. Even if he never found out I had already started something with you. You’ve already been through so much. So, I question whether or not I’m willing to put you through even more. And whether I can subject my kids to that.”

  Her voice quivered when she mentioned her children. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her toward me. She cried, her head pressed to my chest.

  “I don’t want him to come back,” she said through tears. “And I want my babies.”

  “Listen,” I said, as she continued to cry. “You don’t get to make the decisions for me. I want to have something with you. Something that doesn’t involve sneaking around and trying to keep things under wraps. I know it won’t be easy, but I want you, and whatever comes with you.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I lifted her chin up and looked at her face. Her eyes were wet with tears, and her eyelashes glistened in the light.

  I kissed her cheek and could taste the saltiness of her tears on my lips. I kissed the other cheek, and then her forehead.

  Then I kissed her lips. The kiss started slow and continued that way, but I could feel it in places I had never felt a kiss before. I loved Carrie as a young, inexperienced kid. The things I felt for April were more complex. I was more complex. Was this love?

  My hands were on her waist, and hers were laced behind my head.

  She began to scoot off the bench, pulling me down with her. Before I knew it, she was lying down on the dock and I was on top of her.

  We continued to kiss as she undid my belt and unzipped my pants. I grew hard the second she touch
ed my bare skin.

  She took my shaft into her right hand, and with her left hand I could tell she was pulling her panties to the side, making room for me. She guided me inside her, and I felt her warmth wash over me. I buried my face in her neck for a minute. This was the best part—the heat, the tightness. Her legs open and tensed.

  People would have been able to see us on the dock if they had been looking out their back windows. But we were oblivious as we made love to the sound of the water lapping against the dock, illuminated by the light of the moon.

  I dropped April off at her house a little while later so that she could get her things and drive her car over. I went on ahead without her.

  When I pulled into my neighborhood, I saw a car in my driveway. Holly’s.

  Oh god.

  Foolishly, I had thought maybe if I just stopped talking to her during the day she would go back to Kyle and work things out and everything would be fine. That we wouldn’t have to talk about things. But, I had known things were changing for her, that she was developing an attachment to me again. Hell, even I was feeling it. Squashing feelings was a gift of mine. So, I was stupid to think I could casually sever it by not talking to her for a few days.

  She had a key to my house, so she was already inside, seated on the couch when I walked in. A white bra was next to her on the couch. April’s. In our haste to leave that morning, April had put her tank top on and gone braless. I remembered her nipples poking out spectacularly as I had driven her to her house.

  “Well, I know this isn’t mine,” Holly said, forgoing salutations. “Way too small.”

  “Look, Holly, I…”

  She cut me off.

  “Spare me.”

  She stood up and tossed the bra at me. I caught it out of instinct. She walked out the front door and I followed her to the driveway, bra still in hand.

  “Holly, wait.”

  “For what, Luke?” she said, turning back toward me. Her voice was cold. “I’ve waited. I’ve dated other people while I waited. For you. Because you needed time to heal. I was always there when you needed someone, something. A fuck. A friend. And here I thought we had finally turned the corner.” She shook her head, and then her voiced cracked. “God, I’m so stupid.”