Tampa

chapter ten

Not having to worry about being in the house when Buck came home meant more time for play—in the kitchen there were food games where Jack, keeping his eyes closed, sampled dollops of salad dressing off my chest and had to guess at the flavor, getting a hearty spank with a wooden spoon when he was wrong; in the living room we’d often play a soft-core movie from one of the racier on-demand cable channels on the big-screen TV while copulating atop Buck’s electric reclining chair, operating the control switch so that it slowly shifted positions the entire time like we were riding on the back of a somnambulant horse. Although I worried the increased contact was making Jack grow too needy—he’d begun to call any time Buck stepped out, even for a moment to return a DVD—the variety and frequency the arrangement added to our exploits made it hard to turn back from, even at its lowest moments, when I didn’t make it out of the house before Buck arrived home and I had to pretend I’d dropped by for a visit. To my surprise, Buck actually was simply entertained—fine with watching a few television programs together and then accepting my exit. He required only an extended hug upon departure that often morphed into a quasi-grope, his hand squeezing the flesh of my upper buttock with the probing tenacity of a fruit inspector. Occasionally as we untangled he’d plant a wet kiss against my jawline and audibly inhale the fragrance of my hair.

But the moments before he came home made this suffering worth it—times when Jack would urgently call and I’d open the door to find him sitting on the couch waiting for me, naked and erect, wearing the baseball cap I liked (its Little League vibe made him look just a shade younger). Sometimes we knew we had only minutes alone and there was a harried and apocalyptic violence in the way we went for each other—our joined bodies slamming into the wall, quaking with a fortune of pleasure that we had just seconds to spend. I began to dress for efficiency—skirts that could be lifted, shirts that could be slipped overhead, never any panties.

It was an optimal situation, save for the additional ripples it made at home. I now saw Buck enough that he drained the reserves of patient energy I had used to spend tolerating Ford. Evenings when Ford returned home from work and came into the bedroom wanting an inspired quickie inevitably led to hurt feelings—I encouraged him to look at pictures online, to buy videos. “Teaching all day takes everything I’ve got,” I complained; “it exhausts me wholly.” But Ford’s appetite was for real flesh and he’d insist that at the very least I let him look at me naked while he pleasured himself; this led to offensive scenes of Ford’s face in the dim-lit shadows, his jaw fixed as tightly and aggressively as an assassin about to pull a trigger while his body hunched over me panting and dripping sweat.

Sensing that I was drifting even further away from him, Ford’s mind went into overdrive. He’d recently tried to get the baby conversation going again—he wanted us to go to a fertility doctor, get the ball rolling. “If we ever have a child, it’ll be through adoption,” I stressed, trying to play to both his vanity and my own. “You didn’t marry me for my stretch marks.” I had no interest in children; even if Ford raised the thing completely by himself and we trained it not to talk to me or interact with me whatsoever, I would surely end up moving out of our home within days of its arrival. There was an impulse of self-protection surrounding the decision as well; I knew if I ever had a son, at a certain age it would be impossible to ignore him, and I never wanted to force that transgression upon myself.

“You know there are benefits,” he reminded me. It was true—as soon as we became parents, we’d gain additional monthly income from his father’s trust.

“What, you want more money?” I asked. He shook his head, in a cursory way at first, but then an anger mounted behind his eyes that soon forced him from his chair; he began to pace around the living room, fists closed, chest forward. “I don’t care about the money,” he stated, nearly a growl. “But yeah, I do want more.”

“More what?” I asked; this was the end of the line, the brink of his rage. His fist sank into the drywall with a loud crack. “More!” he shouted, then stammered incoherently. He opened his hand and beat his palm against the wall several more times before grabbing his jacket and walking out the door—he didn’t take his keys. When he returned three hours later it was raining heavily; his waterlogged sneakers made long sucking noises as he entered the hallway and walked straight to the kitchen phone, leaving a puddled trail. I brought him a towel, which he accepted but did not use. Instead he continued to drip, every inch of him from his hair down to the ends of his soaked jeans, as he called the cable company and ordered three new premium upgrade packages of digital sports channels.

I ended the fall term assigning Lord of the Flies to read over the holiday. “It’s the perfect Christmas story,” I told them. “Think of these boys when you see news footage of shoppers getting trampled as hordes of consumers race for an on-sale video game console.”

“Is this book like that TV show Survivor?” Marissa asked. Stained red from candy canes, the students’ tongues appeared to have been dyed by communal blood in a satanic cult ceremony.

“Sure,” I said, opening the door and practically pushing them out of the classroom. “Happy holidays. Bon voyage.” Of late, Jack had begun to exit the class with a too-cool air: not looking at me, slightly sauntering, effortfully aping casual. But today he gave me a smirk of foretold pleasure—his birthday was over the Christmas holiday, which he mostly had to spend at his mother’s. As a final hurrah before his departure, we were going to make the drive to the Toucan Inn after school as a seedy holiday gift to ourselves. Seeing angel-faced Jack standing nude inside a room normally used for hourly blow jobs and heroin binges struck me as a delicious treat: the juxtaposition would vividly magnify all his boyish qualities.

I picked him up at dusk behind a gas station; when I pulled in he was wandering to and fro with a small bow-topped box in his hands, as though he was working up the courage to walk in and propose marriage to the station’s attendant. I wore my red wig and had cash for the hotel desk clerk; if asked for ID, I figured I could simply claim not to have it on me and he wouldn’t refuse the money, but no such ruse was required. “An hour?” he guessed, taking in the faux electric hue of my hair and the oversized sunglasses that eclipsed most of my face. He was smoking behind the counter and watching a reality cop show. The same show’s crew had once visited Ford’s precinct, but no footage of him was chosen. This had deeply interrupted Ford’s sense of entitlement. His friends had already taken to calling him “movie star”—when the Fordless episode aired, he’d turned to me on the sofa and repeated, about twelve times, “Can you believe it?”

I wouldn’t let Jack touch any of the carpeting or bedding in the room—“You could get crabs just thinking about it,” I told him. Instead I had him take off all his clothes and lie down across the bathroom countertop with his penis hanging down in the sink and his butt positioned directly below the faucet.

“This is weird,” he said, not judging so much as objectively noticing. He started to set his face down on the counter, then recoiled and placed an arm underneath his cheek. “The counter’s kind of sticky.”

“You’ll survive.” I turned on the water, watching his cheeks momentarily buckle together, then began to carefully wash his asshole, which made him laugh.

“Does it tickle?” I asked, pressing the tip of my soapy finger centimeters inside him.

He nodded and I rinsed and patted him dry before I started giving him his very first rim job. He made no sound or expression, perhaps equally afraid to like it or dislike it, but when I turned him over he was exceptionally hard and it took only seconds of sucking the tip of his penis for him to come down the back of my throat. For a moment he sat very still on the counter, ass in the sink and head back against the mirror, and I wondered for a second if he felt too out of control—too molested perhaps, his orgasms a seeming consent to acts he didn’t fully enjoy. But then he bounded off the counter and grabbed the box he’d brought with him. “Here,” he said, immediately sheepish. “This is for you.” He looked so anxious that for a moment I worried it might indeed be an engagement ring—that somehow he’d gotten a diamond band, or even a cubic zirconia one, figuring it’s the thought that counts—and was about to suggest that we embark upon a four-year engagement to legality. When he opened the box to reveal only a pair of gold hoop earrings, Jack easily misinterpreted my flooding relief as happiness.

“They’re just so beautiful,” I gushed. “Truly. These are simply perfect; I can wear them with anything.”

The part of me that had once voiced concern about having any object that could be linked to Jack—that would’ve asked Jack if the earrings were a family heirloom or made sure he hadn’t taken them from his mother, who might discover them missing and mention them to Buck—no longer fussed over such neurotic worries; our repeated contact without consequence meant I didn’t sweat small details anymore. “You like them?” he said, fishing.

“I love them.” I smiled.

“And you love me?” He was fishing again, his smile widening. I bent to the floor, put his cock in my mouth, and began speaking in muffled words. He laughed, pushing me off.

“What?” I smiled. “You can’t understand me?” These mere seconds on the Toucan’s carpet gave my knees a rash that took days to fade.

Less carefree as of late was Jack and Buck’s relationship. For one, Jack’s grades were suffering—Jack simply seemed distracted this term, Buck lamented, like he couldn’t get his head in the game. “But his English grade is fantastic,” I pointed out.

“Well,” Buck said, winking at me, “that’s because he has a great teacher.”

Despite the arrangement being his idea, Jack likewise seemed to grow defiant whenever Buck insisted upon time alone with me. If Buck put on a movie, he’d ask Jack to go to his room and start on homework. Occasionally Buck would even set the dinner table for two and tell Jack to eat in the kitchen. “We need grown-up time,” he’d insist, and Jack would slam doors and make protestations. The worst incident happened days after the visit to the hotel. At dinner, Buck also gave me a Christmas present—earrings as well, moderately expensive diamond ones—and Jack’s eyes immediately made the comparison and saw how much shorter his sword was in this particular duel.

Trying to make Jack feel better, I politely highlighted their impracticality. “I can’t take these home,” I argued. “If my husband saw these, he would definitely start asking questions.”

Buck shrugged. “So just wear them when you’re here.” With that he stood and began to take out the earrings I was wearing. They happened to be the very same earrings Jack had bought me.

Jack loudly pushed his chair back from the table and threw his fork to the ground, stomping off to his room. “What the hell?” Buck asked, but he didn’t dwell on it; he was too busy outfitting my lobes with his prize.

It was only because of Jack’s melancholy at being outgifted that I agreed to meet him once over the break—two days before Christmas—several hours away in the town where his mother lived with her husband and his seventeen-and nineteen-year-old sons, whom Jack apparently loathed enough to prefer residence with Buck. We’d made a plan to rendezvous at the mall in one of the handicapped restrooms, where Jack alleged that one of his stepbrothers took girlfriends to fornicate all the time—a single room with a locking door, a sink and a toilet. “He sounds like a romantic guy,” I’d joked. It was bold of us, but the chaos of the holiday meant the mall would be teeming and overcrowded, all security personnel busy watching merchandise instead of trying to halt any hanky-panky in the toilets. Even if we were caught in the bathroom together, I reasoned that nothing could be proven. I could allege that Jack had seen me enter the bathroom, recognized me as a trusted teacher and, being in the middle of a personal crisis, came and knocked on the door wanting to have a private conversation, which I allowed him. I doubted they could legally have cameras in the bathroom; there would be no proof that we’d been copulating against the hand dryer instead of talking.

I got a blended iced coffee drink and waited on a bench near the restrooms. The moment I saw him enter the main doors, I walked into the bathroom and locked the door. I’d come prepared for the worst—the possibility that the bathroom’s previous occupant was a customer of size on a mobility scooter whose food court cheesesteak hadn’t agreed with him, perhaps—and quickly took out a small can of Lysol, misting the room’s corners.

When I heard the agreed-upon knock—one single rap—I unlocked the door and stood behind it, out of view to anyone in the hallway as the door swung open and Jack entered. After locking the door he immediately turned to place his mouth upon mine. We hadn’t seen one another in nearly a week and a half, the longest we’d gone since our affair started. He wasn’t interested in the slightest bit of foreplay, the poor, desperate creature. In less than a minute he’d unzipped and lowered his pants; I leaned against the sink and extended my ass toward him. Upon entry he gasped, the relieved sigh of homecoming, and buried his face in the back of my head, roiling his cheeks against my hair. We were done in less time than it would have taken to complete a legitimate bowel movement.

Afterward, his panting lips found my ear. “Do you want to wait a second and do it again?” he whispered. I did, but I worried a line was forming outside—the longer we took, the greater our chances of having to exit to an audience.

“We shouldn’t be too long,” I warned. “That’ll have to hold you till you’re back at your dad’s.”

Jack’s expression instantly hardened, as though he’d been insulted. “You’re not seeing him while I’m gone, are you?” There was a hint of outrage in his voice.

“Of course not. I told him I have far too many family gatherings to attend.” I gave Jack a frisky poke in the ribs and he laughed with relief.

“It sucks,” he said, shaking his head. “My dad is crazy about you. Usually he’s kinda ‘whatever’ about women. I knew he thought you were really good-looking but I didn’t know he’d get all gaga.” He zipped up his pants and paused, hesitating to add, “He talks about you all the time.”

I gently grabbed the collar of Jack’s shirt, tilting my head to the side and letting my hair fall across my right shoulder in a way I knew to be flattering. “Jack,” I said reassuringly, “he doesn’t even know me. He has no idea who I really am.”

This thought made Jack smile—subtly at first, but soon he broke out into a wide grin. “Yeah.” Jack nodded. “He sure doesn’t.” We gave one another a final kiss, nearly choking on the force of our own needy tongues, before I opened the door. We’d reasoned that if someone else was waiting, I’d try to ask the location of a store as a distraction while Jack crept out. But the woman planted outside was squat and hunched over a walker.

“Here,” I said to her loudly, directing Jack out behind my back, “let me help you.” I stood in front of her, a concerned citizen, and slowly guided her toward the door while his thin teenage frame dashed out and off.

Christmas Day with Ford had the effect of his seeming to be in cahoots with Jack—every gift he gave me was some type of boudoir garment I couldn’t wait to wear for Jack, from satiny thongs to lace bustiers to crotchless teddies. “Ford!” I was able to exclaim upon opening each package, my voice truly resplendent with expectant glee over the way Jack’s mouth would drop. “This is downright nasty.” The ice cubes in his glass of whiskey clinked as he brought the cup to his face to water his leering grin.

I knew an initial viewing session of the garments was unavoidable, so I took a great number of sedatives and washed them down with cranberry mimosas; Ford had placed himself in charge of deep-frying a turkey, so I had no real duties for the day other than to remember to continuously dab a Kleenex at the drool forming in the corners of my mouth and serve as a veritable blow-up doll for Ford to take his festive cheer out on. We both passed out after dinner, Ford from tryptophan and myself from a more complex hurricane of chemicals, and by the time he woke me up making jokes about the Cool Whip originally intended for the pumpkin pie, I was in a twilight state of cyclical consciousness. I managed to put on the French maid–inspired bra-and-panty set (Ford had included a small pink feather duster in the box that he wanted me to use to tickle his cock) and began spouting loose phrases in French I remembered from college (Peux-tu m’aider?). There’s little else I remember about this particular celebration of Christ’s birth. The next morning I woke up sore with the raging thirst that follows a night of obliteration, but with very few painful memories. That erasure was the gift I gave myself.