Tampa

chapter three

Seeing the students’ actualized youth up close made me double down on my age-preventative spa visits and my purchase of vigilant creams and potions. I cycled through the weeks of the month with oxygenating facials, DNA-repair enzyme facials, caviar illuminating facials, precautionary Botox, microdermabrasion, LED light therapy. To unite body and mind for the best results possible, I always tried to envision myself literally getting younger during the treatments: I pictured my fourteen-year-old self standing off in the distance, waiting for me to come repossess her body; each one of these sessions allowed me to take one step further toward reaching her by turning back the clock a few months. Though often, well-intentioned compliments on behalf of the aestheticians would derail me from such vision quests.

It was not uncommon while I was receiving a glycolic peel (I don’t find its biting sting unwelcome—in general with beauty treatments, pain feels like an assurance of progress to me) for the aesthetician to gush, “You know? You really could be a model.”

“I’m too short,” I’d quip. “Five foot seven.” Though I’d flirted with doing print ads for a small time during college, I couldn’t stand taking direction. I also had the fear that with the right photographer, the real me might accidentally be captured—that in looking at the photo, suddenly everyone’s eyes would widen and they’d actually see me for the very first time: Oh my God—you’re a soulless pervert!

The lobby of the plastic surgeon’s office had a clinical asceticism to it; with its white pillar columns and brushed chrome accents, it seemed to be part church and part laboratory. I suppose that was the message they were trying to convey: staving off decrepitude combined the miracles of religion with the progressive advancements of medicine. Yet the elderly patients in the waiting room made it clear what a pseudoscience the whole thing was. They’d often look up at me, raising vast draperies of throat skin that hung above their crepe chests like crumpled ascots. Knowing the miseries of my future body, most of them couldn’t help but give me a smile filled with sadistic delight. “You have beautiful skin,” one told me once. She seemed to squirm with relish as she said the words; it was no different from kicking me in the ribs and saying, Everything on you will one day sag. But for now, every inch of my flesh was perfectly taut—if I were to run out to the lobby midtreatment and shed my bathrobe, the sight of my immaculate abdomen would likely have caused these withered creatures to fall to their knees crying and break a hip.

Spa days were usually paired with shopping sprees. These were a necessary cushion against the realities of my pretend marriage: buying nice things helped me temporarily forget the vulgar angle to which Ford’s stubbled jaw hung open while he was snoring, the moist smacks his tongue made when he chewed a steak, and even my rare though inescapable duties in the bedroom. But they certainly couldn’t help divert my thoughts from Jack. Lately I’d begun packing my closet with body-clinging tailored suits and silk shells with low-cut backs: this way I could wear a jacket into the classroom, then remove it so only the students could see my exposed flesh, never the other teachers; occasionally I also wore long sateen scarves that covered my chest. Only upon entering the class would I wrap them up around my neck or sling them back across my shoulders so the air conditioner paired with my open-nipple bra could put on a show. Until I was engaging in true contact with Jack or another student, I needed the boys’ hungry stares for sustenance: these young men were so new to life, they didn’t yet know how to mask the direction in which their eyes were peeking nor their wonder and delight at what they were looking at.

Even in this competition of the involuntary gaze, Jack proved himself to be far superior to his peers. While others looked upon my chest with a gleeful smirk or pleasant shock, Jack stared in the way one might watch a waterfall—there was something profoundly hopeful in his glance, an optimism that the world held more wonder than he’d ever thought to guess. It was a feeling I tried to encourage in him with an affirmative glance or a nod, one that told him, simply and plainly, You’re seeing exactly what you think you’re seeing.

In retrospect perhaps it was also his name that set me on his trail—I hoped Jack Patrick’s two first names meant he was two boys in one: public Patrick, a regular fourteen-year-old schoolboy, and private Jack, who might willfully submit to every smutty thing I wanted to do to him.

His behavior in the classroom was promising: self-doubtful but alert; laughing when I or one of his classmates made a joke, but not making them himself or asking for the class’s attention. Each day he wore a T-shirt and sportlike mesh shorts that fell just below his knees, but his lower calves suggested that his upper thighs were covered in a thin layer of blond hair. In the light these tufts seemed like a gossamer confection; if licked, I imagined they would dissolve on my tongue.

The reading list for the nonadvanced eighth-grade English classes was preselected and not to be deviated from: Romeo and Juliet began the fall semester, then we would be moving into The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible. To begin I had students draw names from a bucket: in each class, we’d read Shakespeare’s play aloud to kill time. Jack drew the character of Paris, and visibly blushed when Marissa Talbet, an annoyingly theatrical redhead who on the first day of class asked if she could, from time to time, make pertinent student council announcements, spoke of Paris’s legendary attractiveness in her role as Nurse. Marissa was the first student to modulate her voice for the part, raising it several octaves higher and attempting a British accent. Her classmates found this hilarious, but Jack never doubled over with sugar-induced laughter. Instead he simply smiled, all the while looking at the text of the play, hardly ever raising his virginal brown eyes—but when he did glance up, he found me watching him, and we’d lock into a stare for the briefest second before his head lowered back toward the safety of the book.

Reading aloud, his voice was steady overall, though he stumbled a bit between antiquated words and spoke with the misplaced stressors of one who doesn’t fully grasp a line’s context. “Thou wrong… sit… wrongs… it… more than tears… with that report,” he spoke to Juliet, whose name happened to be drawn from the bucket by the exacting Frank Pachenko (when the teasing about this role immediately began, Frank was quick to remind his peers that in Shakespeare’s time Juliet and all of the female characters would have indeed been played by male actors). In general Frank’s appearance and organized demeanor bucked the stereotype of the typical fourteen-year-old male: his hand always went straight up in the air when a question was asked, and his glasses had lenses too large and too circular for his age. Occasionally I saw him speaking with Jack, usually a quick question or two that Jack answered with a low, short phrase, but there was a familiarity between them that suggested they’d known one another since childhood despite the different paths the social jungle of adolescence was beginning to put them on: Jack was an accepted outlier in the circle of the popular jocks, while Frank took geeky solace in social failure by channeling his energy into academics. Frank wasn’t an outstanding mind—his response papers formed simplistic arguments with an average vocabulary—but he looked the part of the young academic: his shirt tucked into his slightly too-high-waisted shorts, his bulky white sneakers that somehow didn’t appear to ever have been worn.

Since lunch directly followed Jack’s third-period class, I made it a habit to drop into the lunchroom and take note of his whereabouts, even watch him eat if the opportunity presented itself. Less than a month after school started, I’d already begun to shut his peers out with the myopic blindness a focused goal brings. I’ve no doubt there were others, throngs of students not in any of my classes, who were watching me as I stood in the humid fog of the cafeteria and sipped a carton of chocolate milk through a straw, placing myself in front of one of the large industrial fans positioned at each corner of the cafeteria and letting it lift stray hairs from the gathered bun at the base of my neck. A sound-based traffic light at the cafeteria’s front entrance registered how loud the collective sound in the room was: green meant the students were talking at an acceptable volume, yellow was an intermediate warning, and red would sound a bell that meant a punishment of total silence would be invoked—once the light turned red, a staff member sounded three whistles, and anyone caught talking afterward was given detention. But I stared into the green light—The Great Gatsby was assigned to the ninth graders but not the eighth—and thought about being inside my convertible with Jack, the top down, both of us completely undressed, me flooring the gas and letting the wind hit our bodies as a type of foreplay.

Janet liked to ruin these daydreams—I could’ve wrung her neck the day that Jack brought a pack of Twizzlers in his lunch. I had a clear view of him, framed between the hunched shoulder blades of two small girls, likely sixth graders, who were sitting at the table in front of Jack’s. One at a time, he bit down onto the red rope of the candy, pulling a little, revealing just a bit of aggressive tooth, and then he would slowly chew, his lips flushing with wetness. I was so fixated I didn’t even hear her until she was right next to me, her respirator-like breathing falling upon my ear.

“Rosen is on a goddamn witch hunt,” she declared. I came out of my trance, suddenly vulnerable to all the room’s wretched smells and sounds. It was chili day, and massive yellow trash bins around the room were brimming with garlicky waste. Janet began a series of wet coughs, reaching into the pocket of her wide elastic pants to bring out a stained handkerchief. “He dropped by in the middle of my class this morning. Totally unannounced. I’d given them a group assignment and the little punks were all over the room. A few were climbing on the desks like baboons.”

“Hello, Janet.” I looked back up and felt a bolt of panic in my stomach; suddenly I couldn’t see Jack. I desperately began a right-to-left scan of the room; I had to swallow repeatedly to avoid the urge to yell out his name.

“I’d like to see Rosen try and teach them about the former USSR. It’s not exactly flies to honey. He sits in his big air-conditioned office half the day, never has to manage a classroom. He couldn’t walk a mile in my shoes.”

I nodded, solemnly looking at her feet. If I gifted her a pair that weren’t Velcro, would she wear them? Likely not. She frequently removed her shoes in the teacher’s lounge—“Letting the dogs breathe,” as she called it—and when she put them back on there was no need to bend down and tie anything. She simply latched the Velcro back up by running the opposing foot’s callused heel along the straps.

When she stood in front of the industrial fan, Janet’s sacklike clothing pressed against outlying regions of her body normally hidden by baggy fabric. “Just play his game for a little bit, Janet. Let him see what he wants to see, get him to stop breathing down your neck.” The charcoal frizz of her perm hovered above her scalp like a rising cloud of smog. With one eye open farther than the other, she looked like a stoic survivor: pillaged by the elements but still here against all odds.

“Says he wants me to ‘foster an environment of mutual respect.’ What a bag of horseshit. These feral little dogs wouldn’t know respect if it bit them on the privates.”

“Would respect really bite them on the privates?” I asked.

“Just look at them out there. It’s like National Geographic. The future is hopeless.” Janet’s caustic remarks were drawing the attention of a husky student eating alone at a nearby table. A chili dog rested limply in the side of his mouth, his mastication paused so he could stare straight ahead at Janet.

“Perhaps this conversation is best reserved for after hours,” I whispered. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a familiar blip of gray shirt and turned—Jack and his buddies had moved outside to the courtyard and were now sitting along the edge of a brick planter. The guys in the center were talking to two girls in short-shorts, saying something that was making the girls slap them on the forearms with pretend outrage as they all laughed. Jack sat at the corner, not speaking to the girls directly but in on the conversation. “Excuse me, Janet.” She was still talking, still continued to talk as I walked away and unbuttoned another button on the front of my shirt. Heading through the doorway out to the courtyard and looking straight ahead, I did my best strut, veering as close to Jack as I could without brushing against him on my walk by. His crowd of friends grew silent; I could feel all their eyes transfer to me as I passed. When I was several feet away, I heard one of his friends whistle. “She is smoking hot,” he said. There were laughs; next came the overenunciated voice of one of the girls. “Oh my god, Craig,” she chided. “She’s a teacher.” This was the attitude I knew I had to conquer in Jack’s mind: he had to be convinced that I was more like him than like his mother.

In my afternoon classes I sat as close to the window AC unit as possible in an attempt to stop the electricity circulating in my body, so close that one side of my face grew nearly numb. I knew it wasn’t good to be hung up on one specific student so early on, that I shouldn’t feel a sense of desperation just for him. My obsessing over Jack meant I was growing increasingly willing to try to speed up contact. These urges might blind me to warning signs or cause me to engage in unnecessary risks. I needed to stay objective, but it seemed like a losing battle.

Hearing the first acts of Romeo and Juliet read aloud for the fifth time that day, my head began to slump back in my chair. The AC was icing down my scalp but failing to cool the incessant tingle that caused me to cross and uncross and recross my legs again and again. At times, I wished that my genitals were prosthetic, something I could slip out of. They were a constant drone of stimulation; their requests hummed aloud throughout my life like a never-ending soundtrack. And everywhere I looked there were young male bodies. I had to watch their fingers idly drum on desktops, their nascent biceps flex as they raised a hand to their ear for a scratch, the pink buds of their tongues emerge to wet the corners of their mouths. By the end of the day, the stink of pheromones clung to the walls of the classroom like wet paint and made me dizzy.

But despite the pleasant view, I saw few real options. Goody-goodies like Frank would deny me, and the overly confident type would find it impossible not to brag. There was only Jack—my second choice, Trevor Bodin, had a vast assortment of imperfections; deciding between the two of them was like being asked to pick a dance partner and given the option of a trained choreographer or an epileptic with a wooden leg. Trevor was an artsy sort whose hair was a wiggish crop of curls. A pensive journaler, he’d already asked if I’d look at some of his poetry. Since he walked home from school and didn’t have to rush to catch a bus, he often came up to talk books and writing with me after class. But he had a girlfriend; most of his poetry was devoted to professing his love for her—Abby Fischer in my second period, memorable for her chunk of dyed purple hair. Being the romantic type, if Trevor ever did stray, he’d undoubtedly confess to her minutes after the act, likely through a series of frantic text messages that peppered statements of regret with frown-faced emoticons. He also came off as clingy, which could prove to be downright toxic. Trevor seemed like the type who would be ever more demanding, who would accept nothing less than symbiosis. Plus, based on his clothing, his parents were extremely lenient. He had no fear of authority, which meant he wouldn’t be worried enough about getting caught and wouldn’t act with the necessary level of caution. Trevor was too outspoken, tried too hard to impress. But he kept tempting me—he loved staying to talk to me alone in the classroom after everyone else had left. That afternoon as soon as the final bell rang, he came straight up to my desk. I suppose it took a while to get my attention; I was looking through a slit in the window blinds, seeing if I could identify Jack amidst the horde of students pouring from the main building out to the bus lot. As they kept coming it seemed like they were multiplying, splitting off and begetting others in a mass act of asexual reproduction.

“Mrs. Price?”

I answered but didn’t break my gaze out the window. “Go ahead, Trevor, I’m listening.”

“Don’t you think Romeo and Juliet is unrealistic? I mean, how they kill themselves? Why would they kill themselves if they’re actually in love?”

Suddenly I spied two boys beginning to wrestle on the lawn in front of the bus line. They clenched one another’s waists until one finally began to reach around and take the other in a hold, pulling his shirt up above his ribs; I could make out the movements of his bare chest panting with exertion. I brought my lips closer to the window, feeling the sun’s intensified heat through the glass. Wasn’t it possible, as their fighting escalated, that they might remove their shirts entirely? My mind began to entertain the fantasy that they weren’t on the grass of the school grounds at all but the dirt floor of a Roman coliseum, fighting to the death so I could copulate with the winner.

“I doubt they’re really in love anyway. I mean, they hardly know each other, right?” Trevor mussed his cropped hair, awaiting a response that lauded his insight and maturity.

“Probably not, Trevor.” I had a brief urge to suggest to Trevor that he and I play a copycat game of sorts, watching the boys’ movements, then repeating them. If I lunged at Trevor and wrapped my arms around his waist, would I be able to stop myself from going further once I felt his sides contract in a fit of nervous giggling?

In a matter of seconds the outdoor scuffle turned from light-hearted to serious; the two had toppled over in the grass. The boy on top was trying to pin down the other’s arms; kids on the nearest bus were now hanging out its opened windows and cheering them on. I had to get myself in the middle of their brawl—I’d be able to touch the hot, moist skin of the top student’s arm as I pulled at him in a phony attempt to stop the fight, to smell the boys’ pungent musk of hormones, and possibly more. Anything could happen—I could get pulled to the ground and sandwiched between their squirming torsos; my clothes might be ripped from my body in the fray.

“Two guys out there are going at one another like idiots,” I said, turning to reach for my purse. I hurried toward the door as Trevor followed alongside me in a running walk.

“Hey!” I called out to them as loudly as I could while still sounding friendly. The top boy looked over and the bottom boy took advantage of his hesitation, lunging upright and managing to grab the kid’s neck. “Okay, guys, enough already.” I ran up and grabbed both arms of the choker, letting my hands roam upward into the damp pits of his T-shirt.

I expected them to pull me into their mix of interlocking limbs and continue fighting but they didn’t—the choked student backed away and stood immediately, rubbing his neck. Perhaps he feared getting suspended. “We weren’t fighting for real,” he explained, catching his breath. His friend began to stand as well, twisting too soon from my grasp. No! I wanted to hiss at them, Don’t stop touching each other! When it became clear that there would be no further physical contact between any of us, my disappointment was so intense that I experienced it as a shift in gravity; I squatted down to the grass for a moment to catch my breath.

“Yeah,” the second boy added, his voice slightly deeper. “We were just messing around.” There was a tense pause of silence as I closed my eyes and raised a steadying hand to my forehead; the feel of the boys’ eyes looking down upon me was as intense as the sunlight on my neck. “Are you okay?”

I nodded and cautiously took my time standing back up. I looked over the body of each one with a longing for what might’ve been if I’d had to insert myself between them as they rolled together on the ground—the sharp chin of the top boy could’ve painfully buried itself in my shoulder; the flexed hand of the other could’ve slid across my ass in a feverish search for leverage as he tried to escape. “I get it,” I said, placing my hand along the red exposed skin of the choked boy’s upper shoulder. The collar of his T-shirt had been stretched out. My fingers drifted a few inches across his slick skin until they felt sufficiently wet; I hoped the wind wouldn’t dry them before I had a chance to take a quick taste. “Now get out of here before the AP sees you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they answered in unison, grabbing their bags and jogging just beyond the buses before slowing to a walk. I turned to find Trevor still there waiting a few feet behind me, his black T-shirt and jean shorts making him sweat profusely in the sunlight.

“Jerks,” Trevor said, trying to give me a knowing smile. I squinted, reconsidering everything about him. His cheeks were rosy with heat, his hair almost entirely dampened. I’d gotten myself worked up in the hopes of a three-way wrestling match that hadn’t developed—was it so improbable that the universe was now giving me Trevor as a consolation prize? He was surely too hot in those clothes; shedding them would feel divine.

But I reminded myself of all the ways he was likely dangerous—I tried to imagine that the glossy sweat covering his body was actually venom. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Trevor.” I gave him a perfunctory smile, then turned and started walking toward the parking lot, but my voice wasn’t entirely dismissive. I suppose I wanted to see if he’d follow me to my car, and was pleased when he did indeed bound along up beside me.

“I saw this TV program… I mean it was on TV but it really happened in real life… these kids were forbidden by the girl’s parents to see each other, so she and her boyfriend killed her mom and dad.” Trevor nearly whispered this, trying to infuse the story with the excitement of a secret.

“Attraction creates powerful feelings,” I mumbled. “It overrules intellect.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess that’s, like, the point of the play, right?”

“You could argue that’s one of the themes.” When we reached the yellow line marking the edge of the faculty parking lot, I spotted AP Rosen moving alongside the string of buses with his walkie-talkie. I couldn’t lead Trevor to my car in front of other faculty members, no matter how badly I wanted to see what might happen if I did. He was like a puppy dog that needed an invisible fence, and I had to train him that this was the edge of his yard.

“Last question.” He smiled. “Is Romeo and Juliet your favorite Shakespeare play?”

I laughed far louder than I meant to. When I glanced up to see if any of the leaving faculty were staring over at Trevor and me, no one seemed to be looking. “No. My favorite’s Hamlet. It’s the most realistic.”

His hand shooed away a buzzing insect that had come to inspect the salt and oil pouring off his face. If we were alone, I might have offered to wipe down his sweat with my hair. From certain angles Trevor was indeed very cute, but I had to resist him—he was low-hanging fruit. With a dull roar, the buses began rolling by and my eyes followed them like I was watching a shell game at a carnival: all of them looked identical, but one had a prize inside. Which bus was Jack’s?

“Doesn’t Hamlet start out with a ghost? How is it the most realistic?” Trevor wouldn’t shut up. I badly wanted to reach out and place a finger against his lips just to see what he’d do—would he simply quit talking? Or would his lips then part just a little, letting my finger slide between his teeth and move across his tongue?

“Because everyone acts disingenuous,” I said. “And then they all die.” Trevor continued talking even though the tandem sounds of bus engines drowned out his words. My eyes switched back and forth between his mouth and the hovering exhaust smoke from each bus. The haze was gathering together to create a singular black cloud that I hoped Jack might appear from like in a magic trick.

I had to admit that Trevor was all wrong for my purposes. But the roar and the stink of the passing buses made me feel like Trevor and I had been placed inside a dangerous war zone together and needed one another to survive—I was impressed by the way his lips managed to look pristine, like inner meat, despite the smog filling in around us. I could feel the growing wetness between my thighs in the wind. The way Trevor was looking at me now, his wry smile, made it seem like he was reading my mind. Perhaps we were sending one another chemical signals. His growing body surely smelled upon me the dank catalyst of experience that could take him from theory to practice.

“Good-bye, Trevor,” I whispered. I could feel the start of tears stinging my chest; it was hard to turn down such certain pleasure. How easy it would be to stand and chat with him just a bit longer until the parking lot emptied out, then offer him a ride. He’d sit a bit awkwardly in the car at first, his legs bent up too far as he tried to avoid touching the tender skin behind his knee against the seat’s hot leather. After two blocks, we’d be on one of the main roads leaving town; after ten minutes we’d be outside of town completely, surrounded by the undeveloped grass expanse of land fenced off for future suburbs. Then I would turn down the radio and tell him to pull off his shorts, stressing that I was serious. At the first rural stop sign we came to, I’d instruct him to say my name when he saw a car coming from any direction. Then I would turn the radio back up and bend over into his lap, filling my mouth with him until I felt his tentative fingers brush my head, heard his voice say, Mrs. Price—quietly at first, a conflicted admission, and then again more loudly with panic, Mrs. Price, I see a car.

“Mrs. Price?” Trevor had his cell phone out; he was trying to show me something on the screen I couldn’t see in the bright glare of the day. I pretended he was trying to show me a photo he’d taken of his penis held up against the length of a ruler and gave him a smile filled with gratitude.

“Till tomorrow, Trevor.” I turned toward my car and didn’t look back. The rage of lust was like an IV drip in my veins; I felt it beginning to spread inside me with the helpless awareness of someone realizing she’s been slipped a drug. I tried to gain some release by pounding my heels into the asphalt as hard as I could. I felt like I might rip my car’s metal door off its hinges if I wasn’t careful. Inside, I lifted my hair up into a quick bun and let the seat burn at the back of my neck. With a shaking hand, I reached up to the rearview mirror and turned it to face me directly. “You will go home and snort a small amount of the cocaine you keep in the Altoids tin in your pajama drawer. You will robotically fuck your husband until your box feels like a gaping wound. You will be so aggressive that he will be frightened, and his fear will keep you from being completely repulsed by him. You will get this bothersome spark out of your system for long enough to buy you a little more time with Jack. Jack needs to know you before he can trust you. Jack needs to trust you before you can trust him. You need to trust him before you can fuck him. The end.”

“Hey, hey, Celeste!”

I jumped in my seat; Janet’s pork-chop fist was suddenly raining down on my window in a repeated knock. Had she heard any of what I’d just said? I quickly turned on the car and rolled down the window. She leaned her head inside until her long tapestry of neck was guillotined below from the windowpane. Taking a few congested mouth breaths, her eyes began to rove in an exploratory survey of my car’s interior. “This thing is in mint condition,” she warbled. When placed into direct sunlight, I’d noticed, Janet’s major systems began to shut down almost immediately. Her mouth now involuntarily hung a bit open. From her vitals it seemed like she’d just been shot in the back.

“So I don’t know, my van won’t start. I guess I should’ve seen this coming. They say bad things happen in threes.”

Rather than ask about the universe’s other two injustices against her (her looks and personality?), I decided to cut to the chase. “What do you need, Janet?”

“Triple A will spend upward of an hour just trying to pull their heads out of their asses. Can you give me a ride? I’ll call from home and have it towed. From my air-conditioned living room. I can’t even think about it until I get into the air-conditioning.” Our faces were so close they were almost touching, yet she managed to look past me instead of making eye contact. Did she have cataracts? I was in awe of her as a creature in sum; every one of her parts had its own individual defect, yet here she was, a basically functioning unit.

“Sure, just get in.” I reached over and gingerly unzipped my gym bag, trying to worm out the towel without the dildo springing out too. “Let me put this down so the seat doesn’t burn you.”

I felt the car ominously lower as she transferred her weight inside. Her abdominal bumpers extended out against the gearshift. When we began to drive, each time I went into third, my hand disappeared into the borders of her stomach. “Excuse me,” I mumbled. Janet shrugged.

“I can’t even feel that side of my body,” she said.

Although Ford’s affinity for gender roles meant he hated women smoking (“Nothing’s more masculine than puffing smoke. That’s the business of men and tailpipes”), after sex he’d consent to just about anything, and if Ford had touched me for any length of time I usually needed a good half a pack to calm down.

He gave me a cheerful spank, followed by a satisfied wink. When I noticed the ring he’d left on, I crammed a second cigarette in my mouth and began smoking two at once. There had been a time in college when I’d told myself, as a cardinal rule, that I’d never have sex with any guy who was wearing a man ring. Ford had plenty—high school, college, fraternity, police academy, gemstone. It was a purely adult form of male sleaze and I abhorred it. “Babe, I know I give you shit sometimes for not giving it up more,” he announced. “But when you do, goddamn.”

“See,” I said, my face expressionless. I felt like I’d sufficiently beaten him up and gotten beaten. I’d managed to choke out, just for a few hours, the angry desire inside. “When I say ‘no’ I’m just protecting you. You need time in between to recover.” I blew a long puff up at the light on the bedroom ceiling, remembering the weightless shine of Trevor’s lips. I’d have to start being crueler, less encouraging to Trevor. I couldn’t let him tempt me that way again. Today in the parking lot, I’d gotten the feeling that he was pursuing me. And if he could pursue, he could tattle. He could barter and leverage and blackmail. Some student chasing me down wasn’t what I was after. What I needed, what I desperately hoped to find in Jack, was a student whom I could wear down. One who, even if he initially felt like running, would gradually slow his pace and let me catch him.