Tampa

chapter seven

That night at 7:23 P.M., I picked Jack up for the first time in front of a combination Taco Bell/Long John Silver’s. It wasn’t dark yet, but in the low light of sunset, eyes could easily be mistaken—passersby thinking they saw Jack entering a red Corvette might have to admit that it could’ve been any boy his size who looked similar, and though they were nearly certain of the make and model of the car, perhaps the color, tinged by the sunset’s pink glare, had only looked red in that moment.

“Thanks for coming.” I smiled. “Buckle up.”

He’d changed into a different, preppier outfit than he’d worn to school; in fact he looked ready to go to a casual job interview at a supermarket—khakis and a striped polo shirt—and the very ends of his hair were slightly wet, telling of a recent shower. His skin bore a soapy-sweet fragrance of cologne; I smiled thinking of the bitter flavor its spice would leave on my tongue. “I like your car,” he offered.

I began to head out of town toward the nearby bay area and its long rows of mangroves where we could park undisturbed. The traffic soon began to perturb me—it was an unwelcome contrast to the adolescent morsel strapped into my passenger seat. We immediately became trapped behind a livestock truck of chickens; when I was finally able to pass, a hideous woman simultaneously operating a station wagon and cramming a Whopper into her mouth came into view. “Aren’t people revolting in general?” I complained.

Jack offered back a polite smile. I noticed him eyeing the car’s center console, my hand gripping the top of the gearshift.

“Can you drive a stick?”

He shook his head. “I wish. I can’t drive at all. I can get my learner’s in February though.”

“Well we’ll have to give you some lessons,” I offered. This seemed to please him a great deal, although it wasn’t a genuine proposal. But I followed it up with a more earnest suggestion. “Jack?”

“Yes?” He was so nervous that it was hard for me to gauge his level of horniness.

“You can touch me, you know. Anywhere you want while I drive. My windows are tinted.” He swallowed and looked straight ahead for a moment, rubbing his sweaty palms against his pants while giving himself an inward pep talk.

“Okay.” He finally nodded. He placed a sweaty hand on my bare knee, then sat motionless for a minute before his fingers began to gently move in one direction and then another, sliding incrementally farther up my thigh. I began to moan but my enthusiasm was slightly dampened when we passed a graphic pro-life billboard, then an advertisement for septic repair service whose mascot was an anthropomorphized plunger. I sighed—Jack and I needed a highway all our own, devoid of reminders about life’s daily vulgarities. Even the rusted exteriors of the jalopies we sped by seemed ominous harbingers of unwelcome news, announcing that my time with Jack, that our bodies and everything we’d each ever known, would all inevitably decay and fall apart.

In an attempt to get his hand closer to my genitals, I lifted my pelvis off the seat, pushing it forward against his fingers in a way that forced me to widen the placement of my legs on the floor and the gas pedal and hunch over the steering wheel for balance in a crablike pose. I reminded myself not to scare him at first with outright demands for more; instead I praised the very restrained motions he was managing. “That feels so good, Jack.” I stole a quick look at his face as I peered behind my seat to change lanes and get on the highway; his eyes were fixed wide upon my airborne lap. Not once did Jack ask me where we were going. He had a perfect sense of what wasn’t important.

Eventually his fingers found a rhythm of stroking my thigh, which made it hard not to close my eyes in pleasure for seconds at a time, but the distractions of the road did finally seem to fade. I didn’t feel like I was driving or even knew where we were going; instead it seemed the vehicle had been programmed to whisk us off to privacy and I was there merely to steer. Each time Jack’s slippery fingers massaged my leg I contemplated stopping earlier and choosing a closer place, but I knew I had to let strategy override lust for just a while longer—what we were about to do was dangerous enough; impulsive decisions would open the door to a whole new set of risky variables. I stayed on the highway until the planned exit, keeping my needs temporarily reined in, and made every single turn required to arrive at an outpost of the lost. Jack’s shaking had risen from a shiver to a tremor. “Are you cold?” I asked. Jack didn’t seem to know how to respond.

“I’m not sure,” he finally said.

Roughly half an hour after I’d picked him up, we pulled into the overgrown tree-lined drive of a long-abandoned farm. “It’s safe here,” I announced. He nodded back at me, eyes filled with eager uncertainty, looking briefly out his car window into the pitch-blackness surrounding us as if to scan for predators. “No one’s going to interrupt us,” I stressed, my voice a honeyed invitation. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

With that I took off my shirt, watching his eyes lock onto my bra. There was a Christmas-morning feel to the way I slid off my shorts to reveal lace thong panties, then crawled over the console, purposefully arching my spine to push my left butt cheek inches from his face as I jumped into the backseat—every step of the process seemed like a new gift being given. “It’s a little cramped, but we can lie down.” I motioned to him. “Take off your clothes and come back here with me.” He removed his shirt, then his shoes and pants, lifting himself toward me with a visible erection beneath his blue boxers.

“You have a great body,” I told him. His build was the slender, undeveloped wiry sort whose tautness revealed the shadowy promise of muscles not yet arrived.

“I’m too skinny,” he began, but I quickly placed one hand across his mouth to avoid further speech and with the other began rubbing across his chest and down his stomach, dipping a finger inside the elastic band of his shorts to stroke the starting delineation of his pubic hair. I felt his lips part beneath my hand to breathe more heavily; his eyes were traveling a vertical circuit from my crotch up to my breasts. “Have you ever taken off a girl’s bra before?” He shook his head no. “They’re mysterious little contraptions,” I said, turning my back to him and raising the veil of my blond hair over my right shoulder to clear his view. “Go ahead and give it a try.” His hands shook as he stumbled with the tiny metal hooks; he was nearly panting as he bent in closer to my back, struggling to see the bra’s petite mechanics in the dark. I could smell the mint chewing gum on his breath—he’d indeed prepared himself for a make-out session. Could consent have been any more transparent? Eventually I felt the release of its pressure and Jack gave a victorious sigh.

“Bravo.” I smiled at him from over my shoulder, then dropped the bra to the ground and turned back to face him bare-chested. “You’ve got me pretty worked up, Jack.” His hands were down at his sides, bracing; he’d scooted back over to the right, as far away from me as the tiny backseat would allow. I got up on all fours and crawled over to him, my breasts hanging level with his face. “Feel how hard my nipples are.” He started to reach out his hand but I pulled away and gave him a teasing smile. “Not with your fingers,” I said, correcting him. “With your tongue.”

Nodding, he scooted closer and stuck his tongue as far out from his lips as he could manage, as though he’d just been dared to lick a metal pole in the winter. His eyes were open wide, visually taking in the target—he seemed to be worried that he wouldn’t be able to find my breast if he closed them. I lowered my head and watched the pink-on-pink contact, my nipple beginning to glisten with Jack’s saliva. Dutifully, he fully wetted one, moved over and wetted the other, then sat back and looked up at me with eyes that awaited further instruction. “That felt perfect,” I said encouragingly. “I knew you’d be really good at this.” I sat down in front of him with my legs bent open; the thin lace string of the thong covered the tip of my clitoris but not much else. “Have you ever put your fingers inside a girl?”

Even in the dark I could make out the hot blush that was covering his cheeks. “I haven’t done much,” he said. The sound of his breathing suggested he was running away from something.

“Why is that?” I asked. “You’re certainly good-looking.” My hands wrapped around the jersey of his cloth-covered penis and began to stroke. He folded a leg up and sat on it, squirming with nervous energy as the speed of my fingers increased. Compliments seemed to freak him out more than relax him.

“I’m just shy with girls I guess,” he said. I watched him swallow three times before speaking again. “I never know what to say.”

I lifted my hands from the wad of fabric swirled up around the shape of his erection and found the panel opening of the crotch, then slowly moved it down to reveal his penis. Lowering my head so my hair fell across it, I spoke just above it like it was a microphone. “You can relax, Jack,” I said, bathing its tip in my warm breath. “You don’t have to say anything.” With that, I licked my lips, then slid them down over him, slowly arching my neck and extending my throat until my mouth came to the base. He made a gasping noise and bucked a little, writhing in a disoriented way that bumped the head of his cock against the roof of my mouth. I gave him a quick thirty seconds of advanced sucking, my tongue fluttering against his underside until I could taste the salty bitters of pre-ejaculate, then sat back up and wiped my mouth off on my arm.

His face had transformed into a foreign mask of disbelief. He looked down at his erection as though he was trying to confirm it was still attached to his body. I grabbed his right hand, which was clammy and limp, bereft of all resistance. I felt like I needed to continue talking to him, the way one would a victim of hypothermia, to keep him conscious and prevent him from going into shock. “You’ve seen pictures of girls on the Internet, right?” I began moving his fingers across the sides of my exposed labia. “Did they have hair down there or were they shaved?” He closed his eyes for a moment, flipping through his mental catalog and trying to remember in earnest, and I took this opportunity of blindness to guide two of his fingers inside me, pushing my hips forward to meet them. When he opened his eyes again, he did so slowly, like someone who’s seen an apparition and tried to make it go away by tightly squeezing his lids shut, hoping it might disappear if he gave it a chance to escape unwatched. “Well?” I smiled, my pelvis bucking up against his fingers in rhythmic movements. “Shaved or unshaved?” I couldn’t believe how close we were to actually doing it. I had the growing paranoia that some bizarre act of nature was about to intervene and prevent our sex from happening—lightning was going to strike down and bisect the car, throwing Jack and me to opposite, smoking ends, or a sinkhole to the center of the earth was opening just below the convertible, about to send the vehicle plummeting. I pictured us, airborne and naked in the backseat of the falling car, trying desperately to crawl toward one another against the forces of gravity so he could stuff his penis inside me for just one moment before death.

“I guess I’ve seen both,” he whispered.

Lifting off from his fingers, I stood upright on my knees and braced against the ceiling, gripping the garment hook above the door for balance. “You know what’s fun?” I asked, squaring my vagina in front of his mouth. “If you take my panties off with your teeth.” He glanced down at his wet fingers for a moment, taking in the reality of them, then brought his mouth to my underwear and grabbed at their elastic, lightly scraping the skin around it with his incisors. His head slowly lowered, his nose grazing my pubic bone, and I let out a relieved shout of ecstasy as the top of his head moved down my leg, my thighs nearly straddling the back of his neck. When my thong fell loose to my knees and he sat back, only a slight tilt of my pelvis was required—I leaned forward and in a single moist click-and-lock was sitting atop him, fully impaled by every inch he had to offer: it had happened. It had actually, finally happened. In many ways, I realized, this was a bigger first time for me than it was for Jack. Sliding back, I pulled his torso down until he was lying nearly flat along the backseat, grabbed his hands and placed them on my breasts as I began to push against him with slow, rocking-horse motions. For an instant I felt like spontaneously crying at the release of it—in that moment I had everything I wanted; every action of my adult life had been engaged in setting up a situation that would allow me to feel exactly this: the slim, curious pressure of a teenage boy pushing into the center of my being.

Our orgasms were almost instantaneous. I looked down into his face and saw both ecstasy and loss—the running comprehension of his brain, always one long step behind his body, attempting to tally what had happened, what was happening, and what was almost over. His eyes registered a sense of bewilderment at his lack of control, then an involuntary and guttural noise of surprise left his mouth. The unpracticed wince of his face as it contorted tipped off my own; I dropped my hips and pushed into his erection with all my force as he began to spasm. Several moments passed before I looked down again at his eyes and saw fear—when I came, I’d probably screamed in a manner reserved for the fatally injured.

But my breath soon returned. I dismounted and felt the leather seat lock onto my wet skin. My crotch was a hot pool of spent pleasure; the slow drip of his fluid leaving my body felt like a deep ache inside me that had finally been purged. My mind immediately raced forward to after I’d drop Jack off at home—there would then be the additional delight, perhaps an act that would become part of the ritual, of stopping in a parking lot to wipe our fluids off the car seat.

The windows of the car had fogged up; I reached into the front seat to grab my shirt and first wiped Jack’s brow, his sweat clinging the small bright curls of hair against his forehead, then wiped the sweat from my own face and between and beneath my breasts before clearing off the two windows on the driver’s side of the car. Finished, I passed the shirt to Jack, and he wiped down the two on his side.

“That was the best sex of my life, Jack.” He smiled; his eyes bashfully dodged my own but his face held a definite glow of pride.

“Mine too,” he said, then, realizing his own joke, began to giggle. Now that it was over, the lust no longer there to suppress his modesty, Jack seemed embarrassed of his body—he’d lifted his knees up to his chest.

I reached up into the front seat and turned the key, blasting a cool stream of air-conditioning back onto us, and looked at the clock. It felt like we’d been there for hours, but it had only been twenty minutes.

“Are you hungry? Do you want to go to a drive-through?” Jack nodded. He reached to the floor and pulled his underwear back on, and I climbed up into the front seat to grab our clothes, hoping he was staring at my ass and the glossy spill covering my thighs. I knew it would be a while before he stopped being too timid to do something like mount me from behind and have me again. I looked back to see—if he was erect, we could easily have another session in this new position. But his penis was flaccid and he was looking out the window. And yet, I reasoned, it was hard for him to want what he didn’t know he could have—it probably didn’t cross his mind that sex again already was possible.

“Jack,” I called softly. When he looked up at me, his eyes immediately fell right where they should have. “I want you to feel comfortable with my body,” I said, turning my head around so he was left unsupervised with my backside squatted toward him. “Why don’t you have another look?” I asked. When he still hadn’t touched me after a long minute, I gave him direction. “Spread my cheeks apart,” I whispered, turning to watch him. He sat for a moment, contemplating, like a child who had once touched a hot stove and now wanted to overcome his fear by daring himself to place a hand on its burner when the electricity was off. Gradually his thin fingers slid up my legs and across the patches of drying cum between my thighs, then he gripped the flesh of my cheeks at their fullest point and pulled them to opposing sides. My asshole immediately tightened as I felt a cold shock of air from the side vent upon it. Reaching one arm back, my hand landed on his knee. “Come closer,” I urged. Now that I might have him again, it seemed I hadn’t had him at all—every ounce of my original desire returned. My fingers crawled up his leg to the nexus of his crotch, and with a small bend of my elbow, I was able to grip the base of him and gently pull. He obediently scooted up closer to the edge of his seat. When I balanced on my knees, I was finally able to straddle over him backward and sit down on his lap.

There were a few awkward limp thrusts when I wasn’t sure he was responding, but soon his nascent erection began to quicken. He even grabbed my hips for better leverage as he lifted himself up and down. I turned my head and began kissing him more violently than I meant to; I couldn’t restrain myself. He was simply right there for the taking. “Do it as hard as you can,” I breathed, and he did, the speed making him feel larger inside me as he strove toward climax. When he came his teeth involuntarily clenched together, nearly catching my tongue between them; I slid his right hand around from my hip onto my clit and pubis in broad, mashing strokes. It was the thought of his small fist punching up into me that made my whole body begin to shake until I’d slid off the seat; soon my spent limbs were splayed between the floor and the front passenger seat, my ass unceremoniously positioned upward in the air. For a moment the car was filled with nothing but the sound of our panting breath; desire had chased us long and hard.

“Do you need help up?” he finally asked.

My position on the ground suggested I’d been tossed from my seat in a car accident. I took a deep breath and uncrumpled my limbs, pushing my damp hair from my face. Wordlessly, I reached up and grabbed his shirt and pants and my shorts. We dressed in silence and said nothing as we moved back into the front of the car, though the soreness between my legs when I spread them to climb over the console was such a pleasant sort of ache that I nearly swore. A hurried urge to get him back home suddenly came over me—I wanted plenty of time alone with my own fantasied memories of the evening before Ford got off work.

Two exits outside of town we got milkshakes and burgers and parked in front of a closed appliance store to eat. There was a clear eroticism to every action Jack made—ripping open the ketchup packet with his teeth, taking the top off the milkshake cup to attack the whipped cream with his tongue; I didn’t know if it was an intentional tease or if his actions normally held such innuendoed physicality. “We don’t have this restaurant in town,” he commented. “Their milkshakes are really good.”

“You’ll see me again, won’t you, Jack?” I’d taken the cherry off the top of my milkshake to suck, holding its stem between my lips as I looked at him with imploring eyes. He used his arm like a napkin on the whipped cream in the corners of his mouth and I smiled. “Besides in class, I mean.”

He nodded eagerly, then ran his fingers across the grooves in the top of the gearshift, reading it like Braille, turning to me with a hopeful expression. “Can we do this every night?”

His forehead was still sweaty. I brushed at it with a napkin, pausing to tuck a fold of hair back against the side of his head. “Probably not every single night. Hopefully most nights though.” I started the car but turned the radio down low as I pulled out of the parking lot; from Jack’s tentative expression, it seemed like he had more to say.

“Should I drop you off at the same place?” I started.

He gave a small nod. “It’s going to feel really weird being in class tomorrow.” We pulled up to a stoplight and I noticed a shoddy hotel, the Toucan Inn, on my left. I imagined checking into it with Jack and the shroud of anonymity we’d have to function under, the way the coming months would force us to date like criminals on the lam, shirking anyplace public, any activity that might require ID.

“Want to go to that motel sometime?” I pointed. “It won’t be clean enough to get under the sheets but I’ll bet there’s a nice setup of mirrors in each room.” His face took on a blank expression, like his mind had to unfold new and never-used corners to process what I’d just said. I placed a reassuring hand on his upper leg and squeezed. “Don’t worry about class. You’re always daydreaming in there, anyway. What are you thinking about?” He shrugged.

“Stupid stuff, I dunno. Whatever comes into my head. I don’t usually even remember. One minute I’m staring off into space and then suddenly a teacher’s calling on me.” He bent over and began putting his shoes back on. “Mrs. Feinlog is the worst about that. She pretends like she’s NASA or something. ‘Jack, Jack, you’re lost in orbit.’ She’s such an idiot.”

“I’m sorry she picks on you. She doesn’t have many advantages in life.” I pulled back into the Taco Bell lot and felt a deep sense of normalcy: here we were right where we’d started—it had actually happened, and no one else knew. Jack sat casually slouched in the passenger seat and continued to make small talk for a few minutes. He certainly didn’t seem traumatized or the victim of something harmful—in fact his expression was alive with a dewy glow. Far more so than when I’d first picked him up, he looked spirited and engaged. He looked improved.

“So when are you unsupervised this week?” I asked. He seemed to get the joke, a thin smile spreading over his lips as he thought.

“My mom lives in Crystal Springs; it’s just me and my dad. Usually he’s home by six but I’m alone from when I get home at four until then.” His face suddenly brightened with the realization of good news. “And Wednesdays he’s never home before nine… he stays late to do continuing education for the new service reps. IT maintenance stuff. He doesn’t really like me to go out on school nights.”

“Oh? How did you manage to come meet me?”

Jack laughed. “I told him I had a group project for English tonight. But during the week you could come over any afternoon before he gets home.”

I felt my crotch seize at the thought of fucking Jack on his own bed with the musky funk of early adolescence rising from his sheets, everything in the room surrounding us related to him in a way that would make his body feel magnified. His home was a better location than I’d ever let myself imagine—I’d been expecting only sex in the outdoors, in my car, perhaps occasionally breaking up the monotony with faraway venues: in darkened out-of-town theaters for a poorly attended movie to which we separately bought tickets. His home meant a bathtub and shower, a pool, a kitchen table, a host of variety. “That would be great but it could be risky. Do any of your classmates live on your street?”

Jack shook his head. “Some of the guys live close in the subdivision, but not on my same street.” There was a pause as his forehead lifted with memory. “Wait, that one kid does live across the street from me. I’m not friends with him or anything. Frank?”

“Frank Pachenko?” He nodded and I fell back against my seat, deflated. “His mother is the nosiest bitch in the world. She can’t see me anywhere near your house.”

“Your car windows are tinted, right?”

“Yeah, but she could see me walking in or out.” I could picture her thin, birdlike lips leveling the accusation now: And what were you doing at a minor’s house when his guardian was not present?

“You can park in our garage. I can have it open for you when you’re coming over, then the second you pull in I’ll shut it. She won’t ever see you get out of your car.”

I knew this wasn’t airtight: she could catch me getting into or out of my car at school and associate it with the mysterious red Corvette seen at the Patricks’ recently; a pinprick of curiosity would be cause enough for her to write down my license plate and wait at home, happy to investigate, ready to match it up. But the treat of Jack in his own bed helped convince me that my paranoia required a long and unlikely chain of events to occur: she’d have to first become suspicious about a car entering another house’s garage. Clearly, the families weren’t close. But even in the worst-case scenario, even if she did determine with certainty that it was absolutely my car, there was no way for her to be certain of motive. What if I was a family friend? A loving relative who just happened to have my third cousin in class this semester? She couldn’t be sure.

I nodded and leaned in to give him a kiss. “Okay, I’ll come over tomorrow around four fifteen. Have the garage open for me. We have to be really careful though… I can only stay an hour, tops.”

His kisses had changed already; now there was an unrestrained eagerness, almost a force. But he was still keeping his eyes wide open; they stayed trained on me the entire time. “Try it one more time with your eyes shut,” I whispered. He closed them and suddenly his hands found my ribs; his thin arms wrapped around me and pulled me tight. Several minutes later we unlocked with swollen lips and glossy faces.

“It’s more intense that way,” he observed.

I gave him one final kiss, then ruffled his hair the way a Little League coach might—I had the urge to impart a sense of normalcy to our good-bye, make it seem casual. “Right,” I said. “Now get lost. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the door and shut it too softly, then began walking briskly down the sidewalk. I checked my phone for messages I might’ve missed from Ford but there were none. It had truly been a perfect night. When I looked back up, Jack had crossed the street; by the time I pulled the car back onto the road and headed toward home, I could see in my rearview mirror that he’d broken into a run.

Though I wanted to relish every patch of our mingled odors on my skin, I knew I had to take a precautionary shower before bed. But it seemed like an act of criminal vandalism, like I was taking a sanding belt to a priceless oil painting. As I dried off, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been robbed of a possession of great value; it was so compelling that I actually went to my jewelry chest and looked over its contents as a form of reassurance. I passed out on the bed almost immediately afterward, drunk on my sense of accomplishment. It couldn’t have been later than nine thirty.

When I woke up it was past midnight; I could hear the television blaring in the living room and was seized by hunger—I’d been too excited to eat dinner and hadn’t touched my milkshake, save the cherry. I hadn’t wanted to corrupt Jack’s taste on my tongue.

Ford was in the reclining chair, watching a show that featured junked cars getting blown up by a series of impressive weapons. The TV illuminated a bucket of chicken on the kitchen table; I grabbed a leg, then walked up behind his chair and stood there in naked silence, quietly gnawing the meat. Had he looked up at the mirror on the living room wall, he would’ve seen me, perhaps made a little jump and turned with a laugh to declare that I’d scared him, but he didn’t look. His simple brow was still and waxen, his eyes blinking with the flicker of the television in the dark. I ate until I was holding a clean bone, then watched myself in the mirror, standing behind Ford and holding it in my hand like a weapon.