Tampa

chapter nine

We allowed ourselves just a moment of shared disbelief, me staring up with his cock still between my lips and Jack looking down in horror, before beginning to jump into action. I killed the water as Jack threw on pants and a T-shirt. “Grab your books and go sit at the kitchen table,” I ordered. “Tell him I’m here helping you with a paper and that I just went to the bathroom. Go right now.” He ran. Whether or not his erection had time to soften I wasn’t sure.

I put my hair up into a bun, trying to towel-dry it as much as possible. The side door opened and a muffled conversation began. When I was convinced I looked put-together enough that I couldn’t possibly have been getting a titty bath just minutes earlier, I took a deep breath and walked out to meet Jack’s father.

Gratefully, Buck and Jack Patrick looked nothing alike. At fourteen, Jack was already as tall as Buck, who stood squat and front-loaded with a growing beer gut that seemed to force apart his hips and made his legs seem even smaller and farther back upon his body than they really were. His light brown hair had the barbershop-haircut shape of a young boy’s standard trim; it was shaved slightly too close on the sides. When I walked in and extended my hand, he made a show of looking me up and down from my head to my feet and back again. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t put my shoes back on—I’d left them under Jack’s bed.

“Lovely to meet you, Mr. Patrick. I’m Celeste, Jack’s English teacher.” Buck gave out a low whistle.

“I did not have teachers like you back in my day, I’ll tell you that right now. Jack, do you realize how lucky you are?” Buck turned around and gave his humiliated son a wink. Jack’s face had boiled to a crimson. “And house calls to boot!” Buck exclaimed. At this point, the titanic knot of worry inside me relaxed. Most parents would have been so suspicious to come home and find their child’s teacher there, unannounced in a session of impromptu tutoring, that they’d have called the school the next day. But it certainly didn’t seem to be raising flags on Buck’s radar. Especially not when the teacher looked like me.

“Well,” I reasoned, “I live close by and Jack’s research paper is getting very close to a solid outline.” Jack was sitting fully upright at the dining room table and had set up the first things he’d grabbed from his backpack in front of him to form a guise of studying: a history textbook, a chemistry textbook and a notebook turned open to a blank page. Buck didn’t seem to be concerning himself with specifics though. “Jack’s a very smart kid,” I added.

Buck decided to equivocate. “When he focuses, he can do all right,” he said, nodding. There was an uncomfortable pause as Buck’s concentrated stare settled on my breasts. Jack was trying to seem absorbed with the blank page of notebook paper in front of him. To his credit, I saw that he had added the following title to the top of the page as Buck and I were talking: “Outline.”

“Well, Jack and I were just wrapping up,” I said. I’d need to ask Jack to check for my shoes and claim I’d left them in his bathroom.

“Stay for dinner!” Buck said encouragingly. “I was just going to order some takeout. After you coming here to help Jack, it’s the least I can do. I know they can’t be paying you worth a damn. Although from the looks of your car you’re doing all right. That’s a beauty. I can see why you didn’t want to park it on the street.” He gave me a judging smile, as though I’d broken the law by having something nice. “That’s not a teacher’s-salary vehicle.” It was then, despite the wedding ring on my hand, that Buck truly began to get to the chase. “Now are you married-married or just married?” Buck asked. Thankfully, he didn’t give me time to answer. “Let me tell you, I know exactly how it can be.” He tilted his head toward Jack, as though by avoiding the phrase “Jack’s mom” he was being subtle and not clearly going to say something awful about his son’s mother. “A couple years back I barely escaped alive from a real nasty situation.” His eyes refocused on my breasts yet again and he tried to make an impressive show of lifting his cell phone from its external holder on his belt. “Marriage can be so confining,” he said, giving his lips a slow lick, his eyes trained at nipple level. “Sometimes you just need to let off a little steam.” With that he placed a call to the restaurant and started to walk into the kitchen. Jack stood and began packing the books on the table into his backpack; when his father was sufficiently far away, he whispered that he was sorry.

“Your father is a horror show,” I whispered back. Jack nodded solemnly. I badly wanted to give him a victory kiss—we’d done it together, partners in crime who’d managed to deceive, but Buck quickly circled in again, pointing to line items on a colorful menu for my approval; I nodded vigorously and he began to wander away once more, unable to talk on the phone and stand still. “Jack,” I called quickly, wiggling my foot, “get my shoes.”

When Buck returned from the call, I was stepping into a pair of shiny beige heels. “Dressing up for dinner.” Buck smiled.

“I really should probably be going,” I tried, playing the traditional-wife card. “I need to get supper on for my husband.”

In the area of my estrangement from Ford only, Buck did seem to have an oddly intuitive streak. “He’s waiting on you right now?” he asked. There was an air of conquest in his tone; he knew, somehow, that Ford was not waiting.

“Not right now, no,” I conceded. “He works pretty late.” Buck’s face lit up like a winning pinball machine. He seemed to think the sole determining factor in whether or not I’d have an affair with him was Ford’s schedule.

Jack mechanically set the table as Buck droned on about work—the large number of people he supervised, the fire alarm malfunction that had ended their training night early. Not once did his words slow in order to ponder the extended amount of tutoring Jack and I might have accomplished, all without his ever knowing, had this accident at work not occurred. He also spoke openly of lavish vacations he’d taken past girlfriends on and his knowledge of where to buy jewelry, insinuating that if I hooked up with him there could be a nice bracelet in my future. “You want some of the best emeralds you’ve ever seen?” he asked coyly. “Get off at St. Thomas on a Caribbean cruise.” It was hard not to laugh. Sure, Buck seemed a comfortable level of middle-class, but dating him in exchange for gifts wouldn’t qualify as gold-digging; it would be more like panning for nuggets.

I sat across the table from Jack during dinner, loving the way he shunned chopsticks in favor of a fork, as though sex had made him so hungry he couldn’t bother with anything that compromised his ability to shovel food in his mouth. At one point I took my foot out of my shoe and ran it up his leg, rubbing front to back again and again along his crotch while Buck spoke of upcoming concerts that his company could get box-seat tickets to. Watching Jack eat made the conversation bearable; his lips became visibly flavored with oil and sauce, and I delighted in the torture of knowing just what they tasted like by eating the food. By the time Buck asked if I could stay for dessert, though, my patience had been sufficiently used up.

“No thank you,” I said. “I have to watch my figure.”

“Self-control.” He smiled. “I like that in a woman. Outside of the bedroom I mean.” The three of us stood there for a moment, paralyzed by the awkwardness of this remark, then Buck tried to come in for a good-bye hug. I managed to trap one of his stumpy hands and shake it thoroughly instead.

“I would really love to see you again,” he said.

“Thank you for a lovely evening.” They were the only polite words I could manage.

I had a near-giddy sense of optimism afterward, knowing that if Buck ever came home earlier than expected, all would be well as long as Jack could make it to the table with a notebook and a pair of shorts on.

But Jack wanted even more freedom than this. That Friday, at Jack’s insistence, I took him to a drive-in movie. We went all the way out to Clearwater, about an hour away. I insisted we both wear party-store wigs since I’d have to roll the window down and be seen in order to buy a ticket. My faux hair was a short red bob, Jack’s a shaggy blond mop that might have accompanied a surfer costume. “It’s like we’re going to rob a bank,” he joked, putting his on.

We watched the film casually, his hand resting against my bare crotch with two fingers blithely inserted, my own fingers gripping the base of his penis, our limbs irregularly coming alive with motion, then hanging in stasis to watch one of the more interesting moments of a scene. “You know my dad keeps asking me to get your number for him,” he finally mentioned.

“I feel for you. That guy is a boob.” The movie centered on the quarterback rivalry between two opposing high school football teams; disappointingly, the youngest actor in the film still appeared to be at least twenty-six. Yet the sentiment lodged in one of the pregame locker-room speeches nearly moved me to tears. We’re high school seniors, the lead actor gushed. Due to the passion in his voice, I was able to momentarily suspend disbelief and think of him as an eighteen-year-old despite having seen in the tabloids that he’d recently cheated on his wife with their children’s nanny and fathered a set of illegitimate twins. Tonight is all we have. This is the night we’re going to dream about for the rest of our lives. Some of us aren’t ever going to make it out of this town, but for the next two hours we can go out on that field and feel immortal! It’s true, I thought; the adult world has so much less to offer than adolescence does. It seemed to me that the happiest possible ending to the movie would be both teams playing impeccably and tying at the end of the fourth quarter, then the entire stadium being blown up by terrorists and their young lives ending on a high.

Jack turned to me, a sudden excitement making his words sound jumpy. “So I think I know a way that you can be at the house a lot more and it won’t matter if you’re there when my dad comes home,” he said. “You just have to lead him on a little. All of my dad’s past girlfriends have had keys to our house. They’d come over even when he wasn’t there and lay out by the pool or whatever. Bring groceries over and make dinner so it would be ready by the time he walked in the door—that kind of stuff. If you pretend to date him, you could come over all the time.”

My hands fell away from his penis, suddenly unsure of everything about Jack. “You want me to sleep with your dad?”

“No!” Jack looked at me like I was completely insane. “God, are you kidding me?”

“Well adults don’t usually date without having sex, Jack. It’s just the way things work. I’m sorry to break it to you, but those women coming over to cook for him were most certainly putting themselves on the menu too.”

“Ewww!” he screamed, cupping his hands over his ears. “Stop saying gross things. I know they were, I get that. I’m not saying you actually date. Just tell him you want to get to know him better or something.”

The thought of Buck’s frontal-scalp hair plugs rubbing against my skin made my toes curl inside my shoes. “It’s a slippery slope, Jack.”

“You just pretend to be a little interested. Then if he gets home early and you’re there, he’ll think you came over to see him. You could even stop by on weekends and stuff.”

On-screen, a tubby linebacker with a heart of gold took a concussion-inducing hit to protect the quarterback. The camera zoomed forward to follow the trajectory of the bite guard, expelled from the linebacker’s mouth on impact, as it soared over a pileup of bodies and landed across the end zone with a poignant bounce. “Jack,” I pointed out, “he’s not interested in simply eating pot roast and watching Jeopardy! He’ll start wanting more and more.” I thought of Buck’s shining red face mid-proposition, the way his flushed cheeks would gleam like griddled ham. “Eventually I’ll have to either reject him or give in.”

Of course what Jack didn’t know was just how temporary our own relationship was going to be. As I argued, I began to realize that several months from now, when Buck would likely reach his sexually frustrated breaking point, Jack would probably be due to hit a growth spurt—I’d need to be waning away from both of them anyhow. Buck could prove to be a perfect excuse to begin going over to see Jack less and less, and eventually I might be able to play the conflicted-conscience card with Jack: how I’d wronged them both and needed some time to soul-search, that my pretend relationship with Buck had made me realize Jack needed to be a normal kid and bound into high school without the heavy tethers of an adult love affair.

Jack was still trying to solve the puzzle I’d set before him of how I could engage Buck without the flirtation becoming physical. “I think if you just keep telling him you need more time or whatever, he’d go along with that. Say he’s totally free to date other people and stuff. I know he likes going to the strip clubs. He’s sick; sometimes he’ll get a lap dance, then come home and tell me about it.”

“That is very, very nauseating.” Jack smiled; illuminated by the movie screen, his expression caused a series of micro-wrinkles to form at the corners of his eyes. Perhaps he wouldn’t be opposed to starting a preventative regimen of retinol? Surely I could gently convince him of its benefits.

“I know he’s disgusting. But I mean, you’re so much hotter and younger than anyone he’s ever dated. I think you could string him along for a super-long time. At least until I can drive and have a later curfew. Think about it—you’ll be able to come over whenever you want.”

The thought of unbridled access made my crotch seize up in a robust squeeze. I realized I’d be able to go over in the early hours and peek in on Jack, perhaps catch him with bedhead and a sleep erection and wake him up by putting his penis into the warmth of my mouth. This image was more than enough to let greed cloud my judgment.

“I guess we can give it a try,” I agreed. “But tell him he can’t call me, ever, so there’s no point in giving him my number. My husband’s a cop, and he’s the jealous sort. We can’t be too careful.” I didn’t clarify to Jack whether or not the cop detail and the jealous detail were true, and oddly, he didn’t ask. I suppose in the same way I wanted the details of Jack’s future to remain vague and blurry in my mind, he wasn’t looking to cement the particulars of my home life. It could work, I figured. I’d explain to Buck that I’d never had an affair and probably never could. That I wasn’t looking for anything physical and he needed to understand that. I was simply looking for a friend. And of course I’d mention he was free to date and sleep with whomever he wanted. Dating wasn’t what he and I were doing, I’d explain—I was just getting some space from my husband.

One of the teams in the movie scored a touchdown; cannons filled with school-spirit-colored confetti shot into the air as football players ran to cheerleaders for congratulatory kisses. Jack slurped the last dregs of his cola through his straw.

“This is going to be so cool.” He smiled and gripped my hand in a way that I can only describe as juvenile—like we were at the fair and he wanted me to follow him over to the Ferris wheel.