Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

“Janet,” he said. “It’s a little cold for slippers.”

“Don’t worry about me — I’m always hot,” she said, sliding her hand up the door and easing her hip out. No change, not even a twitch of his lips. “Listen, I’m dying to ask you about those wind gusts we had. Just how fast are we talking?” she asked in her best fascinated voice. With wind gusts , she saw a slight smile.

“And just how scared should I still be? Because you know how scared I get,” she said. She let the robe slip off one shoulder, then drew it back up and shivered so her hips shimmied. She wanted him to note how vulnerable she could make herself. Then he could decide to protect her or fuck her. Protection was fine, fucking better, but both was best.

“Janet,” he repeated, but his edge softened. “I know how scared you get.” He came inside, saying, “But the weather is nothing to be scared of. Even storms like this.” He accepted her gin. She had high hopes.

After dropping a coaster and bending toward him to pick it up, her robe opening slightly, she felt him relax. She knew he had looked, heard his voice catch in his throat as he explained how he measured wind speed. When she reached across him to retrieve a magazine for that article on Atlantic currents she’d saved for a moment like this, he subtly copped a feel. Finally, with a deep breath, knowing this would be the end of the evening or the beginning, she went for it; she slipped her hand between his legs during an extended lesson on atmospheric pressure— Air has weight, like a person, weight that is pushing against us all the time, even now —and after a look of surprise, he tore open her robe. He scanned all of her like a scientist. She reclined, traced a finger down herself and watched his eyes follow to where it disappeared. She thought she saw that slight smile play again. Then he flipped his belt open, slunk from his khakis, and fell upon her. They bumped to the floor, pushed the coffee table away, their limbs a puzzle until he flung her legs wide and fit himself in.

She didn’t need to act; it was good. But still she did everything a little louder, breathier, rougher, just to be sure he got the message: You are important to me. Even after the storm, I need you.

They continued in the bedroom. And when he finally slept, she smoothed down his chest and back hair. “So passionate,” she murmured.

In the morning, she watched him sneak out. He closed the bedroom door gently, but by the time he reached the front door his mind was elsewhere and he let it slam. If she’d been asleep, it would have jolted her awake; she’d be disoriented, wondering what had happened. But instead she anticipated it, felt the soft tremble through her body.

Janet tried to run into Dave again, somehow get him over to her place. But he never answered when she knocked. Didn’t respond to the notes she taped to the door or his car windshield. Sometimes she glimpsed his back as he entered his house, or his shoe as he got in his car, his face obscured by morning glare upon the windows. It began to feel as if he’d never existed. Except when she watched him nightly she remembered his weight pushing against her.

One morning, Janet noticed a woman leaving Dave’s town house. Then on several more mornings after that she saw her again. The woman was mousy; her limp brown hair hung straight down her back unless she had it pulled up in a thin, messy ponytail. She always left early, clearly needing to return to her own home to get ready for work. They were not serious enough for her to keep her things at his house, Janet decided.

And then it was spring.

Janet won another teaching award: Teacher of the Year, five years running. It was like a perfect school-year farewell from the girls, who adored her. It’s never a landslide, but the girls outnumber the boys, and, well, the girls love me, she’d say when her fellow teachers unenthusiastically congratulated her. The teachers all disliked her, she was certain. In their opinion Janet was scary. That was their word for people who were better than them. At everything. And always had been. She’d stopped playing humble years ago, and because of it adults avoided her. They didn’t know how to be around someone with no secret shame, guilt, trauma, or self-hatred.

Meanwhile, the teen girls experienced awe. They didn’t know yet to be afraid of people like Janet. They looked at her and thought, Beauty! Brains! Confidence! Now here’s something I can aspire to. They were one step away from adulthood and needed that extra push, and Janet was happy to give it to them, to keep them smart and out of trouble. She’d even designed special after-school sex-ed classes just for girls, and they were grateful. If it meant a lesson in the perfect blow job so sex was unnecessary, or inventive ways to put on a condom so it seemed like a treat to wear one? She knew several tricks. Tips on how to be the seducer so as to control the proceedings? Seductress was her middle name. Be the parent signing off on birth control? Why not? She felt they were all her daughters.

The men in her life said she was too bossy in bed, always repositioning them and sighing when they did things wrong — There. No . There . But really, how hard is it to please a woman? Had they ever even tried? Even she had tried. Certainly it wasn’t always easy. And so many women were so needy, then overly grateful. Especially the mothers. Like Mrs. Howard from parent-teacher conferences. Those aching eyes. Janet had thought, Why not? It had to have been this woman’s first orgasm — or first good one. After, she curled into Janet’s body and cooed until Janet finally said, as kindly as she could — she wasn’t cruel exactly—“Enough,” and began to dress. The look on Mrs. Howard’s face: like she’d seen a ghost, maybe two. Janet avoided her calls after. There were only a few.

One man, some years ago, she’d been very optimistic about. He was a teacher; smart, sexy in a blazer, no tie; his shirt was always unbuttoned an extra button to display a manly spray of hair. He didn’t mind her in bed; he was responsive. He pepped up when she boxed his ears with her legs and yelled, “Faster!” He got harder when she insisted, “Deeper,” and he said, “Yes, Janet,” as if he were saying, “Yes, ma’am.” And he could do it too, huffing and groaning as though summiting a mountain while he pumped: his forearms and biceps tight from the strain of pulling her hips higher and toward him. A wild fear would rise in her that he could break through whatever barrier existed between them and lose himself in the mess of her intestines. It was the best sex she’d had up to that point. But soon he began to reveal his disappointment in life. He’d always thought he’d be in politics, attending dinners with the president or accepting senatorial bribes. He never imagined he’d be a teacher in a small city that wasn’t even coastal, though it was close. He got glum and expected comfort, for her to say he was special, could do anything — whatever women were supposed to say to men who’d been told to expect big things from life. They usually never considered that big could simply mean a stable job, mostly happiness, occasional good-to-great sex. She’d never been told to expect anything, and so she just did what she wanted and told her students to do the same. She’d won her teaching awards because she did what she loved and did it well, not because she expected to be rewarded. Dave Santana was important not because he thought he should be but because he did important work, and he knew it. It’s one more thing they had in common.

She broke it off with that teacher. Later he became a state assemblyman. Janet saw a campaign poster of him stuck in someone’s lawn. He looked good. Even more handsome; he wore a tie. She’d never thought to insist he wear one; she had been so sure he looked best tieless. He posed with a wife and two kids. She’d never heard him talk about either a wife or kids. The wife looked long-suffering, not fresh and new, and the kids were high-school-age, though Janet had been the man’s lover four years ago. Five, tops. Oh, the havoc she could wreak with a simple phone call. But it wasn’t her style. And if anything, that he’d kept a secret like that made him more interesting.