Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“I don’t know about my kidneys. It feels good, though.”

He worked his way down to her heel, then back up, rubbing between each toe. She relaxed against the door and closed her eyes, shoulders easing backward, and he grinned.

“See, it’s working,” he said. “You’re starting to melt.”

She laughed. “It must be my kidneys.”

Her foot arched in his hand; feeling the response of her body aroused him. He moved his fingers lightly up her Achilles tendon to her ankle, massaging around the small bones. She did not twitch or pull away; instead, she stretched her calf to give him more room to work.

“You know you can give a woman an orgasm if you rub a certain way?” he asked, and her eyes opened, following her rising brows. He walked his fingers around her foot in the pattern he had read about. “It’s like, ankle, stretch, thumbnail up the arch. Repeat.”

“Have you ever done it?”

He grinned and rubbed the back of her calf. Still, she didn’t flinch. “No. Do you want me to try?”

“Let’s not,” she said, but left her foot where it was.

He ran his nail up the midline of her foot, and her toes curled. “Come on,” he pressed. “I won’t tell anyone if it works.”

Her gaze drifted to the customers outside the Starbucks. He realized, with an electric thrill, that she was considering it. Teasingly he added, “I bet that’s what’s blocking your chi .”

One of her eyebrows went up. “If it was, would it be any of your business?”

“I don’t know. Do you want it to be?”

She smiled, but it looked thin, even bitter. “You don’t pay much attention to the news, my friend,” she informed him, and the familiar phrase caught him by surprise. Quietly she continued, “And this is what I wanted to talk to you about. People go to jail for things like this, Zach. Women do. Teachers do. Somebody always finds out.”

“They go to jail for getting their feet rubbed?”

“No. They go to jail for getting involved with students. And only one party ever gets blamed, no matter who instigates it. Do you know which party that would be?”

“You’re not involved with me, though.”

Her cheeks lifted in the slightest hint of amusement. “You just propositioned my feet.”

“They’re just feet.”

“But that’s not the kind of foot rub you give your mother, now is it?”

“No, but my mother doesn’t stick her tongue down my throat, either.”

Her smile grew weary and she tugged her leg from his grasp. “I need to take you home. I don’t think your mother would want to have any role in this conversation.”

“You might be surprised. She’s not as uptight as you think.”

Judy slid her foot back into her shoe. “Well, I know a little more about mothers than you do.”

The condescension in her tone made him feel small. He knew a thing or two about adults and their secrets, and he was tired of them—his own parents in particular—acting like he was too naïve to make even the most obvious connections. “You don’t know much about my mother,” he countered. “She’s not uptight at all. She cheated on my dad with one of her yoga students.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“She did. A guy who was in her Dynamics class.” Zach knew the man’s name, but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Ponytailed, with thin, hairy legs, he often came to class in a shirt printed with John Lennon’s face and the caption, “Long Live Dr. Winston O’Boogie.” Over time Zach came to think of him by a private nickname: Booger.

“He wasn’t a kid or anything,” Zach continued. “He was probably like 28 or 29. I think that’s one of the reasons why she was so gung-ho about moving away from New Hampshire. He was still at her studio and I think she felt weird about being pregnant around him.”

Judy nodded as though none of this surprised her, and her unimpressed reaction both disappointed and soothed him. Perhaps the act he had seen as a gross betrayal, a secret calamity, was normal enough in the world of adults; perhaps he had overreacted. She asked, “Is he the father of the baby?”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure they broke it off awhile before that. I think.” He hoped. “We moved in June, and I hadn’t seen him at the studio since the fall. But I was doing judo after school most days, so I don’t know. I didn’t want to see anything I’d feel obligated to tell my dad about, so I kind of avoided the studio once I figured out what was going on.”

Her laugh was full of grim understanding. “I did the same thing when I was young and realized my father was having an affair with our housekeeper. Oh, I was so angry. And I blamed her, really, not him. He could do no wrong, because he was my father. But her —oh, watch your back, sweetheart.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, same here. Hey. Give me your other foot.”

She plunked it onto his lap. “How did you figure it out?”

He shrugged and began to massage her sole. “I just knew. There wasn’t any one blazing moment where I caught them in the act or anything. It’s just that there’s a certain amount of touching that goes on between yoga teachers and their students. You get familiar with it, so you can tell when it goes beyond what’s normal. And it was definitely beyond normal.”

“Maybe you did see it, and you blocked it out.”

He worked his fingers down the middle of her foot, and frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean maybe you did catch them in the act, and you just don’t remember. I think that happened to me. I remember coming home and finding the house empty, and turning the doorknob to my father’s room, and then running down the path, crying. After that I knew to stay out of the house when she was there. But I didn’t see a thing, not that I recall.” She drew an oval in the air in front of her forehead. “It’s as though, in the filmstrip of that sequence of events, that part of the film was exposed. Not that I’m complaining. If it was that traumatic, I’m sure it’s better if I don’t recall it. I’ve got enough odds and ends knocking around in there.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think that happened to me. I’d be pretty messed up if it did, and I don’t think I’m too messed up.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, and he grinned. “I’ve never had to pull a student aside before to ask him to mind his manners with me. Can we come to an agreement about that, please? Because I’d rather shake hands on it now than have to do my Mussolini impression down the road.”

“Maybe I’d like your Mussolini impression.”

“Oh, stop it. Come on now.”

It was like a judo match: find your opponent’s point of weakness, and exploit it. Judy’s was easy to identify: the words marching dutifully out of her mouth didn’t match the supple way her muscles responded to his touch. She had rested against his thigh a small model of what the rest of her body would do, were it not for the little problem of propriety.

Her gaze was firm, and he met it easily, still smiling. He moved his hand slowly over her foot: ankle. Stretch. Thumbnail up the arch.

She stretched her toes in a fan, and smirked.

Repeat.

Repeat.

She lifted her foot from its resting place on his leg. Slowly, she ran it along his inner thigh. It came to rest at the front of his jeans, and only when she nestled it against him did he pull his breath in through his teeth. His hand flew to caress the part that caressed him. He tried, and failed, to control the urge to arch against the counterpressure. In the moment of blinding arousal his head tipped back against the closed window and, faintly, hurt.

“Stop screwing with me, Zach,” she said, her voice low but infused with a wavering note that was almost like fear. “I mean it. It’s not cute and it’s not funny. It’s my fucking job . It’s my reputation. I’m not going to throw it all away so you can play seduce-the-teacher. Because you wouldn’t know what to do with me even if it worked.”