Alissa Nutting - Tampa

The garage door was closed; no cars were parked in his driveway. But someone could have been home—a single front room was lit up and the curtains were open. I took the binoculars out of my glove compartment and moved to the passenger seat to see around the cluster of giant palms in the front yard. A closer view showed a middle-aged man passed out asleep on the sofa, a pizza box and two beer bottles on the coffee table. I searched every inch of the room I could view, but there was only the man—Jack wasn’t there. It was Saturday night, I reasoned; it had been silly to get my hopes up. But there was still much to celebrate: the unconscious father figure meant the house wasn’t locked down in any sort of emergency mode. Clearly, Jack hadn’t said a word. I moved the binoculars over to Jack’s darkened window and immediately dropped them.

I couldn’t pick them back up fast enough. My chest began to surge; trying to find them on the floor, I felt like I might suffocate with adrenaline. Had I actually seen him?

When I finally got ahold of them beneath the seat, I thrust them up to my eyes so violently that I felt a volt of pain when their hard plastic hit the bone of my left brow. There, within two seven-centimeter circular lenses, I could see the shape of a body contrasting against the darkness. I focused the lenses further, my fingertips sweating. It was indeed Jack. His right arm rose and fell in repetitive motion, tugging against his crotch. The windowsill blocked me from seeing below his pelvis—the tip of his penis was visible, but nothing beneath it. Yet there in full view was the entirety of his torso, his flexed arm. What caused me to nearly scream as I shoved my fist into my underwear and began grinding my clit against my knuckles was the oddity of his posture and gaze; I came immediately, then continued to push against my pubic bone with the full force of my wrist, as if to try to muffle the insanity-producing sensation and stay in a state where I could, with full mental faculty, observe him as a specimen. He was staring out the window, straight up at the moon, wildly jerking off to a distant celestial body.

Watching him was so taunting that I felt like I was being injured; the longer I looked, the deeper the hot wound inside of me grew. When he finished he closed his eyes for just a moment, resting his forehead on the glass of the window. Then, suddenly, his head turned, and in a singular panicked motion he seemed to reach to his ankles for pants and disappear within his room. A quick rove of my binoculars over to the living room showed that the sleeping father had awakened and left the couch.

I felt like I’d been kidnapped and now had to escape while drugged—a fuzzy, sharp paralysis swam through my limbs and made it difficult to turn the key and start my car; my vision was blurred and a dull nausea churned in the back of my head. My body petitioned that my actions made no sense—everything I wanted, stripped down and clearly ready, was right there in wait, yet I was driving away in the opposite direction, an oxygen-deprived climber traveling farther up the mountain instead of making a descent. My feet were too heavy on the pedals; I pictured Janet’s swollen feet grafted onto my ankles, the prosthetic hooflike shoes she wore tangling on the clutch and brake; at the first stoplight I arrived at, I stalled out. It was several minutes before I realized I’d left his subdivision through an alternate exit. Getting home would require many corrective turns. For a harried moment, with the fluorescent lights of the road and the strip-mall business swirling around me, I wondered if I could find my way home at all. Supposedly I knew exactly where I was—these were roads I drove daily. But there was a confusing pressure at the base of my skull and it was pulsing a blood rhythm not unlike the sound and speed of riot police striking their shields with their batons; it was a sound that thought and memory seemed to find threatening. Reason had evacuated my body. I felt like nothing more than a bomb with a steady timer attached, my heart counting down to an unknown hour of disaster.

When I finally found my street, I parked sideways in the driveway and stumbled in the door. My clothes felt like scratchy wool; I disrobed and stood in the dark, leaning against the cool drywall, panting. Moments or hours later when I heard Ford arrive home—the slam of his car door, a frustrated expletive because he had to park on the street due to my vehicle’s position—I fell to my knees in the dark, squatting down like a dog in the hallway with my ass facing the door.

There was an incoming flood of light, then the hurried slamming of the door’s screen.

“Celeste, Jesus, hello ! Good thing I didn’t bring Scottie back for a beer…” The sound of his locking the doorknob and dead bolt, drawing the chain.

“Can you turn the light back out?” I asked softly. Darkness. The sound of his belt being undone, his weapons coming off. My view as he took me from behind was the glass patio doors, through which I could see the full moon hanging in the sky, reflecting off our pool as if it was its point of origin. I stared up at it imagining not the brutish strength of Ford thrusting inside me but the inquisitive determination of Jack’s body exploring the instinct of touch. The moment Ford finished I began to crawl away to the patio door, his semen dripping down my thighs like blood from an injury. Wordlessly, I jumped into the pool and sank to the very bottom, blowing every ounce of air in my body out with all the force of my lungs. The moon seemed to take up over half of the sky. I continued to stare as my lungs began to twinge with panic, my abdominal muscles struggling not to heave in for air, until a naked Ford, one hand cupping his genitals for fear of a nosy neighbor peeking over the fence, eclipsed the view, his mouth overenunciating. “What the hell are you doing?” read his lips. Then I slowly glided up the pool’s slanted floor to the shallow end and surfaced.

I went back to Jack’s house again Sunday night. Hoping for a repeat performance, I took great pains to leave the house at exactly the same time, park in the same spot. I fought the superstition that nagged me to wear dirty clothes I’d worn just the night before, step back into the doubtlessly hardened crotch of the terry-cloth pants I’d had on when I’d seen the erect and glistening tip of Jack’s penis, his budding chest and arms in the full motions of exertion and his mouth parted to channel additional oxygen.

But he wasn’t there; his window was closed. All I could see of his bedroom was a long, draped curtain, fallen as if to announce the show was over.

Monday morning the sky was pouring rain to opacity. Students arrived with wet hair and soaked textbooks that had served as impromptu umbrellas. By third period muddy footprints leading from the door to the desks and back had formed the circular pattern of a complex dance diagram.

“There should be a tunnel or something, from the school to the outdoor classrooms,” Marissa protested. Her shirt was soaked through, clinging to her breasts and the side rolls of her stomach. Jack came in a few moments later, a tracing of rain around his shoulders; he’d used a folder to shield his head and his hair had managed to stay nearly dry, but the calves of his legs had been showered. I watched each one of the drops snaking down his legs, some of them traveling all the way from above his knee in a manner that recalled urine. The innocence of that thought—a frightened Jack in the middle of the classroom, wetting himself; me undressing him from his soiled clothes, his damp tender skin cold to the touch—briefly clutched me in a fantasy of erotic mothering and made me long, oddly and briefly, for a more developed personal relationship with Jack. There was a turn-on to the suggestion that I might one day see him troubled, perhaps crying; that I might soothe and reassure him with a sympathy that could lead to a feeling of gratitude on his behalf. One that he would repay sexually, his eyes smiling up at me during cunnilingus. I gave the students a quick character-study quiz about Dimmesdale and his physical response to the guilt of his actions and then stared at the clock: I simply had to make it to the end of the class, mere minutes, and then my wait might possibly be over.