Alissa Nutting - Tampa

His wet lips fell slightly open as he nodded. “Let me go lock the door.” I walked to the desk and grabbed my purse; to avoid faculty accidentally getting locked out of their classroom, the knob could only be locked with a key. The sound of the clanking metal as the bolt shut into place felt like a small, perfect kick in the center of my loins—here we were, locked up and perfectly free.

I unbuttoned my shirt as I walked back to him, removed it and placed it carefully on one of the desks. Standing for a moment in my bra and my skirt, I let him take a long look at me before I unhooked it and placed it on the desk as well. “Come touch me,” I said.

He stood and walked over very carefully, as though the offer was some spell he might break with loud footsteps. He stopped a few inches away from me and stood, paralyzed and transfixed, until I grabbed his neck and pulled his mouth back to mine. Soon I felt his tentative hands sliding up the sides of my stomach.

His tongue grew still inside my mouth as his hand cupped my breast and found my nipple. Rubbed arbitrarily by the uncertain strokes of his lost fingers, it hardened to the point of aching, and gripping his head in my hands I forced his lips from my mouth to my chest. He latched on and my eyes closed; for a moment the sound of the rain was so loud that it sounded like the roof had opened; I gave a short scream as a quick orgasm bit down through the center of me. It hardly lasted a second after I perceived it, ending with the abrupt halt of an unplugged current the second Jack’s lips fell away. “Are you okay?” he asked.

My appetite was roaring; the incomplete contractions had awakened every sensory cell in my body. In seconds I could’ve hoisted my skirt and slid my panties just a centimeter over, unzipped his pants and felt exactly what I needed, his anatomy’s tentative push delivering a wave of release that in that moment might’ve truly felt endless. Yet I knew our first time couldn’t be right there—I had to give him a little space, even if that meant only a few hours, for things to sink in and the next step to become his idea. I couldn’t smother him in unexpected sex, then send him off to chemistry having feelings so strong and confusing that he had to do something horrible like go and talk about them.

“I’m fine,” I answered. “It was a good scream.” I glanced up at the clock. “Look, I’ve gone and made you miss nearly all your lunch. I’m sorry.”

His face was the most earnest thing I’d ever seen; it held a near-alien amount of honesty. “I don’t mind,” he said.

I pushed my breasts against his chest, feeling the hardened tiny buds of his own nipples through his shirt. “I hope you realize how amazing you are,” I whispered, kissing his bottom lip. “We’re only able to do this because I know I can trust you not to tell anyone.”

“I won’t tell,” he said, his arms holding my waist with an amateur stiffness. I smiled, thinking about the lover he’d become and all the things he’d try with me for the very first time. I’d be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he’d have afterward would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naïveté would be subtracted from my expertise to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.

“Of course you won’t. Not even to your very best friend. That would mean that all the fun would be over.” Topless, I walked to my desk and sat down to write him a note, giving him a new daydream image for the boring minutes of our class together. Now any time I sat at my desk he could vividly imagine me naked. I handed him the note, then began to put on my bra. “Don’t worry”—I winked—“you’ll see them again soon. If anyone asks where you were, remind them you were absent Friday and say you were getting notes. We can’t do this too much at school; we don’t want to push our luck. Is there a time after school you can meet me somewhere else?”

“Yeah,” he said. His brow knotted with a worrying thought; for a moment he tried to shake it but eventually asked, “Aren’t you married?”

“Adult relationships are complicated, Jack. All you need to know is that we can do anything we want if no one finds out about it.”

“My parents are divorced,” he offered, picking up his backpack.

“Then you have some insight about the great range of human behavior.” I gave him another kiss; I meant it to be quick but his cushioned lips pulled me in and soon I was rubbing my leg across his erection. The bell signaling the end of lunch sounded and I let out an audible groan. “Just go straight to your next class,” I said, heavy breaths slowing my words. “No one will know you missed lunch except your friends.”

“I have to get rid of this,” he said, looking down.

“Hold your backpack over it.” I placed my hand on his shoulder and began walking him to the door. “That will go away when you start walking. There’s nothing sexy about hurrying to class.”

Now I had to reveal a bit of planning on my part; I hoped it wouldn’t make things seem too contrived. I reached into my purse and handed him a prepaid cell phone. “Take this. My number is the only contact programmed in. Only use this phone to text me. No one else. Don’t call anyone else on it, don’t text anyone else on it.” The number was for a matching prepaid in my car that I’d bought with cash over the summer—an optimistic venture that helped me manage the long wait for classes to begin.

He looked at the phone in his hand like it was a living thing, a small animal he hoped might wake up soon.

“Put it away,” I urged. “Never bring it to school. Text me later if you can meet up.” With that, I gave him a kiss on the neck that ended with a small lick upon his pulse point, unlocked the door and watched him stumble out into the rain.

In that day’s remaining three classes, time seemed to stretch and bend. I found myself constantly looking to the clock, then back out to the students’ faces. By sixth period my extended suffering led me to audibly lament my predicament. “Do you ever feel like the school day will never be over?” The classroom became a landscape of nodding heads.

“You’re, like, the only adult who gets it, Mrs. Price,” Trevor said. My eyes found him in the back of the room and I smiled. He’d hooked up with a new girlfriend, a quirky thing named Darcy who hadn’t the faintest idea how to correctly use a comma. They sat together in the back, holding hands across the desks and playing footsie while passing a notebook of inside jokes back and forth. Now as I watched Trevor’s fingers rubbing Darcy’s palm with rhythmic small circles, I found that my jealousy at their ability to touch openly in the classroom was a nice torture, like running my finger through a lighter’s flame just a little too slowly; I liked the way it drove me crazy thinking about what could be in store with Jack tonight. Were Darcy and Trevor having sex yet? At least oral, I figured. Like two human leopards, their necks, as well as Darcy’s upper chest, were spotted with a series of hickeys ranging from maroon to a twilight purple.

When the bell did finally ring, all the students save the happy couple ran from the classroom. Trevor and Darcy were always the last to leave, each bogged down in the fog of consideration, imploring one another with offers of assistance and questions about after-school plans. Then they headed for my desk, where Trevor liked to make a comment that aimed to be impressive while Darcy stood by him silently like a conjoined twin. “Have you seen the movie version where Hester and Dimmesdale do it in a pile of wheat?” he asked.