Alissa Nutting - Tampa

“This is tedious, Jack.” I started to reach for my bra but he placed his hands on my shoulders, imploring.

“You love me, right?”

“What do you think?” He nodded and stepped back but wasn’t sated.

“If you feel it, then why can’t you say it?” he demanded. “It’s not like saying it will make it untrue.”

“But saying it doesn’t make it true either,” I reasoned. “People throw that word around all the time. It’s meaningless.”

He began to pace at the end of his bed in a way that made his genitals lightly bounce; their hypnotic sway made me feel slightly more favorable toward him. “It’s not meaningless to me ,” he stressed. “This is… it’s hard what we do, how I have to see you in class without touching you or saying anything real to you. How we can’t talk on the phone more than a second to make plans, and it has to be on a secret phone I keep in a box under my bed. How we can’t tell anybody or go anywhere together. And you can’t even say three words to me?”

“Let me show you instead,” I offered, reaching for his arm.

“I know,” he said, pulling back. “I know that. I just want to hear it out loud.”

I didn’t want him to hear it—the more he heard it, the more he’d believe it, and the more he believed it the harder it would be to break things off when the time inevitably came. But, I figured, it would be more than slightly hypocritical for me to belabor the conversation further by taking some odd stance on an insistence of honesty. There was no need to prematurely ruin things.

“Just this once,” I said. “You know I don’t like it. It makes us seem just like everyone else, and we’re not like everyone else.”

He buried his fingers in the back of my hair and brought his lips and eyes in close and level with my own. “I love you,” he said, his voice stupid with hormones.

“I love you too, Jack.” As soon as I said it he was kissing me. He didn’t give one second of pause for analysis, had no desire to read the veracity of my expression. Before I knew it he was fully inside me, my legs balancing wearily on his shoulders like an oversized harness on a young ox.

Pictures were another sore spot for Jack—I insisted that I could have none of him nor he of me, not even a fully clothed shot of me snapped surreptitiously on his regular phone in the classroom. “I can’t have a photo of you standing in the front of our class in a turtleneck?” he asked. “One picture to look at between our visits?”

I was firm. “It’s just not smart, Jack. Say your father sees it, or a friend. One question leads to another. Suddenly they’re watching you watch me in class, or they catch me staring at your crotch as you walk past my desk. We don’t want to invite scrutiny.”

But his father soon saw more of me than a photo. This also happened on a Wednesday, a bit after 6:40. Jack and I were in his bathroom, the shower still running—he’d soaped up my breasts with shampoo, rinsed them using the detachable wand, then liked the visual so much he’d repeated the lather. Jack was standing up on the edge of the tub, his hands lifted to hold the curtain bar for balance, so that he could see my squatting ass in the mirror and my blond hair trailing down my back while I gave him a blow job and theatrically touched my foamy breasts. Given the running water and fervor of Jack’s escalating moans, we only barely managed to hear the sound of the garage door opening.

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.