Alissa Nutting - Tampa

“Your father is a horror show,” I whispered back. Jack nodded solemnly. I badly wanted to give him a victory kiss—we’d done it together, partners in crime who’d managed to deceive, but Buck quickly circled in again, pointing to line items on a colorful menu for my approval; I nodded vigorously and he began to wander away once more, unable to talk on the phone and stand still. “Jack,” I called quickly, wiggling my foot, “get my shoes.”

When Buck returned from the call, I was stepping into a pair of shiny beige heels. “Dressing up for dinner.” Buck smiled.

“I really should probably be going,” I tried, playing the traditional-wife card. “I need to get supper on for my husband.”

In the area of my estrangement from Ford only, Buck did seem to have an oddly intuitive streak. “He’s waiting on you right now?” he asked. There was an air of conquest in his tone; he knew, somehow, that Ford was not waiting.

“Not right now, no,” I conceded. “He works pretty late.” Buck’s face lit up like a winning pinball machine. He seemed to think the sole determining factor in whether or not I’d have an affair with him was Ford’s schedule.

Jack mechanically set the table as Buck droned on about work—the large number of people he supervised, the fire alarm malfunction that had ended their training night early. Not once did his words slow in order to ponder the extended amount of tutoring Jack and I might have accomplished, all without his ever knowing, had this accident at work not occurred. He also spoke openly of lavish vacations he’d taken past girlfriends on and his knowledge of where to buy jewelry, insinuating that if I hooked up with him there could be a nice bracelet in my future. “You want some of the best emeralds you’ve ever seen?” he asked coyly. “Get off at St. Thomas on a Caribbean cruise.” It was hard not to laugh. Sure, Buck seemed a comfortable level of middle-class, but dating him in exchange for gifts wouldn’t qualify as gold-digging; it would be more like panning for nuggets.

I sat across the table from Jack during dinner, loving the way he shunned chopsticks in favor of a fork, as though sex had made him so hungry he couldn’t bother with anything that compromised his ability to shovel food in his mouth. At one point I took my foot out of my shoe and ran it up his leg, rubbing front to back again and again along his crotch while Buck spoke of upcoming concerts that his company could get box-seat tickets to. Watching Jack eat made the conversation bearable; his lips became visibly flavored with oil and sauce, and I delighted in the torture of knowing just what they tasted like by eating the food. By the time Buck asked if I could stay for dessert, though, my patience had been sufficiently used up.

“No thank you,” I said. “I have to watch my figure.”

“Self-control.” He smiled. “I like that in a woman. Outside of the bedroom I mean.” The three of us stood there for a moment, paralyzed by the awkwardness of this remark, then Buck tried to come in for a good-bye hug. I managed to trap one of his stumpy hands and shake it thoroughly instead.

“I would really love to see you again,” he said.

“Thank you for a lovely evening.” They were the only polite words I could manage.

I had a near-giddy sense of optimism afterward, knowing that if Buck ever came home earlier than expected, all would be well as long as Jack could make it to the table with a notebook and a pair of shorts on.

But Jack wanted even more freedom than this. That Friday, at Jack’s insistence, I took him to a drive-in movie. We went all the way out to Clearwater, about an hour away. I insisted we both wear party-store wigs since I’d have to roll the window down and be seen in order to buy a ticket. My faux hair was a short red bob, Jack’s a shaggy blond mop that might have accompanied a surfer costume. “It’s like we’re going to rob a bank,” he joked, putting his on.

We watched the film casually, his hand resting against my bare crotch with two fingers blithely inserted, my own fingers gripping the base of his penis, our limbs irregularly coming alive with motion, then hanging in stasis to watch one of the more interesting moments of a scene. “You know my dad keeps asking me to get your number for him,” he finally mentioned.

“I feel for you. That guy is a boob.” The movie centered on the quarterback rivalry between two opposing high school football teams; disappointingly, the youngest actor in the film still appeared to be at least twenty-six. Yet the sentiment lodged in one of the pregame locker-room speeches nearly moved me to tears. We’re high school seniors , the lead actor gushed. Due to the passion in his voice, I was able to momentarily suspend disbelief and think of him as an eighteen-year-old despite having seen in the tabloids that he’d recently cheated on his wife with their children’s nanny and fathered a set of illegitimate twins. Tonight is all we have. This is the night we’re going to dream about for the rest of our lives. Some of us aren’t ever going to make it out of this town, but for the next two hours we can go out on that field and feel immortal! It’s true, I thought; the adult world has so much less to offer than adolescence does. It seemed to me that the happiest possible ending to the movie would be both teams playing impeccably and tying at the end of the fourth quarter, then the entire stadium being blown up by terrorists and their young lives ending on a high.

Jack turned to me, a sudden excitement making his words sound jumpy. “So I think I know a way that you can be at the house a lot more and it won’t matter if you’re there when my dad comes home,” he said. “You just have to lead him on a little. All of my dad’s past girlfriends have had keys to our house. They’d come over even when he wasn’t there and lay out by the pool or whatever. Bring groceries over and make dinner so it would be ready by the time he walked in the door—that kind of stuff. If you pretend to date him, you could come over all the time.”

My hands fell away from his penis, suddenly unsure of everything about Jack. “You want me to sleep with your dad?”

“No!” Jack looked at me like I was completely insane. “God, are you kidding me?”

“Well adults don’t usually date without having sex, Jack. It’s just the way things work. I’m sorry to break it to you, but those women coming over to cook for him were most certainly putting themselves on the menu too.”

“Ewww!” he screamed, cupping his hands over his ears. “Stop saying gross things. I know they were, I get that. I’m not saying you actually date. Just tell him you want to get to know him better or something.”

The thought of Buck’s frontal-scalp hair plugs rubbing against my skin made my toes curl inside my shoes. “It’s a slippery slope, Jack.”

“You just pretend to be a little interested. Then if he gets home early and you’re there, he’ll think you came over to see him. You could even stop by on weekends and stuff.”

On-screen, a tubby linebacker with a heart of gold took a concussion-inducing hit to protect the quarterback. The camera zoomed forward to follow the trajectory of the bite guard, expelled from the linebacker’s mouth on impact, as it soared over a pileup of bodies and landed across the end zone with a poignant bounce. “Jack,” I pointed out, “he’s not interested in simply eating pot roast and watching Jeopardy! He’ll start wanting more and more.” I thought of Buck’s shining red face mid-proposition, the way his flushed cheeks would gleam like griddled ham. “Eventually I’ll have to either reject him or give in.”

Of course what Jack didn’t know was just how temporary our own relationship was going to be. As I argued, I began to realize that several months from now, when Buck would likely reach his sexually frustrated breaking point, Jack would probably be due to hit a growth spurt—I’d need to be waning away from both of them anyhow. Buck could prove to be a perfect excuse to begin going over to see Jack less and less, and eventually I might be able to play the conflicted-conscience card with Jack: how I’d wronged them both and needed some time to soul-search, that my pretend relationship with Buck had made me realize Jack needed to be a normal kid and bound into high school without the heavy tethers of an adult love affair.