Alissa Nutting - Tampa

“We killed my dad,” he finally said.

“Absolutely not!” I exclaimed. What a counterproductive and harmful thought for him to have. Pressing my lips against his head as though to beam the words directly into his skull, I tried to reassure him. “Jack,” I said, “a heart attack killed your dad. It’s tragic, but everything is going to be just fine.”

We did in fact have a few strokes of luck come our way, namely the house. As Jack’s legal guardian, his mother wanted control of the property to set up a trust for her son; Buck’s siblings claimed their brother wanted money from its sale to go toward the care of Buck’s ailing mother and said they’d made a verbal contract with Buck about this matter. Arbitration would take months, perhaps even a year or two, during which time the property would sit vacant and Jack and I could continue to meet whenever time allowed, though Jack often wasn’t in the mood to be inside it. “We have to go somewhere else,” he’d stress. “Anywhere, I don’t care.” It wasn’t always practical to drive so far out of town, so I settled instead on blended anonymity; off one of the town’s main roads there was a series of medical plazas whose driveways lead into one another like the links of a chain. After hours, their parking lots always remained peppered with cars and there was absolutely no through traffic; not once did another car come down the road while we were in the middle of anything.

Yet the situation was far from perfect. Sometimes it was downright hellish. First there was the arrangement of illuminated signs, many of which advertised obstetrics and fertility practices. With their various lights glowing around us to form the shape of an imperfect pentagram, it seemed like an act of conception voodoo might occur: these totems of medical miracles would join forces and somehow cause my birth control to fail. The other terrible aspect was the heat and the bugs. We couldn’t leave my car running and enjoy the AC in case a security guard came by on his rounds, which meant we were battling the summer’s oncoming humidity against my car’s leather seats. When it did get so hot inside that we felt we had no choice but to roll down the windows, every mosquito from the development’s manufactured pond smelled our salty blood and came searching. On one night we cracked only the front two windows, then began to have sex in the back; by the time Jack reached orgasm there were so many of them in the car that their mass was a dark, hanging cloud—I stared for a moment, convinced their formation was about to shift and take on the shape of Buck’s vengeful face, before pain brought me back to reality. Suddenly I could feel them stinging the ripest places of my sensitive flesh; our minds had been so misdirected by sex that we’d failed to realize how dire the situation was until the moment we finished. Jack then jumped out of the car completely naked—I couldn’t blame him but I also could’ve killed him for it.

“They have security cameras,” I hissed out the car door at him. “Get back in!” But instead he grabbed his clothes and put them on outside; I was left in the car with the bugs.

But the true disappointment of these meet-ups had nothing to do with location. Jack seemed to be divorcing himself from the sex and turning it into a rote act. There was a slightly tortured air to his expression throughout, as though he was doing it against his will. His thrusts became harder and harder, like he was trying to feel something but failing. In general he appeared to want to express a sentiment he couldn’t quite say or perhaps even understand. “Well,” he’d often start, but when I responded, “What is it?” he’d shake his head lightly. “Forgot,” he’d answer, his eyes blank.

I looked forward to summer, hoping it would be restorative for him. Our last unit in English was an analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird , which gave me pause. I didn’t want the text’s elements of morality and justice to seduce Jack into walking the misguided path of honest confession. During third period, I did all that I could to steer the conversation away from relevant topics of depth. “So if we were to remake the movie nowadays,” I asked on one occasion, “who would you guys cast to play Boo Radley?”

“Someone bald,” answered Marissa. Every other student except Jack quickly nodded in agreement.

But even summer break brought no great reversal to his sulking. Jack had to be replaced as soon as possible, but there were obstacles. The first was my own libido. I couldn’t accept the thought of a three-month dry spell until fall hit and I could find Jack’s successor. The flirtatious encounters during substitute teaching that had once aroused me to the point of sustenance—a quick shoulder rub for a student who complained about stress, a celebratory hug for a recent honors society inductee—now seemed like a starvation diet after my year with Jack. The second was the nagging fear—largely paranoia, I tried to convince myself—that I needed to keep Jack fully under my spell just a bit longer, until it was certain that no aspect of his father’s death would be resurrected for examination by the police. As far as I knew there’d been no suspicions at all. But what if someone had seen my car leaving and suddenly felt compelled to mention it? A breakup would likely feel like emotional napalm in Jack’s tender state, and if he was still burning from my rejection when new questions about the night his father died came to light, the situation might indeed turn prickly.

And the fact that our escapades were more sporadic—to prepare for the late-August move to his mother’s, Jack was alternating between spending a few weeks with the Ryans, then a few weeks in Crystal Springs—meant I had more patience for his stricken attitude of gloomy resignation. His father’s death had matured Jack in a way that made him far less satisfying, but each time he returned from his mother’s I had several weeks’ worth of pent-up cravings, and this blind need allowed for a protective myopia against his dour moods: I’d take him immediately, in a ravenous attack that I considered necessary self-defense. Stopping to inquire about the comfort of his position, or to ask what he wanted, would simply have given him an opportunity to passive-aggressively brood—I could imagine him answering my inquiry with a shrug, then looking off into the distance, hoping I’d stop and embrace him and use encouraging phrases to tug at the question of what was bothering him until we began a long, dull chat that was all about Jack and his multitude of hurt feelings. I wasn’t about to sanction such boredom. Instead, each time we met I’d ride him with masturbatory energy, letting him halfheartedly push beneath me with a listless stoicism until I was finished, and then I’d slide off, give him a quick kiss and leave; it was often clear that he wasn’t going to orgasm no matter how long we went at it. Even so, he was better than nothing until I could secure a new beau. My very last conversation with Jack had already occurred several times in my head—taking a sympathetic posture, warmly caressing his hand and shoulder, I would gently point out that I reminded him too much of his father’s terrible death—to move past it, I’d argue, he’d need to move past me, and that was why I had to insist we stop seeing one another. I even convinced myself Jack knew this was coming and had accepted it—after all, I’d never given him back his secret phone, and he’d never asked for it. Instead I continued to insist on pay phones and he kept calling me from gas stations and McDonald’s parking lots. I furnished him a new roll of quarters for just this purpose every week.

Being out of school for summer combined with Ford’s night shift meant intolerably long days. I accommodated Ford’s schedule in some regards: I began to sleep late in order to waste as much of our afternoon time together as I could. It was impossible for me to have any sense of ease when he was home. This allowed me to spend the evening and early morning hours while he was away lost in pornographic flights of imagination about what the fall semester might bring. Ford and I fell into a routine of waking for breakfast at three or four P.M., then going to the gym, where he’d watch me work out the entire time with a proprietary satisfaction; no matter where I went in the exercise or lifting rooms, I could feel his eyes following me. He seemed to like it even more if other men were watching me as well, or if they approached me; if another guy struck up a conversation, I could always count on Ford’s overly grabby hands to find my ass a second later, pinching or spanking it with a shit-eating grin as the man who had just introduced himself slinked away. Ford liked to shower at the house, but I always insisted on doing it there, in the segregated changing rooms, to protect myself from his soapy grasp. We’d return home to a horrible evening of ennui—I began making elaborate dinners each night just to pass the hours—and when Ford finally left for work each night, I had the exhausted relief of a host whose departed houseguest had overstayed his welcome for a week.