The Monday of the second week in, having had the entire weekend to pine and fantasize, I asked him to stay after class for a moment. I’d managed to keep my portable classroom despite AP Rosen’s repeated offers to take an opening in the main building; I claimed I’d become fond of its deficiencies—“It almost feels like a one-room schoolhouse,” I told him. “When I was a little girl I always played that I was a teacher back in the pioneer times.” He absolutely loved this white lie. Apparently a great-great-grandmother of his actually did preside over a one-room school; he told me a long story about it while I thought about humming “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the tip of a student’s penis in my mouth.
I hadn’t once entertained the idea that it could go differently with another boy than it had with Jack. Instead it felt like last year I’d forged a permanent path that all other candidates would obediently follow. But there was also the looming weekend—Jack wanted to take a bus down from Crystal Springs and stay at his father’s house Friday and Saturday under the guise of seeing friends. If I knew with certainty that our depressive sex would soon be just one option on a menu rather than my only opportunity with a young partner, the atmosphere wouldn’t feel so choking and leaden. I could relax a little, care less about when the time would be right to break it off with him and more fully enjoy what remained of our dwindling sessions.
As soon as the other students were gone and Connor and I were alone, I turned from him and unbuttoned two extra buttons on my shirt so that it hung open and exposed my bra. I expected him to stare at me as I spoke inane details about his essay topic, then I could act surprised that his gaze had met my opened shirt and possibly get a confession that he was indeed looking at my bra—information I’d pretend to find so overly flattering that I might offer to show him an even better view.
But the moment I turned around, his eyes immediately averted to the left. “Your button opened,” he said, pointing to the middle of his chest to demonstrate.
I glanced down, pretending to be confused. “Oh dear,” I said. “So it did.” I waited for his eyes to return to mine but he wouldn’t turn his head back; he was not only looking away from me toward the door but also actually using his fingers to shield his eyes.
“Are you decent yet?” he asked.
“Sure.” He lowered his hand but upon seeing I hadn’t rebuttoned my shirt immediately covered his eyes again.
“Aren’t you going to fix it?” There was something accusatory in his question; his voice held disbelief but not excitement.
“I will before my next class. But it’s nice to have a break for a moment. I’ve always thought clothes can be a little constraining,” I said. “Do you?”
Beneath the desk, his feet were busy fidgeting. “Why did you keep me after class?” he finally asked.
I exhaled a long, disappointed sigh; this one didn’t seem to be any fun at all.
“Like I said, I just wanted to talk to you about your essay topic.” But he had a hard time following.
“Everyone wrote on the same topic,” he said, defensive. “Was my essay worse than everyone else’s or something?”
I didn’t answer, hoping it would mean he’d look at me in an attempt to break the silence and our eyes could communicate the unspoken, but he didn’t.
“I was just interested in yours,” I said. “That’s all.” The lunch bell rang and his paranoia flipped into high alert.
“Will I be marked tardy to lunch?” he asked. From the fear and anger in his voice, I could tell he’d never been tardy before in his entire life. The kid was far too square. I decided to cut him loose and pop a Klonopin to help nurse my wounds.
“No, don’t worry. I’ll write you a note.” There wasn’t an inch of his body that seemed calm; his tension was starting to make me anxious too. “Look, I’m writing it right now,” I said, stopping to wave the paper in the air with a little hostility. “Jesus.”
I walked over to his desk and bent down, giving him one last chance at a full view of my chest that he didn’t opt to take. “Can I go now?” he demanded.
“Go, go on,” I said. The incident gave the rest of the week a sour, empty feel. I kept butting heads with my worst fear, a prospect so extreme that I hadn’t allowed myself to think it before the train wreck with Connor forced me to: the possibility that I might go the entire year without finding a replacement.
Yet just two weeks later, all tides had turned. Normally I’d have rejected any student who acted first; it was a sign of brashness and impulsivity, both traits that could easily lead to our getting caught. Furthermore, the power dynamic would be in his favor if he came on to me. But Boyd showed a more advanced level of mastery—part of his genius was that it was indeed so subtle I hardly noticed for almost a month. Yet there the offer was one day, unmistakable as he left class. With a glance, his face transformed from an expression of blank nonchalance to the smallest possible detectable grin and he locked eyes with me. It was sudden but unmistakable: his look conveyed both that he knew exactly who I was and what I wanted, but also that he held a similar secret. We locked eyes for what could only have been seconds, but it was enough; we were two deviants who had recognized one another in an identifying game of telepathy. The next day when I asked him to stay after class, he nodded with innocence, every ounce the demure boy who always sat quietly at his desk, but when the door finally shut he licked his lips and smiled: the costume came off and he was a completely different animal.
Boyd was less outwardly attractive than Jack, another reason why he didn’t stand out to me at first. He had a prominent nose and ears that he hadn’t yet grown into, and he frequently wore oversized shirts and sweaters that made his short limbs appear dwarfed. His smile was a metallic track of braces, but his roguish desires had the effect of making them seem like a punitive measure that he wore as a badge of pride—a punishment for his words being so vulgar, perhaps.
His forwardness allowed me to drop all introductory pretenses. The first and only thing I asked him in that initial meeting was straightforward. “Would you like to touch me?”
He’d responded by approaching and beginning to do so. His hands were so small that one could easily fit inside me up to his wrist. After our very first time alone together, he left the classroom five minutes before the end of lunch with Jack’s former cell phone in hand.
I let him have sex with me twice in the classroom that first week, but we were at work on another plan. “My house is out of the question,” I explained. “Are you ever home alone after school?”
Unfortunately Boyd’s parents, in particular his stay-at-home mother, were far stricter and more present than Jack’s. But there were still slots of possibility throughout the day: Boyd was allowed to do after-school activities as long as he was home by dinner around six. That made a rendezvous in my car dangerous; it wouldn’t be dark yet, and parking lots and shopping plazas would still be full. When I decided upon the venue I wasn’t trying to be sacrilegious or perverse, only careful: Jack’s house really was the best option.
Objectively, Jack unknowingly benefited from this arrangement too. Sex with Jack in the same bed where I’d had Boyd just a few days ago was an enormous turn-on. The first time Jack returned home after I’d slept there with Boyd, I bounced atop him so hard I feared his pelvis might break; there was an almost hallucinatory interplay between my mental images of the two of them as we fucked. Gasping, I occasionally looked down at Jack to see Boyd’s smaller, wryer mouth and nearly exploded. “Wow,” Jack said afterward. It was definitely a change that warranted comment; our sex had grown to be more an act of hostile aerobics than of pleasure.
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