Alissa Nutting - Tampa

“Wow indeed,” I replied. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Although Boyd had roughly zero actual sexual experience prior to our relationship, he was far more advanced in terms of perversion. His kinkier suggestions didn’t bother me the way they might have with Jack, perhaps because of the theoretical naïveté with which he spoke about them—breathlessly, in excited whispers, as though fetishes were fabled legends wrought from the fabric of dragons and mermaids—or perhaps because he’d had these fantasies even as a virgin. They weren’t the product of his growing tired of routine intercourse. He wanted to try everything right away; sex and its oral variants weren’t enough for his curious mind. He once asked me to pee a little in his mouth, which I did; he didn’t love it but grew immediately rock hard from the experiment. He also liked to blindfold me and be blindfolded and hated my insistence that we couldn’t bite one another hard enough to leave a visible imprint.

I was happy enough to indulge him in anything that wouldn’t produce telltale evidence. But some of his desires simply weren’t possible. Boyd longed for others to watch us fucking; he often had dreams where I was giving him head in a bustling street’s storefront window. Of course we couldn’t open the curtains at Jack’s house or record ourselves on camera, but he did enjoy having a movie on in the background during sex; he was able to pretend, he told me, hearing the voices of the actors, that they were right there in the room looking on.

It was only after beginning to sleep with Boyd that I realized my animosity toward Jack wasn’t solely due to the melancholy he’d dragged into our relations; it was also spawned by the fact that I’d almost grown to feel dependent upon him—after all, he had been my only true source of sexual release—and I’d resented that. But now, even during Jack’s bluest moods, some of my initial warmth for him was returning, and I was no longer so anxious to break things off. “I hate my new school,” he confessed one night. “I hate only seeing you a few times a month. I want to see if I can live with the Ryans again in the spring and transfer back to Jefferson.”

“But don’t you think it feels a little more special this way?” I asked. “Having to bear the time apart, then being able to fuck away the built-up frustration?” I was trying to help Jack look on the bright side, but perhaps this was a misstep.

“What are you saying? That you like me not living here?”

“Of course not,” I answered. “Just pointing out a benefit.”

Still, I loved being able to oscillate between the two of them. It allowed for a comparison between their bodies and highlighted minuscule physical differences that I might not have noticed and savored otherwise: the freckle just to the left of Jack’s sternum, the fatty ripeness of Boyd’s detached earlobes. The scheduling of it all had worked itself out so that the separate compartments of my life tied together with a manageable fluidity. I arrived home on nights I saw Boyd—allegedly coming from a curricular steering committee—just in time to eat a late dinner with Ford and send him off to work. Whenever he did request a quickie before he left, it was in a very passive way that was easy to turn down. “I guess you’re too tired to fool around,” he’d state, and I’d yawn and nod, trying to apologize as sweetly as possible.

My classes, too, seemed to be on a sort of autopilot that let me focus my attention almost exclusively on sexual pursuits. My students this year included several transplants from a recently closed theater magnet school who were happy to act out Romeo and Juliet in its entirety. All the while I sat at my desk and did my best to draw a rendering of Boyd’s penis in both flaccid and erect states, then ripped the illustrations into pieces when the bell rang.

Janet was far more gregarious this fall; her spring evaluations had risen from “unsatisfactory” up to “below average” and she felt her job was safe again. “Mrs. Feinlog totally has this creepy old-lady crush on you,” one of my students mentioned one day. “I heard her call you a beautiful angel. It was kind of weird.” Occasionally when I walked through the main building I’d hear the sharp squeak of her oversized white sneakers on the floor and she’d place a hand on my shoulder, panting as though she’d run for days from a faraway village just to give me a message.

“Wanna grab a cold one after work?” she’d ask. If I didn’t have plans with Boyd I’d usually consent; it was less painful to watch Janet get intoxicated than it was to sit around the house with Ford. I’d have a bourbon on the rocks while Janet downed a pitcher of the cheapest draft and talked about a variety of issues—her circulation problems, the HOA citations she kept receiving for negligence in maintaining her lawn or how badly she wanted to strap a given student to the front of her van and drive off a cliff. I’d follow the conversation with the passing orbit of a satellite, returning every now and then from my daydreams to feel the creeping buzz of alcohol and wonder if there would ever be an occasion when I’d be able to indulge Boyd’s exhibitionist urges in earnest—take him to a nude beach or the type of seedy nightclub where couples openly fornicate beneath the woman’s hiked-up skirt as they lean against an alcove wall by the restrooms. I suppose these meetings only added to my growing sense of security: Janet was the most suspicious person I knew, yet she didn’t seem to suspect anything about me. No one did.

That Saturday afternoon Boyd phoned when Ford just happened to be out for a run—had he been home I would never have picked up and Boyd might have forgotten to mention it at all come Monday.

“Hello?” I said, slightly bemused. Boyd had never phoned me on a weekend before; his mother was always at home breathing down his neck and wasn’t big on granting him leave unless his youth group had a church function. “I should join your church and volunteer as a youth minister,” I once joked; Boyd thought it was a fantastic idea. “There’s a storage room upstairs where my friend hid two porno magazines in a supply closet,” he’d gushed. “We could do it in there while we look at them.”

“Hey,” Boyd said. “Did you just call me?”

“No,” I answered. It took a moment for the implication of his question to sink in, and then I felt a sharp unraveling in my chest. “Another number called your phone?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Not your cell.”

“Did you answer it?” In my mind I replayed my most recent weekend with Jack—hadn’t it gone just fine? We’d had loads of sex; his brooding had been minimal. There had been no awkward silences, he hadn’t insisted on our leaving the house and doing it in my car. On the contrary, he’d even wanted something from his father’s bedroom to take back home with him—a photo? A small trophy? I couldn’t remember, but it had seemed to be a good sign of his growing comfort at being in the house. Before leaving we’d eaten a dinner of sandwiches together naked on the living room carpet.

“Yeah,” he said, then, fearing reproach, added, “I thought it was you calling from a different phone.”

“I’ll never call you from another phone, Boyd.” I didn’t try to mask the frustration in my voice. “That’s rule number one.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” The radio in his room was blaring in the background, likely so his mother wouldn’t hear him speaking. “I was just excited to talk to you.” He said this in a contrived puppy-dog fashion. Boyd had a manipulative tool kit that Jack couldn’t have imagined; Boyd had been forced to create one early on in order to deceive his overbearing mother. Had Jack decided to launch an investigation to see if I was sleeping with another student? It didn’t seem like him, but I supposed it couldn’t be ruled out.