Alissa Nutting - Tampa

Several other possibilities couldn’t. The first was that Ford had found my secret cell phone, copied down its only programmed number and called. I doubted this though; if he suspected I was having an affair, his interest in all my plans would suddenly have spiked. He’d have been firing off questions about each one of my day’s activities with an exaggerated tone of indifference that tried too hard to suggest nothing was out of the ordinary. Or he’d just have confronted me about the phone. The second possibility was that it was a wrong number—rare, but it did happen. The last and most twisted was that no one had called Boyd: that he’d simply wanted to talk to me, perhaps stir up some dramatic tension between us. Did he wonder if he was the phone’s first owner? He’d never asked if he was the first student I’d been with. Something had always told me Boyd wasn’t the type who would care.

“What did the person say? Could you tell if it was a man or a woman?”

“Nope. It was just silent after I said hello and then whoever it was hung up.”

Despite this anxiety-laden news, Boyd’s hushed voice was making me horny. “Is your bedroom door locked?” I whispered. “Just this once go into your closet and touch yourself. Let me hear it.” I could’ve asked if the number was local or long-distance. I could’ve had Boyd give me the number and searched on the Internet, cross-checking it with the variety of pay phone numbers Jack had called me from. Instead, I leaned against the wall and fingered myself as Boyd’s heavy breathing swelled into the receiver and finally ended with a vocalized groan; afterward the danger of the errant dial seemed negligible. “I’m sure it was just a wrong number,” I said. “Just never ever pick up the phone unless it’s my cell calling, do you understand?”

“I know, I get it.” He paused. “Do you want me to do it again? I’m still hard.”

That image of Boyd’s glistening, unquenchable penis was like a magic wand that carried me through the rest of the weekend. When Jack called me a few days later to arrange his next visit, I was extra friendly but I didn’t mention the call. It was tempting to say something dismissive about his former phone—that I’d gotten rid of it, or that I wondered if the number had since been reassigned to a new phone—but ultimately any reference at all seemed like it would be more incriminating than dismissive. Had Jack brought it up in any context, I certainly would’ve taken the allusion to be an outright confession.

But he didn’t mention it. He’d discovered whip-its at his new school, and the following weekend he brought two whipped cream cans for us to suck the nitrous out of while we had intercourse on the kitchen countertop. When we finished, heavy headed and spinning, he reached for my panties and held them up to the light appreciatively, like they were some rare kind of insect. “I love your underwear,” he said, one of the only things he said all night. What other thought could’ve possibly crossed my mind than that I had nothing to worry about?

That mid-October in central Florida held on to the distant heat of a diluted summer. Dusk began its onset preternaturally early, blackening the windows with menacing speed each evening. Boyd and I would begin having sex without the lights on and end in total darkness, barely able to see one another’s faces. He increasingly liked to do it to violent movies—tommy guns, stabbings, the sounds of splatter punctuating our thrusts. Once it grew dark, the glow of the small television in Jack’s bedroom had an eerie, otherworldly feel, almost too real, as if we weren’t watching a movie at all but actual footage of a live murder.

That evening my face was flat upon the bed, my ass in the air, Boyd behind me staring at the TV screen. There was a sudden pause when Boyd stopped pushing, but then he continued, slowly, as though he’d somehow forgotten what we were doing and how to proceed; had he stopped completely I would’ve looked up much earlier. Who knows how long Jack had been inside the darkened room, his eyes locked with Boyd’s and Boyd still fucking me, before Jack finally emitted the primal scream that made me jump off of Boyd’s cock and the bed entirely.

Being naked and in his bedroom, I had the initial impulse to approach Jack and start rubbing his crotch, see if he might calm down when there was equal affection given to both of them. The combat-heavy sounds coming from the television, though, seemed to be escalating the tension; I grabbed the remote and put the movie on pause. But the act of stopping the movie seemed to bring Jack’s frozen shape to life: with a guttural yell, he ran toward Boyd and threw him over, punching him. Boyd still had a full and moistened erection.

I don’t believe Jack intended the full damage incurred by Boyd’s skull—it was partially the angles of geometry, partially the physics of force. The back left corner of Boyd’s head slammed into a sharp nightstand corner and produced a gash that began bleeding heavily in mere seconds; by the time Jack realized that Boyd was hurt, Jack’s hands and clothes were covered with so much slick blood that he seemed to have just emerged from inside a large animal. Boyd cowered on the floor, both hands cradling his head as he made primitive groans. Jack backed away slowly, with all the confusion of a recent amnesiac, appearing to feel as if he were the victim of a horrible trick.

It was a while before I realized Jack was talking. Through a series of incoherent stammers, he’d begun leveling the allegation that I was not only responsible for his father’s needless death, but that my motivations were selfish ones. “You didn’t let him die so we could be together.” Jack’s hand made a broad, dragging wipe across his face, leaving a vertical smear of blood. “You’re cheating on me!” Every few seconds, quick spurts of gore consistently sprayed outward from the back of Boyd’s head in a theatrical manner; it had a special-effects feel to it, as though the blood’s release was being regulated by an electronic timer. Impressively, his rigid penis hadn’t softened. He kept trying to stand but instead would merely stumble, then crawl a few more inches. A full defusion of the situation and successful cleanup now seemed unlikely. Jack’s sticky hands were gripping my wrists; soon I felt them on my shoulders and neck as well.

I knew it wasn’t the best moment for a discussion, but I felt it was important to defend myself from the weighty inaccuracy Jack was casting toward me, in front of Boyd no less, although Boyd wasn’t in the best shape to remember the conversation or be unduly influenced by Jack’s hurtful remark.

“Jack,” I responded calmly. “I am sorry your father had a heart attack.”

“All so nobody would find you out,” Jack interrupted, his hands straining against my collarbone.

But after saying this, his grip on my shoulders softened. Something important had registered in his mind, drawing open his lips and causing his eyes to grow alert and panicked.

Seconds later, Jack began to run.

I suppose I chased him. It wasn’t even until I was outside that I realized I had the knife in my hand; I must’ve picked it up in the kitchen on my way out.

Stopping in front of Jack’s mailbox, I was winded, searching both directions for a sign of where he had bolted to. When a figure approached from my left, blending into the shadows with the passive gait of an herbivore and carrying two grocery bags, it hardly registered; my peripheral vision initially classified the motion as a shrub moving in the breeze. When I did finally notice her, we were face-to-face, her eyes squinting as she struggled to recognize me in such an unexpected context. “Celeste?” Mrs. Pachenko finally gasped, her forehead lifting into a growing tower of surprise that caused her hairline to disappear. It wasn’t Jack’s bloody handprints on my chest or the knife in my hand that she noticed first at all. “You’re naked ,” she finally exclaimed. Her open lips had risen above the high, pink shores of her gums, revealing a hodgepodge of unbecoming bridgework; understandably, I was loath to take my attention from the situation at hand.