Alissa Nutting - Tampa

Outside I passed our neighbor Mr. Jeffries watering his plants, holding the hose flush with his groin like a bad practical joke. I waved and he looked up at me for a too-long ogle that resulted in the hose turning on the crotch of his pants and wetting his entire front. He pretended not to notice. “If you need any fire ant poison, I bought enough to send every one of those damn biters straight to hell,” he offered.

“There are actually a few fire ant questions in the natural science section of the eighth-grade state proficiency exams,” I replied. Mr. Jeffries’s eyes squinted up as though I was a sign he was struggling to read. “Their queen lives for six or seven years,” I continued, “but the male drones only live four to five days. Their sole purpose in life is to mate with her and then die.” I couldn’t help but imagine an equally preferential scenario played out by several fourteen-year-old boys and myself. I wondered what percentage of the Jefferson Junior High students—if I came to them in the middle of the night, naked—would agree to have sex with me even if it meant they’d die forty-eight hours later. I guessed there would be at least a small few.

Mr. Jeffries bit the inside of his cheek and turned the hose pressure down to a low, impotent trickle. Despite his fervent watering of the plant bed, the three shepherding garden gnomes at its centerpiece remained covered in bird shit. “That is an unholy arrangement,” he declared.

I’d memorized the directions to Jack’s house; an old online listing divulged it was a one-story five-bedroom home with vaulted ceilings. The upper-middle-class purchase price from a few years ago was encouraging: I hoped for a set of working parents who didn’t have time to decode lies or do micromanagement parenting. An online map reported a 5.3-mile drive. Before starting my car, I was sure to reset the odometer to double-check the distance. Any fact or statistic related to Jack felt like progress.

Due to a series of overprotective stoplights and explosive suburban growth, the short drive took fourteen minutes, which felt both too convenient and painfully distant all at once. I was able to park just across the street from Jack’s house at an angle that allowed a view of the sliver of backyard between his home and their sole abutting neighbor. My car and the AC had been off for no more than a minute when my skin began to slicken. But each bead of sweat that grew on my lip was a pleasant sensory experience; in high school, as I had to date increasingly awful boys for social reasons, I often preferred sex in a hot car for the ways the hermetic steam made me light-headed and added a pleasant shade of autoerotic asphyxiation to an otherwise lacking encounter. Tonight I’d wanted to drive to his house after dark so the heat wouldn’t be so violent, but I hadn’t been patient enough to wait. Close, though. The sun had dropped low in the sky; through the tinted windows it seemed formed of brass. I imagined Jack’s body made gigantic standing before me, the sun in the sky becoming the hot metal button of his jeans. If his enormous fingers reached down from the clouds and unbuttoned it, if his horizon-colored pants began to bunch and fall and his teenage sex of skyscraper proportions was freed, I would drive my car into his toe so he would kneel down to investigate and accidentally kill me when the sequoia-sized head of his penis came crashing through my windshield, all in the hopes that the last image seen before death is the backdrop to our eternity.

Drips of perspiration soon covered my body; as they began to independently crawl across my skin I had the uncomfortable sensation of being covered in ants. Here I am, Jack , I thought, sitting through the heat of hell for you . I gazed longingly at the fence protecting the home’s backyard, complete with a screened-in pool. My stomach dropped with the familiar memory of how unfair life is: I couldn’t simply wait in the car until nighttime, then sneak into his backyard, go for a swim in a white bra and panties and then appear at his window, knocking on the glass gently until he woke from an erection-inducing dream and peeked through the blinds to see me there, soaked and dripping, and let me in. Wasn’t that exactly what every straight teenage boy wanted? It struck me as particularly selfish, the way the world was ignoring Jack’s need for pantied women to knock on his window at night. Restless, I reached for the gym bag I’d used to conceal my supplies: binoculars, a vibrator, a Polaroid camera, a towel and a water bottle.

Focusing the binoculars, I gleaned what I could through windows. Many of the blinds were closed, but the square of frosted glass on the home’s left side told me the location of a downstairs bathroom. The living room’s light was on, though its couch appeared unoccupied—perhaps Jack was home alone? I didn’t know him well enough yet to risk knocking on the door and saying hello; if he reacted badly or questions were raised the wrong way, it would blow everything—although he was the clear standout of his classmates, I reminded myself that he could still prove to be a dead end. It wasn’t worth it to do anything risky. There was a flash of light in one of the back windows and I focused in further, suddenly letting out a long sigh of gratitude at my luck: there he was sitting in front of a television, low to the ground in a beanbag chair—another bright flash confirmed it was him. His alert posture and proximity to the TV suggested he was playing a video game rather than watching a program. I tried to zoom in further, but the lenses were already at maximum view.

Although a passerby would have had to press his nose fully against my car’s tinted window in order to see inside, masturbating in public with no cover seemed inelegant. I grabbed the towel, unfolding it across my lap as though I were about to eat a personal picnic, then slid down my running shorts beneath it. Unsticking my legs from the seat, I expertly opened them into position—since they would immediately bond with the hot leather of the car’s seat and fix themselves in place, it was important that my orgasm wouldn’t require any thigh movement. It took me just a moment to perfectly balance the binoculars in my left hand and steady the vibrator in my right. But just as I was about to begin, I heard voices; looking up from the binoculars I saw two power-walking women turn the corner, swinging hand weights.

I looked back into the binoculars and waited for the women to pass Jack’s house, the blurry, magnified jersey fabric of their clothing momentarily eclipsing each lens. Once their footsteps faded, I turned on the vibrator and began.

Occasionally Jack would lift the game controller up from his lap for a few seconds and I could see his clenched hands. He was wearing an undershirt, but I couldn’t make out the bottom half of his body. Perhaps that could be a treat for him sometime—I could have him play a video game in the beanbag chair while I removed his pants and lay prostrate on the carpet fellating him.

Although I could hear the voices of the female walkers rounding the cul-de-sac and coming back closer toward the opposite side of my car, the thought of Jack’s engorged penis in my mouth made my tongue quicken across my lips. Even in the oven of my closed convertible, I thought of his sex organs in terms of heat. I didn’t doubt that some strain of magical thinking on my part would actually render this true when the time came—the flesh between his legs would likely feel warmer against my lips than anything I’d ever felt before.

I still remembered the pleasant tactile aspect of my first teenage blow jobs, before they became a forced chore: the slickness it all took on after a few minutes always made me feel weightless—it seemed like my mouth produced a different saliva that seemed to shirk density and made my bones as hollow as a bird’s. When I thought of the bitter taste that would descend as Jack got closer to climax, the unmistakable earthy harbinger not so different from the air just before a rainstorm, my leg started to kick as though I was having my reflexes tested.