45 Ryan
“Do you miss baseball?”
I shut the trunk and look over at Frankie. She’s standing on the curb outside my apartment building. My old apartment building, I should say.
We just finished loading the last of the things I actually need or want into my jeep.
My old baseball bag is on top of the piles of clothes in the back seat.
The few pieces of furniture I have that are decent enough to move to the new place will be taken over there later, but I’m essentially moved out.
“Not really. I mean, some parts of it. I loved playing the game. I loved being good at it.” I walk over and take her hand, then pull her against me as I lean against the jeep.
“But I was never going pro or anything. I didn’t lose out on much.
Just another year of early morning practice and smelling like Icy Hot all the time. ”
She chuckles a bit.
“I always loved how you smelled. For years I thought it was a cologne.”
Now I laugh. “No, baby. That was pure the aroma of beat-to-hell athlete. Super sexy, I know.”
“It was,” she says, tucking her nose into my shirt and taking a deep breath. “You smell fine now, but not as good.”
“You’re something else. You want me to smell like a PT room?”
“No, I want you to smell like Ryan.”
I shift, making her step back as I push off the car.
“Tell you what, we can go shopping. Ask the workers which cologne has the most menthol in it.”
She smiles. “Deal.”
I get in the car and automatically take her hand.
“Do you mind stopping by the school with me? I need to grab something.”
“Ooh fun! I’d love that- love to see your classroom.”
The drive is pretty short and when we park and get out, she looks up at the building. It’s in another district, one with more rich people, higher property taxes and therefore is much nicer than any of the schools we went to.
“Whoa… you didn’t say you taught at Harvard.”
“Hardly,” I say, leading her into the building.
But as we walk through the quiet halls, our steps echoing against the lockers and linoleum, I think about what it would have looked like if we had lived here instead of across town.
For a moment I let myself get all ‘what if’ about it- what if we’d had more money, what if Jamie hadn’t grown up surrounded by crime, what if Christian didn’t just feel like he needed to work for his dad.
What if Frankie’s mom hadn’t married Gary.
What if we hadn’t met her, didn’t live where we did, hadn’t been around? What would Frankie’s life be like now?
I stop and look at her. She’s reading the signs that kids have taped to their lockers, the little notes left on dry erase boards.
“This is fun,” she says.
I clear my throat and pull myself from the nightmare scenarios I’d been thinking about.
“My classroom is right here,” I say, moving to unlock the door.
I teach middle school, not elementary school, and it’s only my first year, so it’s not like I’ve decorated my classroom or anything.
It’s just bare walls, my desk and the smart board at the front of the room.
Five rows of chairs with five each in little lines.
Hell, there isn’t even a single poster on the walls and I suddenly feel like the world’s most boring teacher.
I grab the charger I left here and turn to head out.
But she’s found her way in and has wandered to the back of the room.
“Oh my gosh,” she says with excitement. “This is so cool!”
The three bookshelves are filled with books- not textbooks, actual books.
Autobiographies, non-fiction, novels. Hardback tomes and dog eared paperbacks.
Anything I could get my hands on that I thought the kids might light.
On the floor next to the bookshelves is a basket of overflow books I haven’t found shelf space for.
“Have you read all of these?” she asks, trailing her fingers along the spines of the books.
“Most of them, yeah,” I say, leaning against my desk to watch her explore.
She paused and turns. “Ryan, there are like 400 books here.”
“Occupational hazard of an English teacher. Most I read in college actually.”
She turns back to the shelves and pulls a book off.
“Do you remember reading this to me?”
She holds up the beat up copy of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.
“Of course.” I let the memory filter in. Sometimes, it’s easy to think of the past and see nothing but the bad, the stress and anger and helplessness. But there was a lot of good too.
“I kept falling asleep so you had to read the same parts over and over.”
I probably read that book aloud four times all the way through. Every time she drifted off, I’d tell myself I should stop. Put the book away. Go home.
Instead, I’d keep reading.
Partly because I didn't want to wake her.
Mostly because those were some of the only moments in her life when she looked completely at peace and I wasn't ready for them to end.
She looks around the room again, taking in the shelves, the desks, the books…
Then she looks back at me and something about her expression makes me nervous.
“What?”
A smile spreads across her face, instantly relaxing me.
“I just really like seeing this version of you.”
“Teacher Ryan?”
“Yeah.” She slides the book back onto the shelf. “Teacher Ryan.”
I laugh. “He's pretty boring.”
“No.” She shakes her head immediately. “He's incredible.”
I think I actually blush a bit.
“In fact,” she says, starting to cross the room toward me, “I think I might be hot for teacher.”
A short laugh escapes me.
When she reaches my desk, she turns and hops up onto it, making a little oomph sound as she lands.
Then she hooks her fingers into the front of my shirt and pulls me closer.
“Come here, Mr. Lett,” she says, her eyes sparkling.
I step in between her legs and tip her chin up to look at me.
“Ms. Malone, this is highly inappropriate.”
“Good thing I’m not your student then, huh?”
She wraps her hands around my neck and pulls my head towards her, kissing me.
We stay like that for a few minutes, just making out on my desk, before my phone rings, pulling us out of it.
“Whew, saved by the bell,” she says with a wink as I pull it out.
“Fucking spam,” I grumble, declining the call as she giggles and pushes me back away from her before hopping off the desk.
I try to adjust my now-hard cock in my jeans and she giggles again. “Come on, Mr. Lett, I wanna get you home, maybe earn some extra credit.” She says that while wagging her eyebrows and I cannot hold back my laughter.
“I love you, but that was awful,” I say.
“Okay, but did it work? Are you going to take me to bed?”
“Well yeah…”
“Seems like it was a pretty brilliant line then.”