Chapter 26
“I didn’t know you had moves like that, darlin’…” Tristan says as he pulls up to a red light.
“I took jazz classes in middle school,” Frannie says, beaming. “Miss Gonzalez said I was the best in her class.”
“I bet she did.”
“Yeah, then she suffered a psychotic break that spring and had to quit teach-een. Such a shame. No one taught fouettés like she did.”
The light goes green. I’m in the backseat staring at a photo on Korgy’s Instagram, one of him at a school event dressed in his signature purple cardigan and flanked by other faculty members.
He smiles, hands in his pockets. There he is, my teacher.
The teacher I just dry-humped until he came in his pants.
I tried to get a read on him afterward but couldn’t.
“That was really…something,” he said.
I tried to dissect it. The way he averted his eyes. Was it a bashful aversion, a coy one, an embarrassed one? Was the pause between the “really” and the “something” a good pause? A pause of amazement? Of “we should do this again”? Or a bad pause? A pause of apprehension? Of regret? Of shame?
“Yeah it was,” I agreed, even though I didn’t know what I was agreeing with.
“Well, I’ve…made a mess,” he said, looking down at himself timidly, the wet patch on his khakis having bloomed outward.
I wanted to touch the spot. To rub my hand back and forth on it.
To feel the tack of his cum between my fingers.
To lick it off of them. I felt strangely gratified by the mess I made.
I did that to him. He did that for me. The ultimate power. The ultimate surrender.
“I like the mess,” I said.
His cheeks went red and I saw the imprint of his penis as it grew hard again in his pants and he said goodbye, excusing himself. I was back in the auditorium before anyone had noticed I’d left.
“I didn’t like that girl Randy was with,” Frannie says over her shoulder to me. “She looked mean, don’t you think? Just had a mean look to her.”
I mutter some form of agreement to get Frannie to move on as I click on a picture where Mr. Korgy’s holding a giant swirl of pink cotton candy that makes his blue eyes pop.
And another where he’s got a face full of shaving cream and is lifting a razor up for the first stroke, a photo I imagine Gwen took.
Gwen. I scroll past the photos with her in them, quickly enough to barely catch the blur of her blond hair. I scroll past the ones with Gregory too, telling myself that if I lingered, if I acknowledged their existence at all, even in the form of a tiny box of a photo, the guilt would be “too much.”
And then, I have the audacity to feel proud of myself. Proud, for that fleeting moment of guilt that I did nothing about, that I shoved aside with more swipes and clicks and scrolls so that I could get to more photos of just him. Photos that allow me to feed my obsession scot-free and guiltless.
“Waldo?” Frannie asks in a tone that tells me it’s the second or third time. “You get-een out?”
I’m halfway up the lawn when he texts. I debate waiting until morning to check it.
Letting the uncertainty of what it says keep me in this restless, charged limbo.
There’s something intoxicating about the limbo.
I want to indulge it. But that would require self-control.
And inside, as I unravel a Fruit by the Foot from its paper and eat it in three bites at the kitchen counter, I realize that self-control is a thing I don’t have.
I swallow the last glob and as the gummy belt of candy slides down my throat, I pull open our text thread with shaky hands to see what he said.
We need to talk.