Unteachable(21)
Author: Leah Raeder

I stared at him, my mouth open, eyes wide. I didn’t know what to say.

He looked at my knee. “For years, I hated my mom. I wished I could’ve switched places with Beth. That any of us had died instead, because we all deserved it. She was innocent.” He sighed, his frame sagging, succumbing to gravity. “But you know what? It changed my mother. She finally stopped drinking. She went to church, though she was only looking for forgiveness, not faith. She cried all the time. She said she’d do anything to make sure I was happy, because now I was her only child.”

“Did she?”

“I don’t know. I left when I was sixteen, and I’ve never been back.”

We sat there in the shadows, full of unspeakable things.

“Now I know,” he said, touching me again, “why I was drawn to you. We have the same darkness inside.”

“Our f**ked-up parents?”

“Our lost childhood.”

I curled against him, running my hands over his arms, his chest, lightly, reverently, as if I’d just discovered he was breakable. How bizarre, I thought. Mr. Wilke has a psycho mom and a shattered family, too, and that’s why we understand each other. Why did everything beautiful come from pain?

“You don’t seem that much older than me,” I said. “Do I seem young to you?”

He kept stroking the same lock of my hair absently. “In school, you seem older than everyone. With me, you seem young. But I feel young with you, too.”

“We have no age. We exist outside of time. We’re timeless.”

Evan smiled. “Like Jack and Rose.”

“Or Lady and the Tramp.”

He laughed. “The nurse and the English patient.”

“Louis and Lestat.”

He took my face in his hands. “You are the bravest girl I’ve ever met. You’ve been living with this crazy family shit and never said a word.”

I shrugged. “Or maybe Louis and Claudia. I’m the little girl you’ve frozen in time because you plucked me like a rose and made me a vampire. We live together for a hundred years and I hate you and yet I’m in love with you.”

Oh my god. I had actually said it. As a joke, but those were the words, in the proper order and everything.

“Maise.”

“You’ve been living with a dead sister and never said a word. Is it brave, or just how things are?”

His hand moved against my face. “You are so worldly,” he said, and it was both a compliment and a regret.

We kissed again, and his body lay over me and pushed me into the cloudy vagueness of the couch and I thought, Do what you want, I relinquish myself to you. But I guess he saw the disconnection in my eyes, because he stopped, and breathed against my throat, holding me. Just holding.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “I want you to.”

He looked into my face. “That’s not what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“All of you.”

It seemed like such an incredible thing to ask of a person.

“I don’t know where all of me is right now,” I said, feeling silly and young.

He kissed my temple, my eyelids. “It’s all right. I’m happy. I could spend this whole weekend just talking to you and be perfectly happy.”

“Me too,” I said. My voice was strained. “So if we’re both so happy, why are we sad?”

Evan laughed, and we kissed again, without expectations.

Going to bed was awkward. I didn’t know the protocol. Should we brush our teeth together? Little kids brushed their teeth with an adult. Just pretend you’re alone at home, I told myself. I took everything off but my underwear and a T-shirt. He stood on the other side of the bed in his boxers. We stared at each other.

Then we both laughed.

“This is so weird,” I said, echoing Wesley on homecoming night. Where was he? Was Siobhan kissing him good night? Did she do that?

“Weird because I’m your teacher, or because you’ve never done it before?”

Good question. “I can’t even tell.”

We sat on opposite sides of the bed.

“Oh my god,” I said. “Is this how it is for married people?”

“Awkward and distant? Yes.”

I grinned. “Let’s pretend we’re a troubled married couple.”

“I feel like you’re trying to test if I can actually act.”

“I hate how you do that, John. You always think I’m testing you. I guess our kids are just a test, too.”

He looked at me, trying not to laugh. “Well, Martha, maybe if you didn’t hand me a questionnaire every time I want sex.”

“And when is that, John? At midnight, after I’ve spent all day babysitting your spawn? Or when your secretary isn’t available to blow you on the weekend?”

“Come here.”

“I think we should see a marriage counselor.”

“Maise, come here.”

My heart skipped. I sat beside him, our backs to the brick wall. In the darkness the loft reverted to a factory, mysterious machines hulking all around us, sitting in abandoned silence. The sadness of factories, I thought. Once upon a time they’d made things. Now they were all slowly decaying, like used-up mothers. My eyes traced the maze of pipes and beams that made up the ceiling, all the messy guts shoved together. Evan put his arm around me. I felt the contours of his muscle and bone through my shirt, the hard lines of this body I had taken into mine.

“Are you scared?” he said into my hair.

“Yeah.”

“What scares you?”

I kept my eyes on the ceiling. “That this is too good. That it won’t last. That you’ll leave.”

Fingertips ran up the smooth plane of my thigh. Goosebumps, everywhere.

“And you?” I said.

“Same exact thing, but about you.”

I turned to him. That boyish face, scruffy with stubble, almost like two different people looking at me. He wasn’t perfect. His lips were a touch too full, too sulky, his forehead a little too tall, and there was a permanent trace of mourning stamped into his features that sometimes made him look helpless, but all his imperfections fit him perfectly. I adore this face, I thought. How is it possible he’s scared of losing me? Never in my life had I considered I might be something someone worried about losing.

“Statistically,” I said, “we’re doomed, you know.”

“Statistically, everyone is doomed.”

“Right, but we are specifically doomed. Wesleypedia told me that at the beginning of a relationship, your brain releases tons of dopamine. You literally make yourself high. But after a few months it stops, and then you’re basically going through withdrawal while trying to figure out why you’re in bed with this person and sharing germs.”

Evan wore a rueful smile. “What made you so grim?”

Life, I thought.

His hand moved up the back of my knee to the inside of my thigh. He looked at my face as he touched me, watching each layer of irony and cynicism splinter, crack, fall away. I didn’t move. I let every cord in me tighten, slowly pulling into a knot in my center. I was so finely-tuned I felt my n**ples graze my shirt as I breathed, the hair on his arm tickling my thigh. He pushed my legs apart and I bit my lip.

“Look at me,” he said.

I did.

His voice was soft and gritty. “This is what I think about in class.”

His fingers rose to the crease of my thigh. He dragged a nail along the edge of my underwear, and I shivered and couldn’t stop, as if a low electric current ran through me. He didn’t touch me directly, but traced every boundary until I couldn’t sit still. My mouth was open, my breath spilling wildly. All the electricity in me surged to predict where his fingertips would brush, like one of those glass balls full of plasma that shoots to the surface when a hand gets near. Every subtle shift of fabric was unbearable. My skin was too hot, too ripe with blood, a summer creature full of too much life and lust and desperately in need of release.

“Please,” I said.

His hand spread across my thigh and squeezed. “I think about you saying that, too.”

My breath was still out of control, but I said, “And what else?”

“I think about undressing you.”

I leaned forward and shrugged out of my T-shirt. My body felt elastic and sinuous, like a snake. His hand ran up my belly, between my br**sts, never quite touching the places I ached to be touched.

“I think about your skin,” he said, his thumb moving over my collarbone. “Your mouth.” He opened it, put his index finger between my teeth. “The inside of you.”

I closed my lips over his finger, looking at him. I felt so womanish, suddenly. You think you’re the one corrupting me, I thought, but I’m f**king you up, too. My eyelids lowered. The power was all mine now. I took him deeper, almost to the knuckle, curling my tongue around his finger, scraping my teeth over it lightly as he withdrew. When he pulled away I took him into my mouth again. He groaned. So I did it again, and again, enthralled at how his body responded, leaning closer, softening, giving itself up to me. God, it felt so good, having all the power. I could get used to being the teacher.

He pulled out finally and pressed his face to my shoulder. “What are you doing to me?” he said, his voice far away. “This is all I think about. I’m obsessed.”

I swallowed. I could still taste his skin, clean and warm and faintly salty. I put my arms around him, and we lay down together, and were lost in each other until morning.

The day was half gone when I woke. Evan was up already, working on school stuff. He called me sleepyhead and kissed me and sat on the bed to watch me dress. Funny, how even clothes going on my body was absolutely mesmerizing to him.

We walked around the neighborhood in search of food. The city looked like an old-time photograph tinted the colors of coins, silver and nickel, its edges blurred with mist. Headlights made bright lighthouse beacons in the fog. We walked close and slow, arms around each other’s waists. Trees still saturated with rain from last night seemed to glow a hyper-pigmented green. The streets were full of a dizzying brew of wet concrete and brick and asphalt. On one side of my body, Evan’s heat; on the other, the cool lick of rain-dampened air.

We bought coffee and almond croissants at a cafe and sat on the patio, watching the world flow past.

“I got you something,” Evan said.

He took his hand from his pocket, something small and shiny in his fingers.

My body went into slow-motion. I looked up at him slowly, breathed slowly, felt the long, slow strokes of my heart ticking like a close-up clock in a movie.

“I was going to give it to you yesterday,” he said, eyes lowered, “but the timing wasn’t right.” He turned the ring in his fingers. “I keep pretending I’m okay, looking at you in class and playing Mr. Good Teacher, when all I want to do is take you in my arms. And I wanted you to know that even though we have to do this, the hiding and pretending, there’s not a moment that goes by when I’m not thinking of you, wishing it was different. So I thought maybe this would remind you. That this could hold you when I couldn’t.”