Chapter 33
Robert
Longest week ever. It’s hard to play student when you’re this hot for teacher.
I’m the first one to the parking garage Friday evening. I find a spot in the shadows at the end of a dead-end row on the top floor where there aren’t many cars, and get out, then I take a quick stroll around the floor just to be sure there are no bodies in the cars that are there. I’m leaning on the trunk when Andrew finds me and parks about eight spaces away.
He glances around, then hustles over to me. His huge smile mirrors mine. “Great place to rendezvous. So, what’s the surprise?” he asks.
I tilt my head toward my car and hit the Unlock button. “I’m taking you out tonight.”
“I don’t—”
“I’m not taking any chances, okay? Trust me.”
“All right, then.” He opens the door. “Let’s go.”
When I get back in the driver’s seat, he says, “I’ve missed—” But that’s all he manages to say before I am over the console and all in his space. We are not going there in this parking garage, but I have to kiss him and I have to touch him and I have to hold him and I have to soak up everything he gives me back. And he does give back.
And then we do go there, because we can’t not.
“Curse this damn console,” Andrew mutters.
“Well, if you hadn’t given up your apartment, I’d be stretched out naked on top of you right now instead of giving you a hand job in the front seat of my car.”
I feel his grin against my neck.
“As long as it’s your hand, baby, I’m good with that.”
“You called me baby again. Like.”
When a car comes up the ramp on the other side of the floor, we reluctantly disengage. But I think I can focus on the road now.
“Where are we headed?” he asks as we leave the parking garage.
“Downtown.”
“Are you sure you’re checked out to drive on freeways?”
“Oooh, that’s cold.”
He laughs and buckles his seat belt. “I am at your mercy tonight.”
“I’m going to remember you said that.”
On the way, I get to pump him for information—pets he had growing up (an ancient basset hound named Einstein), favorite way to waste an afternoon (pushing a two-year-old on a swing at the park, which I think is cheating), best movie he’s seen in the past year (Donnie Darko, rented from Netflix—I didn’t get the movie and neither did he, but he can’t get the image of the evil bunny out of his head, thus best movie for its staying power).
“First guy you kissed?”
He doesn’t answer for a couple of beats and I throw a quick glance his way.
“You,” he says finally.
“You’re lying. You’re telling me you never had another boyfriend?”
“You didn’t ask me about a boyfriend. You asked me about a first kiss.”
I need to keep my eyes on the freeway. The traffic is heavy for a Friday evening, most of it heading north, but plenty heading south too. Still, I can’t help another glance.
He takes a deep breath and flutters his lips. “Oklahoma makes Texas look liberal. I didn’t date in high school. Facebook and My-Space weren’t very big back then, so I was pretty much encapsulated in my little world. I only knew a couple of other guys, but they were not my type, trust me on this.”
I smile at the road ahead.
“So my first boyfriend, I guess, was in college.”
“Why you guess?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“And you never kissed.”
“Nope. We never kissed.”
I try to wrap my brain around that—a boyfriend, but no kiss. I want to ask more questions—questions like, Just what did you do?—but I don’t know if I’m ready to hear the answers. At least I don’t want to hear them while we’re hurtling sixty-five miles an hour down one of the worst freeways in the state. His tone tells me there’s a story there, and it might not be a very pretty one.
“So tell me about Ms. Momin.”
“Maya. You want the CliffsNotes, or you want the whole unabridged version?”
“I want the forty-minute version.”
“Okay. She’s been my best friend since junior high. We were close. Really close. We are close. We even went to college together. I think now she always had a crush on me, but I didn’t really see it for a long time. I guess things really started to change after Kevin.”
“The college boyfriend?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure I want to tell you this next part.”
I glance at him. “Thirty-nine minutes. I want to hear.”
He flutters his lips again and seems quite serious. I slide over into a more open lane.
“Maya was like my sister. No, not like a sister. Ick. More like a buddy, a pal, you know. I mean, she used to sit on the toilet in the bathroom and talk to me when I took a shower. It was no big deal. That’s just kind of how we were.”
If he sees me raise my eyebrows, he doesn’t react.
“So, after Kevin, I was feeling kind of damaged.” He stops and stares out the window.
“And?”
“And, then one night we were having a sleepover like we did all the time. I was feeling pretty down, and, well, she pushed and I didn’t fight her.”
He seems embarrassed, like this is some great revelation. Like I don’t know where babies come from.
“After that, things really changed between us. There were no more massages—”
Massages?
“—no more conversations in the bathroom while I showered. It was awkward. About five weeks later, she found out she was pregnant. It changed things again. We just kind of went back to being best friends; no benefits. She had Kiki, we got married, we moved in together, things got awkward again, I moved out. And that’s about it.”
“And now you’ve moved back.” I glance at him. “Why?”
“Because she asked. Because I was scared.”
I think about the way he reacted when he saw my birth date on my driver’s license. It had been such a one-eighty. For a while, he’d been focused on me, just me, his heart pounding in unison with mine as he gave in to all that passion. But even as he lay on the couch, his head in my lap, I could feel the fear creeping back in. And then, suddenly, he couldn’t get away from me fast enough, like I was a flame he was standing too close to.
But to move in with Ms. Momin?
“Has it ever occurred to you that she’s manipulating you?” I ask. It’s actually hard for me to reconcile the Ms. Momin I know with the Maya he’s talking about. It’s like they’re two different people. When I think in terms of Maya, the manipulation is so obvious. When I think Ms. Momin, not so much.
“No. I don’t think so. It’s just an arrangement that works for both of us right now, or at least it seemed like it at first. There’s nothing going on between us. She has a boyfriend. It’s all cool.”
“You really expect me to believe that?”
“Okay, well maybe it’s not all cool. She groped me last weekend.”
“Holy shit! She did not.” I feel like I’m going to go blind even thinking about Ms. Momin doing that.
“I think I’ve really screwed up, Robert. And now I don’t know what to do about it. It’s not Maya. It’s Kiki. When I moved out the first time, she was too little to know anything. But now she’s had her daddy there long enough for us to develop routines again. I know it would be hard for her if I leave. She’s old enough to know if I’m gone, but too young to really understand why.”
I feel partly responsible. If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have moved back and wouldn’t be in this position right now.
When I say so, he reaches over and fiddles with the short hairs on the back of my neck. “Yeah, thanks a lot, pal. Next time I relieve you of your clothes, be the grown-up and walk away, okay?”
The club is near the university’s downtown campus. Andrew is still wary, but I convince him that he won’t see any former students here. Last year he taught strictly freshmen, and since it was his first year, it’s highly unlikely that anybody here will know him. And I don’t know anyone who’s attending school at the downtown campus. I don’t know if either one of us is 100 percent confident in my assessment, but the allure of dancing together is enough to make us at least pretend we are.
Andrew hooks his arm around my neck as we make our way through the college crowd gathered on the sidewalk out front. He’s wearing one of his Friday T-shirts (Math Geek), jeans, and Vans, and he looks like I just plucked him out of his dorm room. A group of co-eds break to let us through. Someone wolf whistles.
“I hope you brought your Usher tonight, stud,” he says in my ear.
“Oh, I brought him. You hauling out your tired old Mick Jagger again?”
“Low,” he says, pretending to strangle me. “As a matter of fact, I’m unleashing my Adam Lambert tonight since you seem to like him so much, friend.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll go blind?”
“You might. But then you’ll have to feel your way to me later tonight.”
I stop and he swings around to face me, grinning. “Okay, we’re going back to the car,” I say, turning to go.
“Uh-uh,” he says, grabbing my hand before I can take a step away. “We’re dancing. You can feel me up later.”
“One condition.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
“You don’t call me ‘friend’ anymore.”
He studies my face a moment, then, “Come on, baby, let’s dance.”
I don’t know which I enjoy more—dancing or watching Andrew, who has completely unplugged from the grown-up grid for the night. He dances close to me on the packed floor. We grind, we make out during slower songs. I’ve completely forgotten that this is my teacher until a curvy girl with a lip ring and pink hair approaches us between songs and says, “I know you,” to Andrew.
He stiffens, and I can tell from the look on his face that he’s searching his memory bank for an image that matches the face and hoping to hell he doesn’t find one.
“Dunn Hall, right?” she goes on, pointing a finger at him. “You were at the fall mixer with Kruger. You hooked up with some drunken redhead as I recall.” She appraises me, then looks back at Andrew with raised eyebrows.
Andrew raises his brows back at her. “I’m flexible,” he deadpans.
“Hmm,” she says, giving him a full-frontal scan with her eyes. “See you at the spring mixer, hot stuff.”
“Yeah,” he says. When she turns to go, he grabs my hand and tugs me in the other direction. “Let’s get out of here,” he says in my ear.
Hot Stuff and I spend the next hour seeing just how flexible he really is in the backseat of my car.
Pretty flexible.
We’re basking in the afterglow when I tell him, “I have a confession to make.”
Andrew
Is this what I missed in high school? Making out in the backseat of a car in a dimly lit parking lot? Banging our heads on the armrest when we try to stretch out on a seat that is about two feet shorter than we are? Holding our breaths every time we hear a voice, every time a door slams or a light sweeps across the windows?
I’m an adult now, but here I am sneaking around like the kid I wasn’t as a teenager. I’d prefer a nice king bed, or at least a futon, but I’m not complaining.
And then Robert tells me he has a confession to make.
“Oh, please don’t tell me you’re sixteen,” I joke. But the truth is, I’m terrified that that’s exactly what he’s going to confess, and that would mean adding statutory rape to my growing list of felonies.
He grins, then gropes around on the floorboard until he comes up with his phone. Apparently, it slipped out of his pocket when I shimmied his jeans down. He pushes a button to light up the screen, then thumbs around for a moment before turning the screen to me.
In the photo I’m leaning against the aluminum rail below the whiteboard in my classroom, my arms folded across my chest. I appear to be listening to someone. “Shame on you, taking a photo of your teacher during the school day. I might have to punish you.”
“Yeah? What might that look like?”
“Don’t tempt me or I’ll show you.”
His smile fades in the dim light and his face grows serious. “After you left that night, I just wanted something to hold on to,” he says quietly. “Even when you were being such a jerk to me. I just wanted to keep a piece of you with me.”
I trace his eyebrow with my finger, and then I take the phone from him and delete the photo. “No more photos. You can hold on to me from now on.”
On the drive home, I get to ask the questions. Pets he had growing up (none because of his dad’s allergies), favorite way to waste an afternoon (Xbox, what else, he’s seventeen—grrr), best movie he’s seen in the past year (Brokeback Mountain, a cliché, he admits, but he bought the DVD and can’t help watching some of the scenes again and again).
I’m a little afraid to go there when he’s driving, but there are other things about him I really want to know. So I ask. “Were there ever any good times with your dad?”
He keeps his eyes on the road and doesn’t answer right away. I shouldn’t have taken the conversation there. I should have asked about his early crushes or why he likes being in the band guard or what brand of shampoo he uses.
And I’m about to do just that when he says, “Can I say no?”
“You can say anything you want.”
“I want to say no, then, but, you know, there had to be some good times, right?” He glances at me, but quickly returns his eyes to the road. It’s around eleven PM and traffic is lighter, but I still worry that my question has distracted him. He puts on his blinker, checks his mirrors, then eases into the left-hand lane to go around a slower-moving car. “It’s not that there were bad times. There just weren’t times.” He glances at me again.
“Let’s talk about this later, okay?” I say.
He smiles wanly at me. We’re quieter on the rest of the drive home. I take some time to study his profile and think that I will never tire of looking at him.
“You’re staring at me,” he says, but he smiles when he says it.
I don’t look away until he exits the freeway.
He stays off the main thoroughfares and opts instead for some side streets. We’re only a couple of miles from the pavilion’s parking garage when something darts into the road. Robert doesn’t even have time to swerve or hit his breaks. He hits it dead on, and then there’s a sickening thump as he runs over it.
“Oh, shit,” he says. He yanks the car to the shoulder and slams on the brake, then he’s out of the car and jogging back.
It takes me a minute to find his hazard lights. I turn them on and pull his door closed. When I get out, he’s kneeling on the dark road. His hands are over the dark lump like he wants to touch it but doesn’t know where or how. “I didn’t see him.” His voice catches. “I swear I didn’t seem him. He was just there.”
As my eyes adjust to the dark I can see that it’s a good-size dog, a golden retriever, I’m guessing, from the length of the fur.
“We have to get him to a vet,” Robert says shakily. I can see that he’s looking for a handhold, a place where he can get his arms under the dog and lift him up, but there’s so much blood and gore, that I know he won’t be able to pick up the animal without leaving parts of him on the road. The dog is panting shallowly.
“He’s not going to make it, Robert.”
“No. He’s—if we just—oh God—the vet—they can save him.” His voice is desperate and hitches every few words.
“They can’t save him.”
The dog lets out a rush of air and grows still.
Robert scrambles to his feet and vomits in the grass on the side of the road. I hold his shoulders as he spits to clear his mouth. And then he’s crying. “I didn’t mean to hit him. He was just there. He just came out of nowhere. I couldn’t stop.”
“I know,” I say, rubbing the back of his neck. “There’s nothing you could have done.”
“I couldn’t stop,” he whispers. “We have to move him.”
This is the hard part. That dog isn’t getting moved without a shovel. And I’m pretty sure I won’t find one in Robert’s trunk. We have no choice but to leave him on the road until the county can clear the mess. I know it’s a daily thing for them. If it weren’t, the streets would be littered with dead squirrels and armadillos and possums and the occasional domestic pet. I’ll call them with the location when we get back, but right now, I have to get Robert off the road.
“We can’t move him,” I say gently.
“We have to move him.” He hiccups. “If we don’t move him—” He doesn’t finish. He swipes at his eyes with his forearm. Images of the dog being run over again and again flash in my head. I know Robert is seeing that too.
A car turns onto the street and pulls up behind us. Robert turns his back to it and stumbles back to the car.
A teenager leans out the window. “You need any help?” I don’t recognize him, and I hope to hell he doesn’t recognize either of us. I’m counting on the dark to ensure that.
“No, we’re okay, but thanks.”
“Dead dog. That sucks,” he says. Then he pulls around us and speeds away.
Robert has slid down the passenger side of the car, and he’s sitting in the grass now, hunched over, his shoulders shaking. I crouch down in front of him. “We’ve got to go, Robert. It’s dangerous sitting on the side of the road like this.”
“I can’t just leave him. He belongs to someone.”
“I’ll get his collar, okay? I’ll call and let his owners know what happened. They’ll come get him. Okay?”
He buries his face in the crook of his elbow and his shoulders heave. “He just ran out in front of me.” His voice is small and filled with anguish.
I run my hand over the back of his neck, then return to the dead dog. I’m worried that someone will come speeding down the road and wipe us out too. I pinch the buckle on the dog’s collar and release it. There’s a bone-shaped tag dangling from the heavy nylon. I pull the collar off and my hands come away wet with blood. I wipe them on the grass, then find a leaf I can use to pick up the collar again. I drop it in the trunk.
Robert is still crying. It’s the kind of crying I can describe only as a purge, like something’s been ripped open inside him, and I suspect this is about more than a dog.
“Come on,” I say, pulling him to his feet. He falls into my arms, and I hold him for a minute before settling him in the passenger seat. On the two-mile drive to the parking garage, he uses his sleeve to wipe his face repeatedly, and finally just buries his face in his collar. He’s facing the side window like he’s embarrassed, but he can’t stop the crying.
It’s close to midnight and the fourth floor of the garage is largely empty. I pull up next to my car and cut the engine. There are only three others on this level. I get out just long enough to get the phone number off the collar.
Holding on to Robert with one arm, I dial the number. I’m relieved when a man answers. I don’t want to have to tell a kid we just killed their dog. I explain what happened, give the location, and tell him how very sorry we are. He asks if we’re okay, and I say yes. But I think that’s kind of a relative term, because there’s nothing okay about Robert right now.
I put down the phone and pull him to me a little more snugly. Somehow that makes him cry harder.