Teacher's Pet

“Maybe,” I said, “but why would they have me write a paper?”

She raised an eyebrow. “That seems pretty torturous to me.”

I put my head in my hands. “As if I don’t already have enough shit to do! I wasn’t really planning on writing a five-page paper, too.”

“If you can find the time to fuck him, I’m sure you can whip this up in no time. You’re smart. If it were me, on the other hand, well, that’s a different story. But . . . don’t you think you should tell him? I would tell him if I were you. He might have some idea about who it is.”

“I really don’t think I should tell him. I’ll just write this paper, send it to that email address, and hopefully that’ll be the end of it.”

“Let me see that again,” she said, holding her hand out. I gave her the paper. She re-read what it said, as though it might have changed in the time we’d been talking. “Of course it’s typed,” she said. “Do you think we should have it dusted for fingerprints? Could we take it somewhere and have them do that?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “That would probably be insanely expensive. And then they’d want to know why we needed it dusted for fingerprints. Or they’d just read what the letter said and then they’d know. I can’t let anyone find out about this.” I felt foolish for being so brazen, for walking into the bar the other day and having sex with him in the bathroom, for not wearing underwear to class and then flashing him. How could I have been so stupid?

14.

Leo

Life was suddenly great.

More than great, it was excellent, as though I were now seeing everything through rose-colored glasses.

Everything had taken on a nice sheen, and even the most mundane tasks were made tolerable now, because for the first time in a long time, life actually felt good. I knew I was walking around with a smile on my face. People noticed; on more than one occasion one of my colleagues would say something along the lines of how something good must’ve happened to me because I now seemed happy all the time.

I didn’t say anything to confirm or deny this, but I liked to think that sort of positive energy might be infectious.

Tonight, Jack and I were sitting at the Corkscrew, and he kept looking toward the door as though he was expecting Tessa to walk through at any moment.

“I really can’t believe that you’re going through with it,” Jack said. He rubbed his hand over his eyes and looked very stressed out, as though it would be his ass on the line if I were to get caught. “I really can’t. And that she just came in here like that the other day, and you two went and . . . I just can’t believe it.”

“Is this your way of fishing, trying to get me to give you details?”

“No!” he exclaimed. “I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know anything about it, actually! But now that you’ve done it, it’s over with, right? You’re not going to keep doing it?”

I scoffed. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me since I left the magazine. I forgot what it was like to wake up in the morning and actually be excited about life. To look forward to something. There’s no way in hell I’m stopping that now.”

“You’re telling me you never looked forward to anything until this thing with Tessa? I don’t believe you, Leo. I’m calling bullshit on that.”

“Why? It’s true.”

&nbs

p; “Because . . . well . . . look at you! It’s not like there’d be any shortage of women that you could get involved with.”

I knew that, when it came to dating, Jack did not have as much luck as I did (though could it really be called luck?), and that there was a part of him that was envious about it. And I didn’t want to make it sound trite, that just hooking up with someone wasn’t exciting enough, because I’d been there, done that, hundreds of times over. What I’d never had, though, up until now, was a situation like I did with Tessa.

“It’s more than just sex, though,” I said.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “You mean you like her?”

“Of course I like her. The novelty of hate sex wears off really quick, so trust me when I say, if I didn’t like her, I wouldn’t still be doing this.”

“I’ve never even had hate sex.”

“It’s fun like, the first couple of times. But after that, it just seems to get more and more tedious.”

“Well, I guess it’s good that you like her, anyway. Though that’s the only good I can see in it.”

“Oh, there’s plenty more good.”