And then it happened.
The knock.
We both stiffened. I was so close to coming I didn’t care, I just wanted to finish, but he pulled out and for a moment I was fully capable of murdering the person at the door. We didn’t move, our breath grotesquely loud in the silence. God, had I been making noise? I wasn’t even sure.
“Maybe they’ll go,” I whispered.
The knock came again, slower. Almost mocking.
I shivered.
Evan buttoned up, wiped his hand on his jeans, and I did the same. I smoothed his shirt and he straightened my hair.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
The knock again.
He turned and walked to the door. There was nowhere I could hide—everything was open, revealed. I stood beside his desk, my chin up. I felt the radiant flush emanating from my skin and knew there was no masking it. Own it, I told myself. They’re less likely to suspect if you act like you’ve done nothing wrong.
The door opened, and even in the dimness I could make her out.
“Hiyam,” Evan said clearly, for my benefit. “What do you need?”
Her eyes darted past him straight to me. Not a flicker of surprise.
“I didn’t know you were in here,” she said. I wasn’t sure which of us she meant.
“I’m with another student,” Evan said.
It shouldn’t have stung, but I was still jacked and frazzled and suddenly I hated those words. I was not just another student.
“With the lights out,” Hiyam. “And the door locked.”
Not questions.
“We were just on our way out,” Evan said calmly.
Hiyam stepped into the room. “Good thing I caught you, then.” Neither of us missed the double entendre. “I need to talk to you, Mr. Wilke.”
“It’s not really a great time. How about—”
“Oh,” she said with faux coyness, “am I interrupting something?”
My jaw hardened. This bitch. She f**king knew, though she probably couldn’t guess how far it had gone. Probably thought she’d interrupted a chaste little kiss. Whispered words of self-denial. Smell his hand, I wanted to tell her.
“We were just discussing the semester project. Maise had some questions.”
Hiyam strolled up a row of desks toward me, trailing her hand over them. “I thought we weren’t allowed to ask you any questions about it.”
Evan caught my eye from across the room. He finally looked alarmed. I understood. Leave. Give her less ammunition.
“I’ll be going,” I said flatly. “Thanks for the help, Mr. Wilke.”
Hiyam paused, watching us with cool amusement.
“Any time,” he said. His voice and face were vacant.
I walked past him and out of the room, wishing I could scream.
“Tell me again who knows,” he said.
He stood at his bedroom window, blinds shut. He looked like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. Just add prison jumpsuit and oncoming train. A lamp cast a brooding glow over us, flickering fretfully. I’d had to argue for five minutes before he let me turn it on. I leaned my palms on the bed, sighing. We’d been over this a hundred times.
“No one,” I said.
“Britt saw us at the party.”
“She saw you taking a drunk student home.”
“Wesley knows about ‘E.’”
“Wesley can barely focus on anything but my tits. And he’s my friend. He won’t say anything.”
Evan rocked on his toes, not looking at me. “Hiyam saw. She was taunting us.”
I stood and moved toward him. “Hiyam’s had a crush on you since the first day of school. She told me at homecoming. Besides, she has a filthy mind.” I touched his forearm, ran my fingers over the soft gold hair. “Even if we weren’t sleeping together, she’d think we were.”
It was terrible, but now that the immediate danger had passed, the idea of people knowing excited me. Without proof, they couldn’t do shit. It was right there under their noses and they couldn’t pin anything to us.
He never touched me, Principal Boyle. That’s a filthy lie.
No, Principal Boyle, I never had sex in school with a teacher.
Mr. Wilke is a great teacher, Principal Boyle. He’s taught me so much about cinema, and life, and myself. About my body. About how f**king amazing he can make it feel.
Of course, if I seriously thought we might be exposed, I’d have cooled everything off. I never wanted Evan to lose his job and get branded with the student-seducer stigma. But Hiyam was all talk. She still thought she could use me for a drug connection. She wouldn’t out us.
Evan wasn’t convinced.
“What are we doing?” he whispered, looking at me with a worryingly tragic face.
“No one’s going to say anything. We just have to be a little more careful.”
“Maybe we should wait, Maise. Until you’re out of school.”
He had never, ever said this before. The idea cut through me like a guillotine blade, splitting everything into cold halves.
“You cannot be serious,” I said.
That pained look deepened.
I stepped closer, my body hovering against his, not quite making contact. “If you think you can stand looking and not touching for eight more months, you’re welcome to try.”
“‘Try’ being the operative word,” he said, sighing. “No, I can’t. And I don’t want to try.”
“But you’ve thought of stopping this? Of waiting?”
He sat in a chair near the lamp, his shoulders bowed. “What if I lost my job? What kind of life could I offer you?”
“Your part-time job teaching an art class? You didn’t even want it. You can do better, Evan. You could be an actor.”
“That’s a pipe dream.”
“Every dream is a pipe dream before someone achieves it.” I leaned beside the blinds, looking up at the ceiling. “What if we went to LA?” I glanced at him without turning my head. “Together?”
He didn’t answer, but his posture became alert, attentive.
“I know it’s expensive as hell. But Wesley’s sister lives out there, and he wants to go, too, after graduation.” I bit my lip. “We could all rent a house together. Me and Wesley will get jobs and go to college. You could teach. Or you could audition for roles. Or—god, you’re f**king gorgeous, maybe you could model. I’m sure some catalog needs hot guys to stand around in V-necks.”
He laughed, softly.
“And if it doesn’t work, if we run out of money and suck at everything, then we can always come back. Or go somewhere else. Or never see each other again.”
“Come here,” he said.
I went to him. I sat in his lap, straddling his legs, his arms around my waist. His hair had a reddish-bronze gleam in the lamplight. Those boyish features looked delicate sitting inside the hard, square lines of his jaw.
“How long have we known each other?” he said.
“About two months.”
Sixty-eight days. Sixteen hundred-odd hours. My entire life.
“It feels like a lot longer,” he said.
“We did more with our time than most people do.”
That Polaroid smile. “I’m crazy about you, Maise O’Malley.”
Another rift of light chiseled into the blood-red gem in my chest.
“Why do I think you’re about to say something I won’t like?” I said.
His smile turned tender, suspiciously regretful. “I want this to work. But we can’t do it like this.”
“What?”
“We have to stop seeing each other in school.”
My throat tightened. “I can’t. I have a class with you.”
“That can change.”
Was it just me, or did time stop for everybody?
“You want me to drop your class?” I said in a small voice.
“You can switch to another elective—”
“I can’t, Evan. I need that class on my transcript.”
“You don’t need it. You can get in without it.”
“To a state school, maybe,” I muttered. Something sharp and thin curled in my chest, like peeled metal. It felt horrible. I could not believe he was saying this.
He made me look at him. “I can write you a letter of recommendation. I am your teacher.”
Uncomfortable pause. It had never felt so awkward before.
I twisted away, swallowing the prickly burr in my throat. “I feel like you’re punishing me for something we both did.”
“It’s not punishment. If I had my way, I’d lock us in that classroom and throw away the f**king key. You’re right, Maise. I can’t look without touching.” He stroked my face. “If they found out they’d call you a victim and they’d call me a predator and those labels would stick. And I hate the thought of people pitying you and telling you how to feel. They don’t know you like I do. They don’t know what you’ve been through, how strong you are. I won’t let them reduce all of that to some checkbox on a police report.” He breathed in, held it, breathed out slowly. “If it makes it easier for you, I’ll resign. You have to be in that school. I don’t.”
My eyes were full of water. It took superhuman willpower to keep from letting it go. “How would that make it easier? I’d just miss you and feel like shit all the time. And it’s not even about the credit, Evan. I like your class. I’m actually f**king learning.”
We stared at each other for a moment, wearing our absurdly pained tragedy masks. Then I started to laugh and cry at the same goddamn time.
Evan touched my face again, kissing away my tears, laughing in a gentle, commiserating way. And once he started kissing me he couldn’t stop. He kissed my cheeks, my mouth, tilting my head, opening my jaw with his hand. I tasted hot saline, the salt of my own tears. All of my tension unraveled into beautiful chaos, a mess of sorrow and hurt and desire and tenderness, completely mixed up and completely mixing me up. His tongue curled around mine and he kissed me like he wanted to draw out something deep, the breath from the bottom of my lungs, the blood from the innermost crypts of my heart, the essence of me. When I pulled away, his arms tightened relentlessly around my back.
“Why do I need you like this?” he said, his voice rasping.
I looked at his glassy, mercurial eyes, the haggard lines of want etched into his face, and said, “Because you’re addicted.”
In the tranquil moments after sex, I hatched my plan.
“Let me finish the semester with you,” I said.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, nak*d, while Evan lay tangled in the sheets.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s only fair. I need to finish my film so I can put it on college apps. You would never jeopardize my future.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re trying to manipulate me.”
“‘Try’ being the operative word,” I said, and he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me down while I squawked, indignant. I failed to free myself and gave in, letting him pin my arms to the bed, and then his humor faded. His expression became pensive.