Boy Toy (16 page)

My mouth went dry and I licked my lips. I was losing my mind.

A scream from the Xbox brought me back to reality. I hadn't paused the game and my character was dead. I jerked around to the TV so fast that I thought my head would just keep spinning from sheer inertia and snap right off. It didn't.

I restarted the level, my breath coming fast now, my heart pounding. I couldn't even see the screen. All I could see was that reflection in my mind's eye, the smooth skin of her thighs, the darkening under the skirt, leading to that shiny patch of black material. God! I knew I would never be soft again.

"Josh?" she said suddenly, and my heart skipped not one, but two or maybe even three beats.

I ignored her, pretending to be engrossed in the game. So engrossed that I couldn't
possibly
have just been looking up her skirt five seconds ago.

"Josh!"

"Hmm? What?" I asked innocently, clicking away on the controller.

"Would you mind getting me another glass of wine?"

I paused the game and looked over my shoulder. She was sitting up, holding the glass out to me. Her breasts had returned to their normal positions and her legs were primly set together.

"Sure, Mrs. Sherman."

I unfolded myself from the floor and, miracle of all miracles, my erection had subsided. I took the wineglass.

"You know, Josh, when it's just the two of us and we're here, you don't have to call me Mrs. Sherman."

I had heard George call her "Evelyn" and "Evvy" in the past. I didn't think my parents would like me calling a teacher by her first name, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

"Are you sure?" I took the wineglass.

"Yes. It's just silly. You're helping me with my project. You're not just a student; you're like my research partner." She favored me with a brilliant full-wattage smile and that left dimple.

"OK ... Evelyn." It felt weird coming out of my mouth.

She frowned, her face scrunching up like she'd bitten into something sour and bitter at the same time. "God, no. Not
that.
I
hate
my name. 'Evelyn.' Yuck." She made a gagging sound and I couldn't help laughing. "Sounds like some old lady from a million years ago."

"OK. Evvy?"

"No. No, that's no good either. How about..." She thought for just a second. "How about Eve?"

"Eve."

She smiled when I said it, her entire face coming more alive. "Yes! Perfect! I always wanted people to call me that."

"OK." I said it again. "Eve."

She clapped her hands like I'd just given her a present. Maybe I had. I don't know.

I filled her wineglass and brought it back to her. She sipped and sighed in contentment.

"What's it taste like?" I asked her.

"Do you want to try some?" She held it out to me.

"Are you serious?"

"Sure." She shrugged. "Just take a little sip. And promise me you won't tell your parents I let you try this." She looked over at the clock. "You won't still be drunk by the time I take you home."

"Ha, ha," I said. "Very funny." But I took the glass and sniffed it carefully.

"Oh, so you're a connoisseur!"

I had seen people drink wine in movies, so I went along with the joke—swirled the wine in the glass, sniffed it pretentiously. "A passable bouquet," I said in a snooty tone, causing Mrs.—Eve to throw her head back and roar with laughter. I grinned at her and waggled my eyebrows, then took a sip.

It actually tasted pretty bad, but Eve seemed to like it, so I didn't want to say so. I don't know what I expected, but from the smell, I thought it would be more like fruit juice. Instead, it tasted like fruit juice gone bad. And it burned my throat as it went down.

"Well?" she asked.

"It's OK." Ever the diplomat.

She took the glass back. "OK, so you're not a red man. I can tell. See? You've learned something. Next time you're on a hot date, don't order the red wine."

"Got it."

She looked serious all of a sudden. "But really, Josh—you can't tell your parents I let you do this, OK? I could get in a lot of trouble."

Over a little sip of wine? Puh-lease. But whatever—I wasn't going to tell my parents anyway. "Don't worry about it."

That night at dinner, my mother asked me why I had a grin plastered on my face. I didn't realize I did. "No reason," I told her.

But the truth is this: Until I ate my second helping of mashed potatoes, I could still catch a lingering taste of the wine on my lips when I licked them. And for some reason, it tasted better now.

That night, I did my best not to think of Eve as I lay in bed. It was pure torture; she had become a part of my nightly ritual, to the point that I didn't put on my pajamas until I'd already added another wad of tissues to the trash can.

I was getting home later and later each day; Mom was working late to show her professor (that's what she called him, "my professor," not "my boss") that he had made a good choice when he'd hired her. George had loads of deadlines, multiple games coming out at once ("going to golden master," they called it), so I stayed at Eve's for hours after school each day, playing Xbox, stealing looks whenever, wherever, and however I could. Dad started coming home late, too, since there was no one home anyway.

You'd think that we'd be sullen and sort of miserable, what with all of us seeing each other just for an hour or so at night before I went off to blast through my homework. But the opposite was true: Mom was ecstatic because she was doing so well at her new job; Dad was happy to have some peace and quiet. And me? I was playing video games and getting the chance to memorize a beautiful body on the sly. What's there not to be happy about? I even heard Mom through the vents one night saying, "Thank God for this. It's like free babysitting."

School was, for a little while, difficult. I had to remind myself to call her "Mrs. Sherman," for one thing. For another, it was tough to be just another student to her, to not be able to joke with her or be silly like we were in her apartment. She made it more difficult—every now and then, with no warning, she would toss me a big, secret smile, her left cheek dimpled, her eyes shining.

Zik smuggled one of his brother's
Playboys
into school one day and we sneaked off during recess to page through it, saving the centerfold for last. As we unfolded it, our eyes drinking in the seemingly impossibly smooth skin and endless acres of bared flesh, Zik whistled low and quiet. "Why isn't there a girl like that around here?" he begged. "Why?"

We checked the Playmate biography to see if, by chance, this girl
was
around here, but she was from Canada.

"What do these numbers mean?" I asked. "Thirty-four C—"

As usual, Zik had the scoop—his dad and brother were a font of this sort of information. "Those are measurements. Here, here, and here," he said, cupping imaginary breasts, then hands to his waist, then his hips.

"I don't get it. What do the numbers
mean?
"

"Thirty-four C is, like, her bra size, J. Thirty-four C is good."

We caressed the centerfold with our eyes again. "Well, obviously. But what does it
mean?
"

"I don't know! What is it with you? Can't you just stare at the tits?"

There were other numbers on the bio sheet. I did some quick mental math. "She's twenty."

"OK. Twenty is good. That's not too old."

"Mrs. Sherman is twenty-four," I said, and maybe I shouldn't have, but Zik knew I was going there almost every day after school.

"Huh." He thought about that. "Twenty-four. That's pretty old."

"No, it isn't." A thrill of unexplainable anger riffled through me. "And anyway, just because someone is old doesn't mean they aren't hot."

"Like your mother."

"Shut up about my mother!" I punched him in the shoulder, but it was just kidding. I knew what my mom looked like, and Zik never meant anything mean by it.

That afternoon at Eve's, she retreated to the bedroom as usual while I switched on the Xbox and then went to pour her a glass of wine and get my Coke. But this time, there was a new wrinkle.

"Something wrong?" Eve asked, poking her head into the kitchen. She had worn a rather shapeless and severe dress at school, but now was changed into a pair of sweatpants and a loose T-shirt. She'd added some more lipstick—she had told me once that it wore off during the day at school and her lips felt dry without it. Her hair was tied back—it changed the whole complexity of her face, drawing back her cheekbones, making her look like an entirely different person. Still beautiful, but in a different way.

Her feet, of course, were bare. Bright red toenail polish.

"There's two kinds of wine." I pointed. Next to Eve's red wine was another bottle of white. "Which one do you want?"

"Let's try the white today." She padded into the living room. I poured the white and followed her, gave her the wine, and settled down for some serious Xbox action. She was wearing pants, so there'd be no panty shots today, and that shirt was too loose to make her chest interesting. Fortunately, I was twelve years old and easily distracted by video games.

I was ostensibly at the apartment to help Eve with her project, but in truth it was done now and we basically just hung out together. I can't remember a time when we definitively stated that I would keep coming over. Neither, now that I think about it, can I remember when she officially said that the project was over. My time there just sort of morphed over a period of a few weeks from test subject to test subject/video-game guest to video-game guest/afterschool buddy.

"Do you want to try this one?"

I looked up from the game. Eve was sitting on one of the big stuffed chairs, holding her wineglass out a little. "Me?" I asked stupidly.

"Sure. You wanted to know what the other tasted like."

True. "OK." I took the wineglass and sipped. It was
much
better than the red! It didn't taste as fruity—it was cleaner, somehow, with bubbles like club soda or ginger ale. And it didn't burn my throat as much going down.

"That's pretty good!" I took another sip, then another.

"OK, that's enough!" she said, laughing. "I don't need you getting drunk on me."

I handed the glass back to her, embarrassed. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. It's OK." She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment. "Josh, you really can't let your parents know that I let you—"

"I won't tell them! I haven't told anybody anything."

I noticed another taste, another feeling—something waxy and slippery. I licked my lips.

"Oh, you've got ... Come here," said Eve. I leaned toward her and she did the same. From the greater height of the chair, it made her loose T-shirt gape open at the neck, revealing some of that cleavage that the wedding picture promised. "You've got some of my lipstick from the glass right ... Ah." She stroked the pad of her thumb across my lips, wiping away the lipstick. It took all my willpower not open my mouth and taste her thumb.

"There," she said, showing me the thumb, imprinted with a light burgundy smear. "Now you don't look like you've been kissing someone."

Kissing ... It felt like forever as I watched her raise the glass to those lips and drink. I
wanted
to be kissing someone, I realized.

"Why doesn't it make you drunk?" I asked, pointing to the wine. "Drunk" I knew—I'd seen Mom and Dad come home from friends' houses sometimes, Mom stumbling a little bit or giggling too much. Those were usually nights when I closed the vent to my room and tried not to listen.

"Not everybody gets drunk quickly," she said. "Your size and weight have a lot to..." She stopped. "Well, you're practically as big as I am, so that doesn't really apply, does it? But I've built up a tolerance because I'm older and I've been drinking for a few years. You haven't been drinking ... have you?" This last asked like a cop, her jaw set and her lips pressed into a thin, shimmering line.

I laughed. "No. Why do you drink it if it doesn't make you drunk?"

"Getting drunk isn't the only reason to drink wine. It relaxes me."

"I guess you need to relax after being with us all day, huh?"

She laughed. "Not you, but the others, yeah. God, Josh—you're so grown up sometimes..." She cocked her head and gazed at me over the rim of the wineglass. Those shining green eyes held mine for what seemed forever. I stared until I no longer felt uncomfortable doing so, and then until I felt uncomfortable again.

I was the one who broke contact, clearing my throat (it seemed like a gallon of saliva had suddenly settled there) and turning back to the Xbox. I could still feel her eyes on me.

Later, when she dropped me off at home, she leaned over to the passenger seat before I got out and said, "Have a good night, Josh."

And then she kissed me goodbye.

It was just on the cheek. And I knew it was just a friendly goodbye kiss, but I wanted it to be more. I wanted it to be more so badly.

I fumbled for the door, finally pushing it open. I didn't trust my legs to carry me out onto the driveway and into the house.