Chapter 4

When you're a teenager, and a beautiful older woman says she's had some sexual fantasies about you, it's sort of a big deal.

I realized I had stopped breathing when I kind of leaned, and almost fell off the couch. I was lightheaded, but I could focus enough to keep from falling on my face. Her hands were suddenly on my shoulders, stabilizing me.

"I told you it was complicated," she said softly.

"That's not complicated," I said. "That's just crazy."

I was thinking about how women ... grown women ... don't have fantasies about boys. But that "fact" that my brain kept insisting on, was being jostled by the news stories I had seen about teachers having affairs with their students, and the word "cougar" was running around in my skull ... like the animal itself ... dashing here and there. Except she wasn't anywhere near being a cougar. That was just ridiculous.

In fact, I think "ridiculous" was the word of the day at that point.

She sat down next to me on the couch, and put her arm around me.

"You okay?" she asked.

"It's complicated," I said.

I swear it wasn't planned. It wasn't a play on her words. What was going on in my mind just really was complicated.

But she laughed, and it was a delightful laugh, the kind of laugh that in a dark and dismal environment, is like a burst of sunlight that banishes shadows and fears and stuff like that.

Except she kept laughing, harder and harder, until she fell off the couch and rolled around on the floor by my feet, gasping and laughing and shaking her hands like she was frantically trying to wave to every person in the parade.

She went through a series of calming down, and panting, "I'm sorry ... I'm sorry," but then she'd start laughing again. I just watched her. It was still complicated, but I couldn't help but smile as she laughed like that. Actually, it was one of those silly grins, but she was distracted by her own problem, which was getting enough air to stay conscious.

Finally she flopped onto her back, her arms outstretched. She just breathed for a while, gasping and drawing huge lungfuls of air into her body.

You can just imagine what that did to her breasts.

About five minutes later she held out her hand to me, and I pulled her to a sitting position. She sat there, kind of loose and slumped. It wasn't quite Indian style, because her lower legs weren't on top of each other. Her hair had come partly loose from her ponytail, and wisps of it were hanging in her face. Her hands came to pull the scrunchy out of her hair and it fell to her shoulders. Now I couldn't see her face at all. Then she looked up at me, and her hand automatically brushed her hair behind one ear and then the other.

"When you have a baby you didn't plan on, by a man you no longer want anything to do with, you fall into a very dark and unhappy world," she said.

All traces of levity were gone. The change was astonishing, and a full hundred and eighty degrees from what had been there only a few minutes before. Her head went back down and again her face was covered by her hair.

"You feel like a slut," she said. "And people help you do that by judging you. I told people what happened. I even told the police. But nothing happened. Some people even said I asked for it, because Jack had a reputation before I went out with him. And, of course, he denied the drugs. His friends did too. One of the detectives even told me that when you gamble with sex, sometimes you roll snake eyes! My parents didn't know who to believe. I think that's what hurt the most."

There was nothing I could say that would help. I knew that by instinct. So I just sat there.

"So I had the baby, and I tried to adjust. Timmy was actually good for me in one sense, and that's when I knew how complicated all this was going to be, because I love Timmy with all my heart and soul, and yet I can't abide the thought of his father. I hate the man, but love his son. And so finally I left, to try to start over somewhere where the surroundings wouldn't keep insisting that I was a slut, and got what I deserved."

She looked back up at me from down there on the floor ... where sluts are supposed to be. I couldn't stand it, because while there had been a time I thought that way, I was ashamed of that time, and I couldn't fit her in that category again. I reached for her hands and stood. It was awkward, pulling her up, because her feet weren't in the right position. But she didn't argue. She stood. I put my hands on her shoulders and sat her down on the edge of the couch again. Then, just to show her I wasn't like the others, I sat down next to her. I didn't think all this out or anything. It was just done on instinct. It was just the way I had been raised.

"And then I came here and met you," she said. "And you were a breath of fresh air. You were exactly what I needed. It was like I had come out of a dark, smelly cave, into a field of flowers in the sunshine."

I got embarrassed, primarily because, like she couldn't forget her belief that part of her had enjoyed that party ... I couldn't forget how many times I had jacked off staring at the pictures of it.

"I'm no white knight," I said.

"I know," she said. "But at that time, you were. I made you be that white knight. You were what I needed, because you made me believe I really could have a new life."

"Well, I'm glad about that, I guess," I said.

"But it was also complicated from the very beginning," she said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Do you remember that very first day, when you had finished mowing my yard and came looking for me?"

I did. "You were hiding out in the pantry, feeding Timmy."

"But you didn't know that then, did you."

"No," I said. "It was just the only place I hadn't looked, so I looked."

"And do you remember what you saw?"

The time for being embarrassed around this woman was gone. I hadn't had a conversation like this with an adult before, and it felt important.

"Yes," I said.

"Where I come from, a man would have stood there, looking at me, trying to see more. He might have said something like, "You got a little taste of that for me, sweet thang?" Her drawl was enhanced, and I suddenly realized she had worked hard to get rid of that accent since she'd come to Kansas.

"Well that's not right," I said.

"And that's my point." She leaned into me with her shoulder. "You didn't act like that. You didn't try to exploit the situation. You didn't try to exploit me. And that's attractive to a woman in my situation."

"That's what I don't get," I said. "You're grown up. You have a baby. You're beautiful. Women like that aren't interested in boys like me."

"First off, you're a young man, not a boy. Your eighteenth birthday is just a couple of months away ... right?" She didn't wait for me to confirm it. "Second, if I were to compare you to your father, who is also a gentleman, and one of the nicest men I know, I'm much closer to your age than his. But most importantly, Bobby, I can't just decide I don't like you because you're five or six years younger than me. That's not how it works. If it worked that way, you wouldn't have decided to masturbate while looking at pictures of me."

It sounded really different, right out there in the cold light of day. Alluding to what I had done had been bad enough. But when it was on the table, rearing its ugly head, right there in front of her. Well, I felt bad.

"I'm really sorry about that," I said.

She looked at me. "I need to tell you something else ... about the complicated part."

"Okay," I said.

"When you feel like a slut, and you meet the White Knight, it's nice that he treats you with respect. It's wonderful, in fact. But it also hurts, because you know he's the kind of man you really want and need, but you also know you can't have him, because he's too good for you."

I took a breath but she put her fingertips up and against my mouth.

"Especially when he's too young for you, too," she said. She took her fingers down, but went on before I could say anything. "And then the White Knight does something that tells you he isn't quite as pure as you thought. I knew it anyway, down deep. I knew I had put you on some kind of impossible pedestal. I knew that wasn't fair to you. But I needed you to be that man, at least long enough that I could catch my breath and build a foundation of hope to take me forward.

"And when I found those pictures running on your computer, once I got over the shock of even seeing them, I knew that you were just a normal guy, a guy who wanted the same things that every other guy wanted from me."

She put her hand on my knee, and those blue eyes on my face.

"The White Knight had fallen off his horse," she said.

Again I took a breath to say something. But then I couldn't think of anything to say.

"But he was still the White Knight," she whispered.

"What?"

"When I had time to think about it, I realized that it's normal for men to think about those things. And you were still the nice guy I had always known. You hadn't put a move on me. You hadn't tried to get in my pants. It was obvious you'd like to, but I had never known that. Oh, I knew you looked at me, and all that. But that just made me feel pretty, because you weren't vulgar about it. And now I knew you weren't perfect."

"That's for sure," I breathed, finally able to contribute something to the conversation.

"Like I'm not perfect," she said.

She stopped then, just looking at me. Her hand was still on my knee. I was too young, at that specific point in time, to realize the implications of what she had just said ... about how I had gone from being the unattainable White Knight, to a flawed human being like herself. A flawed human being ... who she could now look at as being attainable.

I didn't understand that fully ... but I had a feeling she had just said something important.

"So what does that mean?" I asked.

She leaned closer to me, until her face was only inches from mine.

"It means I don't hate you, Bobby. It means that if it hadn't been those particular pictures, I wouldn't even have minded what you had been doing with them. It means things keep getting more and more complicated, Bobby, because you're still my best friend's son, and the boy next door, and I really shouldn't want to kiss you as much as I do."

Then she did just that. She leaned in and closed those blue eyes and pressed those warm, pink lips against mine.

I'm really glad she kissed me. I know that sounds like a stupid thing to say, considering all that has gone before. I mean, when the gorgeous woman you've fantasized about and jerked off to kisses you, it's obviously a good thing.

Except it's complicated, of course.

But we'll talk about that later. I was glad she kissed me because I had been about to open my mouth and spoil a really wonderful moment. The words "You can't kiss me" were on the lips she kissed, and she stopped me from saying them. I have relived that moment many times over the years, and I'm convinced that if I'd gotten those four little words out, she would have said, "I know," and gotten up and it would all have been over. She would have forgiven me for this and that, and I would have been smitten with her from afar, and life would have gone on.

But she kissed me. So I sat there, dumb and happy, and she pulled her lips away from mine and sighed and said, "See how complicated it is?"

I would, eventually, fully understand how complicated our relationship had become. But being older and wiser than me, she didn't push things. Instead she stood up and asked, "Do you still have those pictures on your laptop?"