Jaywalking

by Rachel Ember

  * * *

  Yet we strive for them, untiring until

  * * *

  they oh so inevitably

  * * *

  go again—uncaptured.

  Emile looked at the page for a while in the pool of light from the desk lamp, and then drew a few light, steady pencil lines over the stanza, crossing it out without wanting to obliterate the words. They were what he thought of as stepping-stone words; not invaluable, but not the poem. Not yet.

  Outside the window, though the sunrise was still far off, the first signs of its approach had cast a kind of fog over the darkness. It made the sky opaque, like a wet piece of slate. On the floor at his feet, Godot sighed in his sleep, his legs stiffening in a brief stretch. Emile smiled, leaned down, and combed his fingers through Godot’s plush white coat. When he sat up, he picked up his pen again.

  Hold your happiness in its brief, incandescent present

  * * *

  Then sustain yourself with the heat of its memory

  * * *

  through the long season to come.

  Jay wasn’t in class the next day.

  Somehow, Jay’s absence was even more distracting than his presence, but Emile let himself be drawn into the other students’ reflections on the material. He was proud of them. Sure, he would be shocked if at least one of them didn’t plagiarize part of their midterm essay, but all in all, they were a good group. He was a little ashamed of how much he’d dreaded teaching this class before the start of the semester.

  Natalie, his enthusiastic student from the front row, had scheduled her appointment to discuss the midterm directly after class, so she followed him from the classroom to Cross Hall. She chattered the whole walk about how much she’d enjoyed the latest addition to Oprah’s Book Club. Emile listened with half an ear, trying to nod encouragingly; he couldn’t help but be somewhat charmed by a person’s passion for any book, but contemporary literature just wasn’t his thing. Poetry, yes—he enjoyed contemporary poets very much. But he liked his novels set in a past that he could romanticize, and full of dense language and rambling imagery.

  Fortunately, Natalie was easy to steer toward a cohesive topic for her essay, and he gave her two books that would perfectly frame the competing arguments for her theory and sent her on her way twenty minutes later. Then, he considered whether or not he could run to the break room for coffee. He wasn’t expecting another student, but there was always a chance one would stop by at random.

  Someone knocked on the door. “Come in!” he called without turning around. When the door opened, though, some bolt of precognition struck him and he stiffened, knowing who he would see before he turned around.

  Sure enough, Jay stood just inside Emile’s office, quietly closing the door behind him.

  Emile stood up. “You weren’t in class.”

  Jay shook his head. He always looked good, but today Emile’s mouth watered at the sight of him. He was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt in some kind of moisture-wicking athletic fabric. It clung to the curves of his muscles with a faint sheen. His jeans were well-worn, and as usual, he was wearing shoes that suggested he wanted to be able to take off and run at a moment’s notice.

  “I know what you said,” Jay said, pushing back his hair, “about how you couldn’t date one of your students. So, I dropped your class.”

  Emile definitely hadn’t seen that coming. Jay must have just done it that day, while Emile had been in class, because the system would have sent him a notification of a dropped student.

  Not that it mattered. The gesture struck him like a blow. He didn’t have the heart to tell Jay that what would cause a scandal was less that Jay was his student—although that was definitely part of it—but that he was a student at Walland at all.

  Blinking through his confusion, Emile said, “I thought you were here to discuss your midterm.”

  Jay smiled, his eyes careful. “No. I just knew you’d be here.” He bit his lip. “Is that okay?”

  Emile pressed his lips together over a smile and nodded hard, several times. A grin slowly blotted out the uncertainty on Jay’s face. The sight of his confidence re-emerging made Emile’s pulse leap. He had always been the less experienced person, in every couple he had been a part of and certainly in every Dom/sub dynamic. He needed to find a way to guide Jay in order for this to work, at least at first. With that in mind, he spoke before he could change his mind.

  “Maybe you could lock the door?”

  Emile hadn’t thought Jay’s grin could get any wider. Emile wanted to kiss his dimple so badly, it took effort not to vault over his desk. Instead, he stayed still while Jay turned the deadbolt on the door, and then they stared at each other again. The charge in the air was intoxicating.

  “If I were here about my midterm,” Jay murmured, stepping away from the door and up to Emile’s desk, leaning over it so that only a few feet of solid oak separated them, “what would you say?”

  “That I think you’d write a very impressive, nuanced discussion of the theme of trusting oneself,” Emile said, but his voice was rough and breathless. Jay’s blue eyes had taken on a predatory gleam. Emile felt his intent gaze like a touch.

  “Maybe I’d turn in something ridiculous, just for an excuse to get called in here for a lecture,” Jay said with a low tone. “Tell you that you’d have to fix my grade if you wanted me to fuck you.”

  Emile’s eyes fluttered closed, all his breath leaving him with a sound somewhere between a sigh and a whimper.

  “Come here,” Jay said. Emile leaned forward and Jay’s warm fingers closed around his chin. Then, they kissed.

  Jay’s extra inches made it easier for him to bridge his half of the desk; Emile, on the other hand, noticed the hard edge of the wooden surface digging painfully into his thighs after a few moments. Jay was holding Emile’s face between his hands. Emile was resting his hands on Jay’s wrists. The kiss was quiet and thorough.

  After a few seconds, Emile opened his eyes. Up close, Jay’s eyes were the clear blue of late-summer skies, his eyelashes amber-gold. He was Emile’s inter-season in human form.

  Pained by the barrier of the desk in more ways than one, Emile abandoned his dignity and levered himself up, scrambled across, and wound up perched on the opposite edge with his legs on either side of Jay’s waist. Jay laughed and slipped his arms around Emile’s back, then fell quiet as they kissed some more.

  Breaking away some long moments later with a pant, Emile rested his face against Jay’s shoulder. Jay stroked his hair.

  “We shouldn’t do this here,” Emile whispered.

  “I know,” Jay agreed. “But I really want to. I mean, I thought you were hot even before I knew about the professor thing. But the professor thing really works for me.” He rolled his hips against Emile’s to demonstrate, and feeling the impressively large and hard evidence firsthand, Emile groaned.

  “If you were here to bargain for a better grade,” he said before he could stop himself, “what would you offer?”

  Jay slid a hand between them and stroked Emile roughly through his worsted-wool trousers. The silky pressure of Jay’s hot hand made Emile see stars for a beat.

  “I’d let you choose,” Jay said against his ear, breath tickling, before he pulled Emile’s earlobe between his teeth. Emile scooted further off the desk and crossed his ankles behind Jay’s legs, forcing their cocks together and earning a gasp from Jay that Emile chorused. “Damn.” Jay’s voice came out strained as one of his hands snuck up the back of Emile’s vest. “I love you in these vests.”

  “We really can’t,” Emile managed. “Not here.”

  Jay took a deep breath and shifted like he would step back, but then he paused. “Emile?”

  Emile’s thighs gripped Jay’s hips, and he had one hand clamped on the back of Jay’s neck.

  “Oh,” he breathed, slowly letting go. “Right.”

  Jay eased away from him, but not far. He put his hands on Emile’s knees and they smiled at each other.
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  “So,” Emile said.

  “So.”

  “I have office hours for another—” he glanced at the clock and grimaced, “two hours. And someone could come by any minute.”

  Jay nodded, his smile small and wry, still looking at Emile as though he’d like to take him apart. Like he’d do anything Emile would let him do. The knowledge was heady, but not quite enough for Emile to have sex in his office in the middle of the day.

  “What are you doing later?”

  Jay grinned, his dimple appearing again. “Walking dogs.”

  Emile laughed, his hands itchy and restless, though whether it was with the urge to write or the urge to take handfuls of Jay’s sinful black shirt, he couldn’t say.

  “That works out perfectly.”

  Emile accomplished nothing all afternoon except watching the wall clock—and stealing glances at his watch, too, as though one of them might suddenly fail.

  He hadn’t grown up wearing watches. He was young enough that he’d carried a cell phone all of his adult life. In grad school, he’d started wearing a wristwatch in an effort at refined behavior. Of course, back then, he’d been striving to convince himself he was old enough—sophisticated enough, mature enough—for Ben. Just… enough for Ben, period.

  Emile was fifteen years older than Jay and twenty years younger than Ben. The gaps weren’t that different. Yet, he knew that he would never make Jay feel the way Ben had made him feel. That he could ever have thought otherwise made him feel ridiculous now. He wished he could turn back the years and tell himself his youth, his fresh hope, was nothing to be ashamed of. That he should value it—and Ben should, too—the way Emile now valued it in Jay.

  What was between them was so new, he knew he shouldn’t saddle it with the weight of expectation, but he couldn’t help it. He had a romantic soul that could sometimes malfunction in reality. But he’d also lived through enough years and disappointments to know how rare it was to feel for anyone what he felt for Jay, let alone for it to be reciprocated. He valued it as the gift that it was.

  His office hours technically ended at three-thirty, but at three-fifteen, he started packing up his messenger bag. If a student showed up at this point, he’d have to ask them to come back when they’d have more than fifteen minutes to meet, anyway.

  Then, because his luck was abysmal, someone knocked on the door and then opened it without waiting for Emile to answer.

  The rhythm of the knock had been familiar, and so was the exact length of the moment between the knock sounding and the door opening. Still, Emile’s thoughts lagged a moment behind, so that he wasn’t thinking, Oh, it’s Ben, until Ben was already standing inside the room.

  He was wearing a black suit, which should have been ridiculous in such a warm season, but he just looked elegant. His shirt was pale pink, which brought out the blush of his mouth against his beard. “I realize I’m showing up uninvited, but I think we should clear the air.”

  Emile said nothing, so Ben went on cautiously.

  “You have good reason to be angry. And I’ve given up on you forgiving me. But—”

  “I do.”

  Ben’s eyes widened. Emile had surprised himself, too. He cleared his throat and made a tiny adjustment to his tie, even though he knew it was perfect because he’d checked it in the mirror after Jay had left, ensuring that he didn’t look as debauched as he felt.

  “I forgive you. I don’t want to be angry anymore. You’re right, we have to clear the air. We work together.”

  “Well.” Ben put his hand on his hip and frowned. “I see. I must say I’m surprised. Before the meeting the other night, you—”

  “I know,” Emile said, cutting him off. He wanted to get home early enough that he could ready himself before Jay arrived, and therefore, he really didn’t have time for this conversation. “I was angry. But now….”

  He looked at Ben. Really looked. And a door opened somewhere in his mind, shedding light on corners he had deliberately kept in shadow.

  “It hadn’t been right with us for a while. What you did was terrible, but it was a way of ending things between us. And we’d run our course. We were going to end.”

  Ben looked sad. “I didn’t want things to end. I just wanted them to be different. More like the beginning.”

  “Well,” was really all Emile could say. A bitter thought and the image of Seth, around the age Emile had been when he and Ben had first gotten together, flared in his mind. But just briefly, like the last breath of a dying fire. He really didn’t want to be angry anymore, and the anger that was there would disappear entirely if he offered it no encouragement, he realized.

  Also, it was nearly three-thirty, and he needed to go, so he just said, “I have to leave.”

  Looking hurt, Ben nodded with a flat smile. “Of course, you do.”

  Emile sighed internally, seeing that Ben was under the misconception that Emile was troubled by being in the same room with him and sought escape for escape’s sake. He didn’t have the time nor sufficient interest to set him straight. So, he just picked up his bag and, when Ben held open the door for him, slipped past.

  Seeing metaphor and symbolism where it wasn’t—the poet’s curse. But still, Emile drew a certain irrepressible satisfaction from walking away from Ben, toward Jay.

  Nine

  Jay

  October

  After tucking Sebastian back inside his front door, Jay was already hurrying down the sidewalk by 712 Hickamore Lane when he realized that the Dachshund’s leash was still in his hand.

  “Dammit,” he hissed to himself, turning around and retracing his steps.

  When he’d walked Susie, he’d been a block away before he’d realized that he hadn’t locked the door behind them. The Lab had been bewildered when he’d turned back toward the house, obviously convinced he intended to cut their walk short. Jay had practically had to drag her along, assuring her in words he knew she couldn’t understand that he just had to lock the door and then she’d get her allotted ten minutes.

  But only those ten minutes, because while Jay frequently took his time walking the more energetic dogs, he had somewhere else to be today.

  Now, he quickly unlocked the door to Sebastian’s house and stuck his upper body over the threshold to reach inside. Sebastian was midway into the puffy round dog bed by the staircase, and looked over his shoulder at Jay with a ‘Why are you back so soon?’ expression of canine puzzlement, one ear cocked back.

  “I know, I know,” Jay muttered, slipping the leash onto its peg on the wall just inside the door. “I’m a mess.” He wiggled his fingers at the dog as he slipped outside, carefully locked the door, and hurried down the steps toward the sidewalk yet again.

  Jay really was a mess… he felt jittery and his thoughts were all over the place. He’d been half-desperate to get to Emile’s house when he’d left his office. But as the minutes, and then the hours, had passed since that moment, Jay’s eagerness had been joined by anxiety. He felt this way in certain stress dreams—where some big game was coming up and he couldn’t wait to play, but then as he showed up at the field, he’d realized he’d forgotten all of the plays.

  And although they hadn’t said it outright, Jay knew that when he went to Emile’s, they were probably going to have sex. So, in a way, maybe he was anticipating an athletic performance. Except that, unlike in soccer, when it came to sex, he’d read the rule book but barely practiced, much less played a real game.

  Sure, Jay understood how it all worked and knew what to do... in theory. He’d visited his fair share of relevant websites and he’d even read erotica. But he knew his inexperience would still show, and that being hesitant, or needing to be helped along, didn’t fit the dynamic between him and Emile. The charge that had always erupted between them had been lightning-fast and magically hot. What would it feel like when they instead got to the main event, and Emile realized that Jay had absolutely no idea what to do with him?

  At the bottom of Emile’s driveway, Ja
y was brought to a standstill by his mounting worries. He looked up into the trees and the brush that shielded the house from view, and he swallowed, stepping off the sidewalk into the grass. A white-barked Sycamore grew close to the sidewalk, a power line snaking above it; although it had the girth of old-growth, its shape was strange and twisted, pared back to keep it out of the way of all of the obstructions in the place it had happened to grow. Jay traced the twisted shape of the tree’s limbs and wondered if he was doing something out of order. Emile was so much… more… than even Jay’s wildest dreams of the kind of man he’d one day fall for. Was he supposed to have met Emile when he was older and wiser and more experienced? When he’d know how to take control of every part of the physical relationship, in the way he knew Emile wanted him to?

  He sighed. Maybe the timing of their meeting could have been better. But it wasn’t like Jay could just set aside his feelings, go accrue all of the life experience he wished he already had, and show up on Emile’s doorstep again in a couple of years.

  So, he rolled his shoulders and started up the driveway.

  He could do this. He just had to remember how right things felt with Emile. He hadn’t felt any uncertainty when they’d been together at Laramie’s Bar, or in their time alone in the classroom, or earlier against Emile’s desk.

  The memories made his heart speed up and buoyed his courage. Yes, he could do this, and he’d make it good. He would be good for Emile.

  Jay broke into a jog, his worn blue Nikes crunching over the gravel and then, as he reached the footbridge that led to the front door, thudding on the boards. He raised his hand to knock, but as he curled his fingers into his palm to make a fist, he saw movement in the living room through one of the big windows. Godot trotted into view, and closely behind him came Emile, in different clothing than Jay had seen him in last—an oatmeal-colored Henley and dark gray pants—and bare feet.