Big Bad Neighbor: A Single Dad Next Door Romance

by Tia Siren

  There had been bright spots, like the trip to Disney with Emily and Kiley, and those weekends at the beach. Then there were the low spots, like the night Kiley died, or the night I got drunk and stumbled home to find Emily gone.

  I took a long drag of the cigarette and let the smoke trail from my nostrils. I picked up the shot glass and knocked the foul liquor back in one gulp. It burned my throat like battery acid. I could only imagine what the smoke and the whiskey were doing to my insides. Shit, who was I kidding. As I said, I was not unintelligent. I knew exactly what it was doing. The thing was, I didn’t give a shit. I was killing myself slowly, but I didn’t care and neither did anyone else.

  I licked the whiskey from my lips and stuck the cigarette between my teeth, squinting as the smoke curled into my eyes.

  I stared at the blinking cursor on the computer screen. It was waiting for something from me. What was it? Oh yeah, grades…

  I was supposed to be entering the grades from the final midterm so the students could see if they had passed or failed my class. I squinted at my watch. It was half past five. The grades were supposed to be online by five. Fuck it. The kids didn’t care. Why should I?

  The little bastards. I saw them sitting in my class every day, smiling and chatting like they didn’t have a care in the world. They had their entire lives ahead of them. I was just a fucking speed-bump on the highway of life to them, just something to roll over on the way to their entitled fucking lives.

  I watched the fucking jocks trying to get the girls to notice them, and I noticed the girls trying to catch my eye, thinking they’d get a better grade if I made them the teacher’s pet.

  One of them, a Latino girl with big tits, Rachel Diaz I thought, sat in the front row wearing miniskirts and low-cut blouses. More than once she’d spread her legs to give me a quick peek at her red panties. Once she wasn’t even wearing panties. She slid her ass to the front edge of the seat and opened her legs wide. Her pussy was shaved clean, pink, moist. I just shot her a hard look rather than a hard cock, and she immediately closed her legs and looked away.

  If she thought flashing her pussy was going to get her a good grade in my class, she was dead wrong. She might have had a grade-A cunt, but her midterm essay was a grade B at best.

  The saddest thing was, she was the smartest girl in the class. She didn’t have to flash her pussy at me to get a perfect grade. She just had to show up and do the work.

  Sometimes I wondered if she flashed her pussy at me because she wanted me to touch it. Then I’d see her with the captain of the football team and realize she was just fucking with me, but not in a good way.

  That was fine. The last thing I need was to get involved with a student. That would be the final nail in my academic coffin. Would the pleasure be worth the pain? At this point, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t even remember what pleasure felt like.

  Then there was Audrey something, the dark-haired girl with the big blue eyes and timid smile who always sat next to Rachel. She almost looked like one of those cute old cat paintings from the seventies, the ones with the kittens with oversized eyes and pitiful pouts on their faces.

  I blew a cloud of smoke at the computer screen and picked up the class roster to find her name. There it was, Audrey Ross.

  She was a good student, but unlike Rachel, she had to try hard to earn her grades. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart. She had a good head on her shoulders. She just seemed so afraid of failure that she often torpedoed herself.

  Like coming to me to talk about her attention deficit disorder. Don’t give me that shit. I had ADD, OCD, ADHD, and every other letter of the alphabet you could assign to being fucked up.

  There it was.

  I admitted it to the man in the mirror every fucking day.

  I was one fucked-up son of a bitch.

  I knew it. My family knew it. The dean knew it.

  Emily certainly knew it. It took her two more years of a shitty marriage after Kiley died to realize it, that Chase Hollander was one fucked-up individual.

  * * *

  The buzzing of my phone on the desk jarred me from the drunken slumber I’d fallen into. The cigarette had burned itself out in the ashtray and my shot glass was empty.

  “Fuck” I said, blowing out a smelly breath as I picked up the phone and squinted at the screen. It was Nancy Dorfmann, the head of the English department and my immediate boss. I glanced at the clock on the computer screen before I tapped to answer the call. It was almost nine p.m., four hours after the grades should have been posted.

  I tried to clear the whiskey and smoke from my throat and said, “Hi, Nancy. What’s up?”

  “Professor Hollander, are you aware that your midterm grades have not been posted to the system?” she asked, her thick air of condescension scraping its way into my ear like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  The system she was referring to was the school’s intranet, a private website where professors posted documentation related to classes, tests, study sheets, and grades for tests and exams. Each student had a user name and password that gave them access to everything linked to their account, including their grades. If I had stayed sober long enough to enter each student’s grade into the system, those grades would have been available for students to see. I had never understood the urgency in posting the grades. Most of the little shits didn’t give a rat’s ass about their grades. They took what they got and moved on to torture the next professor. Why bother spending an hour of my time posting grades on a Friday night that nobody gave a shit about?

  “Professor Hollander, are you there?” Nancy’s voice was like a swarm of flies buzzing around my ear. “Professor Hollander, your midterm grades have not been posted.”

  I almost told Nancy to go fuck herself.

  Almost.

  Instead, I tried not to slur the words as I said, “I know, Professor Dorfmann, and I apologize. I’ve been trying to get the grades posted for five hours. The internet keeps going down here at my house.”

  The moment of silence told me that Nancy Dorfmann knew I was full of shit. She said, “Then perhaps you should go to your office and try from there. The rule is all grades are posted by five. It’s now nine fifteen. That’s four hours and fifteen minutes after the deadline.”

  I can tell time, bitch, I thought. I just wasn’t so good at managing it these days.

  “Yes, I understand. Okay, I’ll try once more from here, and if it doesn’t work I’ll drive over to the office and post them from there.”

  “Perhaps you should call a cab to drive you,” she said. I could tell she was wrinkling her fat nose on the other end of the phone, as if she could smell the stench of the cigarettes and whiskey fuming through the phone line.

  “And Professor Hollander, I’d like to see you Monday in my office,” she said. “We need to discuss the status of your tenure.”

  I had stuck a cigarette between my teeth and was about to fire it up when the word “tenure” stuck in my ear.

  Tenure was just a fancy bullshit academic term that meant you had a job until retirement.

  For college professors like myself, tenure was the holy grail. It meant you had a job for life, unless you did something stupid to fuck it up. I had become tenured at Trent State after my fifth year of teaching there, which was ten years ago.

  Tenure meant that I could only be fired with what was called “just cause.” Not “just because” Nancy Dorfmann felt like it, but by “just case,” which in my case could be anything from telling Nancy Dorfmann to suck my fat cock on the steps of the administration building (which I was dying to do) to showing up drunk for class (which I had done repeatedly) to having a sexual relationship with a student (I’d come close a few times but had never had the balls to follow through) to being convicted of a violent crime like murder.

  I still thought about killing the drunk driver who took Kiley’s life, but only when I was really, really drunk, which was most every night now.

  “Professor Hollander, did you hear me?
”

  “Um, yes, I heard you.”

  “Please call my assistant Monday morning to set up a meeting,” she said. “And I’ll expect to see all of your class grades posted within the hour.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said as the phone went dead in my ear.

  I tossed the phone on the desk and lit the cigarette that had been dangling between my teeth. I filled the shot glass to the rim and tapped the space bar to wake up the computer.

  “I’ll post your fucking grades, you old cunt,” I sneered as the smoke bellowed from my lips and across the top of the whiskey glass. I licked my lips like a wolf about to devour an entire classroom of lambs and entered the first grade.

  I didn’t need the sheet of paper with the actual grades listed on it.

  Nope, no need.

  This term all the whining, entitled, self-absorbed little motherfuckers got the same grade.

  And it wasn’t going to be an A.

  CHAPTER THREE: Audrey

  “Will you please put your freakin’ phone away!” Rachel said, shooting me a scolding look across the table that was covered in beer bottles and shooter glasses. “Forget your fucking English Lit. grade and have a good time!”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I shot back. “You know you’re getting an A. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “I have plenty to worry about,” Rachel said, raising a perfectly manicured eyebrow at me. She nodded at her boyfriend Duke, who was at the bar getting another round of drinks.

  Duke was the star of the Trent State football team and was HUGE: six-foot-seven, over three hundred pounds of pure muscle, and, according to Rachel, he had the longest cock of any player on the team. How she knew such a statistic to be true was beyond me (unless she had seen every player’s cock, which was not out of the realm of possibilities with Rachel), but she said that “Bruiser”—yes, Duke’s cock had a name—was more python than penis.

  I asked her once how she accommodated such a large thing in her various orifices and she just smiled and said, “One inch at a time, baby. One inch at a time.”

  I watched Duke as he carried the drinks back from the bar. He was wearing tight jeans, and sure enough, I could see the bulge of Bruiser in his jeans. It was snaking from his crotch down his right thigh toward his knee. I couldn’t imagine having something that big inside me. Who am I kidding; at this point I couldn’t imagine having anything inside me other than my finger-besties!

  “Are you sure I can’t hook you up with one of Duke’s pals?” Rachel asked, leaning over the table. She was wearing a low-cut blouse and a bra that pushed her big boobs up and out. I kept waiting for her boobs to just spill out over the table and knock over all the drinks.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I said, checking my phone again. Still no grades from Professor Hollander’s class. I picked up the fresh glass of draft beer Duke slid my way and sighed into it.

  I said, “I think I need to focus on my grades rather than getting laid.”

  “You need to get laid,” Duke said in that deep, bellowing voice of his. He cut his eyes at Rachel and smiled. “Getting laid makes everything better. Doesn’t it, Rach?”

  “Yes, it does, baby,” Rachel said, leaning over to run her tongue down his cheek. They cooed at each other for a moment, seemingly forgetting that there was anyone else around.

  I saw her arm move as her hand went to his lap. I saw his eyes soften as her hand found his giant cock beneath the table. Duke closed his eyes and opened his mouth to breathe.

  Crap. She was stroking his cock under the table, just a foot away from me… I wondered what it felt like… I bet Duke would let me touch it if I asked…

  Rachel glanced at me long enough to read the look on my face. She pulled back her hand and straightened in her chair. Duke had the look of a child who’d just had his puppy taken away.

  “What about Brad Smith?” Rachel asked, nodding at a boy standing near the bar with a group of friends. “He’s a little nerdy, but nerds can be great fucks. They’re just so grateful to have their little pencil dicks in a pussy, they’ll do anything you please.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, shooting her a frown. I was not comfortable discussing my virginity—or Brad Smith’s pencil dick—in front of Duke. “Can we just drop this?”

  Rachel shook her head at me. “Okay, fine. I won’t bring it up again. All I know is if you would get your cherry popped, you’d feel a lot better.”

  “You’re a virgin?” Duke said the words loud enough to wake the dead. His eyes bulged out and his rugged face took on a “no way” expression. “Fuck, Audrey, Rachel is right. You need to get your cherry popped. You need to get your cherry popped tonight!”

  I glared at Rachel. “Seriously? You told him?”

  Rachel took on a hurt look. “Hey, everybody knows you’re a virgin, Audrey. It’s not a great secret.”

  I felt my heart grinding to a halt in my chest. I blinked at her a few times to make sure this wasn’t some awful dream. “What did you say?”

  Duke was leaning in now, listening. Rachel elbowed him in the chest and ordered him to go fetch her a basket of wings. When we were alone, she said, “Audrey, this is a small school. Everybody knows everybody else’s business.”

  “So everybody knows I’m a virgin?” I didn’t know why the thought frightened me so, but it did. I suddenly felt as if I were carrying a deep, dark secret that everyone knew despite my best efforts to hide it.

  “Great,” I said with tears in my eyes. “I’ll be laughed out of school.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Rachel said, reaching across the table to squeeze my arm. “You’re acting like you have the plague or some horrible disease. You’ve just never had your cherry popped. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, you should be proud of the fact that you haven’t let some random boy shove his cock into you.”

  “I guess so,” I said, looking down at my phone. I swiped the screen and refreshed the app. Still no grades. What the hell was Hollander waiting for?

  “Look, why don’t you let Duke set you up with one of the guys on the team,” she said, squeezing my arm again. She waited until I was looking into her eyes. “Come on, someone nice. Even if you don’t get your cherry popped, you get a little action. At least it’ll take your mind off that damn phone! Look around. Pick one. Hell, pick two if you want.”

  “How do I know they’ll want to have sex with me?” I asked. What a funny question to ask. I would have laughed if I hadn’t felt so pathetic.

  “Trust me, honey,” she said with a sly grin. “These boys will fuck anything. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Any one of them would be lucky to have you riding his cock.”

  “Oh my,” I said, covering a smile behind the glass of beer. Rachel not only fucked like a dude; she talked like one.

  She said, “I’m just saying, pick one and I’ll get Duke to hook you up.”

  I blew out a long breath and let my eyes go around the room. All the football players were there. The room was so thick with sweat and testosterone that you could cut it with a knife. I’d never been inside the boys’ locker room, but I imagined this was how it smelled.

  Before I could choose a cock to ride (sorry, couldn’t resist), my phone buzzed. I swiped open the screen and felt my breath catch in my throat.

  “Hollander just posted our grades,” I said, holding up the phone as if it were a Christmas gift I was almost too nervous to unwrap.

  Rachel rolled her eyes and sighed. “Fine. Check your fucking grade so we can get on with getting you laid.”

  We both giggled at her accidental rhyme, but when I refreshed the app to see the grade Hollander had given me, the smile melted from my face.

  CHAPTER FOUR: Chase

  Ayers, Melvin … F ...

  Bradly, Sharon … F ...

  Crenshaw, Andrew … F ...

  Dalton, Michelle … F …

  I paused to light another cigarette and filled my lungs with smoke. I blew the smoke out of the side of my mouth and smi
led at the computer screen.

  These little fuckers. They’ll shit in their pants when they see these grades, the entitled little bastards. I couldn’t help but smile as I entered in the next grade.

  Diaz, Rachel … F …

  Let’s see how happy you are when you see this grade, Miss Diaz. I seriously doubt you’ll spread your legs wide open for me in class again. Sad, but oh fucking well…

  I shot back another hit of whiskey and licked my lips. I was having a ball. I was also drunk. Shit, I was beyond drunk. I’d reached drunk two hours ago.

  I was shitfaced…blind-running drunk, as my old alcoholic father would say. Life is easier, boy, when you’re blind-running drunk.

  I didn’t understand what he meant back then, those times when I’d find him lying in a pool of his own puke on the kitchen floor. I understand it now. He was right. Life was easier when you were blind-running drunk.

  I squinted through the smoke at the screen.

  Preston, Miles … F …

  Ross, Audrey … F …

  As I hit the F key and watched the letter appear next to Audrey Ross’s name, I almost felt bad for her. She always seemed so serious in class, so worried about her grade. Unlike most of the little shits who wasted my time for two hours every week, Audrey Ross at least seemed to care. Oh well. Sorry. Moving on.

  Smith, Wesley … F …

  Thomas, Erin … F …

  CHAPTER FIVE: Audrey

  “What the fuck?” I stared at my phone with my mouth hanging open. I refreshed the screen again. The grade didn’t change.

  Rachel pulled her tongue out of Duke’s ear long enough to glance at me. When she saw me staring at my phone with a look of horror on my face, she reached across the table and squeezed my arm gain. My arm was getting red from all the reassuring squeezes.

  “Audrey, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “He gave me an F,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. I held up the phone so she could see the screen. Midterm grade: F.

  “What the fuck?” Rachel said, more annoyed than surprised. “That motherfucker. Hang on.” She found her phone amid the bottles and shot glasses on the table and launched the app. I saw her eyes widen as the screen updated.