School Ties

by Tamsen Parker

  “Good morning, gentlemen. My name is Zach Shepherd. Mr. Shepherd to you, please, and we’ll be spending first period together this year.”

  I get through the day, classes, meals, practice, without getting hard although my blood’s pooling in this funny way like it’s affected by tides, always at the ready to make a break for my dick. When I stumble into my tiny apartment after proctoring study hall, I barely make it into the shower before I’m gripping my cock, pulling with rough and angry strokes, my other hand spread against the cool institutional tiles while I jerk off. When I come—thick, hot and heavy against the wall and dripping down my closed fist—I choke out her name and wonder how I’m going to survive the next year. Wanting her, maybe watching her find someone else. Coming back here was the worst idea I’ve ever had.

  You’re such a stupid fuck, Shepherd.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Erin

  It’s been a month. A month since he’s been here, a month since he’s been avoiding me. He’s not rude. No, Shep wouldn’t be rude, but god, it hurts. I can’t catch him in his classroom—he leaves as soon as his classes are over—and he’s laser-focused as a coach so I can’t even make eye contact when they’re out on the soccer field. He won’t sit at a table I’m at in the faculty dining hall and if I sit down at a table he’s already at, he’ll make an excuse after a few minutes and leave.

  I’m a pariah and I have no idea why. Not that he’s a barrel of monkeys with anyone else—he’s always been serious and earnest and that hasn’t changed. He’s not sunshine and bluebirds when he’s not with me, more like an overcast day, but whenever he sees me, or even when he senses me . . . I don’t know how he does that, anyway, but his shoulders stiffen and his face darkens without having to set eyes on me. I’m a storm cloud.

  I gave up for a while, but that only made me feel worse. My appetite has suffered, my attitude has suffered. I am suffering. Aunt Tilly had asked me about it when I had dinner with her and Uncle Rett on Sunday.

  “Is everything all right, Erin? You’ve seemed down lately.”

  Down is an understatement, but I’d plastered a fake smile on my face, not showing my teeth. “Yeah. Getting back into the swing of things is a little rough.”

  Maybe they’d speculated later that it’s because of the divorce, but they’d be wrong. I have fleeting moments of missing Will, but it’s overwhelmed with relief. That decision was absolutely for the best.

  Tilly’d raised a skeptical brow before cutting into her duck à l’orange. It’s one of her specialties.

  “How’s it having one of your old students teach next door? Mr. Shepherd seems to be doing well.”

  I’d swallowed my wine before I could choke on it. “Yeah, the boys seem to like him.”

  It’s a weak endorsement, but if I tell her how I sometimes sit in my classroom during my free periods to hear him through the wall, I might cry. He’s brilliant. Really brilliant. I love to hear him talk, love the way his mind works, the way he explains things in a way I never would. I wish I could sit in his classroom and have him teach me, instruct me, fill me. That’s when my thoughts start to wander away from his brilliant mind and on to less cerebral and more . . . corporeal thoughts. Fleshy, sweaty, sexy thoughts.

  Luckily, Uncle Rett had jumped in, talking about how our thirds soccer team was crushing the other schools in the division under Shep’s leadership. My unfulfillable fantasies had puffed into the air, a victim of reality.

  I’m tired of suffering. I’ve suffered enough. If he’s going to be like this, I at least deserve an explanation. So that’s how I find myself standing outside his door, poised to knock. The hand by my side is curled in on itself in sympathy and I steel myself, setting my jaw and my brow before I rap my knuckles against the wood.

  When the door opens, it’s clear I’m the last person on earth Shep’s expecting. Was he expecting someone else? My stomach lurches at the thought, remembering knocking on Will’s door.

  “Erin.” His dark brows crease while he takes a step back, his head turning like a horse’s yanked by reins. “What are you doing here?”

  All my resolve deserts me, scattering in flimsy scraps all over the stained hallway carpeting. My shoulders collapse and I can’t meet his eyes. “I . . .”

  “Is everything okay?” Just like that, he’s back. The Shep I remember who was always so concerned about me, offering me his fleece, walking me back from Turner at night, rushing me to the ER. His hands are braced against the doorframe like he’s trying to hold himself back. I wish I’d come here with some problem for him to solve, a crisis to manage. But all I’ve got is, “Yes, everything is fine,” and I hate the way a barrier gets drawn down between us, his expression shuttering. Why is he locking me out?

  “I . . . Can I come in?” My voice is small and desperate.

  He digs a running-shoed toe into the hardwood on his side of the threshold and looks down at it. It’s as if he’s expecting some unusual reaction, a cloud of smoke or maybe a secret hole to open that he can slide through. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Okay, then. I look over my shoulder to make sure there aren’t any little ears to hear what I’m about to say, but the hallway’s clear and silent. I gather whatever pieces of tenacity I can and wait until he looks me in the face. “Why are you avoiding me? Since you’ve gotten here, you barely speak to me.”

  “I’m not avoiding you, I’m busy. You know how it is.”

  His response is rote, like he’s practiced it. Is it the height of narcissism to think maybe he has in case I ever came around to call him on this? You’re so stupid and conceited, Erin. God. But then he scrubs a hand through his hair, and through the gap I can see through a doorway on the opposite side of the hall. Into his bedroom. At least I think it’s his bedroom. Tacked over a desk to the institutional-beige walls . . . Are those his drawings from his senior year? Along with one I haven’t seen before. A finely detailed portrait of heels lifting out of a pair of shoes. My shoes. I’d recognize those purple flats anywhere. Even from the back, even in grayscale.

  The sight gives me the courage to stand firm instead of turning tail and running away, inflates the hope inside of me that this thing between us hasn’t just been in my head. It’s there. It has to be. Why else would he have pictures of me hanging in his room? When he notices me gazing over his shoulder, he raises his hand to the doorframe again, blocking my view. I’d like to push past him or duck under his arm to look my fill but I won’t invade his space. I will, however, give it one more try.

  “I do. I’m busy, too. But, I thought . . .”

  “What? What did you think?” I hate the bordering-on-derisive note of his questions. “Cruel” is not a word I would’ve ever dreamed I’d associate with Shep but that’s what this is. Downright mean. I could call him on it, set up evidence like we’re in the midst of some television courtroom drama. Exhibit A: You kissed me. Exhibit B: All the updates you sent into the bulletin. Exhibit C: You came back here. I could go on for days with all the small, unsaid ways he’s told me that he cares for me, is attracted to me. But the habit of not saying these things out loud, of keeping the pull between us a furtive secret we don’t even dare whisper, is a hard one to break. All I can do is gesture weakly behind him.

  “What are those, then? Your drawings of me. I thought they meant something. At least they used to. I don’t understand. I just—”

  “Stay away from me, Erin.”

  His voice is hard but brittle. Like if I took a hammer and chisel to his words, they’d flake off in sharp slabs. Stay away from me, Erin. There’s a jagged warning there and it punctures any hope I had of us being together. Or being friends. Or being anything at all. He didn’t deny it but it doesn’t matter. My eyelids flutter, tears behind them, and my stupid weak chin quivers. Don’t cry. He’ll pat you on the head and maybe hold you because you’re pathetic, because that’s what he’d do for anyone.<
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  I’ve bared my expansive vulnerability to enough men and I’m not going to do it again to someone who doesn’t give a care about me or my stupid feelings. My throat is tight and it makes my words come out tiny and weak. “Will do.”

  I open and close my hands, which have been clenched by my sides this whole time, and turn to hurry down the hallway, hoping to at least make the stairwell before I start to cry.

  Shep

  Erin hustles down the narrow hall and I hope none of the doors open as she rushes by. It’s bad enough she’s so upset but the last thing she needs is one of the guys seeing her like this. I wait until she’s turned into the stairwell, a hand clamped over her mouth, before I shut my door and slide to the floor with the ancient wood against my back. I can see my drawings hanging on the wall over my desk, the ones she must have seen. I’m just glad my sketchbook was shoved under my bed when she came by.

  Drawing Erin is not exactly a hobby of the past. I’ve got pages of pieces of her, ranging in time from the day I first saw her to yesterday. On the nights I’m not jerking off thinking about her—and who am I kidding, often on the nights I do—I draw her. Sometimes I try not to but it’s always the same: the slope of her shoulder against a bright blue sky while she sits in the bleachers, a drift of her hair as she walks down to her classroom on a windy day, the clutch of a pen in her hand while she takes notes in a faculty meeting.

  If I thought avoiding her day in and day out, watching her laugh and smile and chat with other people, listening to her teach her classes through the horsehair plaster that separates us was bad, I was right. But this is a hundred thousand times worse. Knowing she had to screw up the courage to confront me, forced herself to walk up all those stairs to knock on my door, hope in her heart that maybe it didn’t have to be this way or maybe hurt sinking in her stomach because she didn’t understand what she’s done wrong. Because she’d make it her fault, I know she would. Will.

  I scrub my hands through my hair and push off the floor to look out the window. There she is, like I knew she’d be. Running across campus with her hand still covering her mouth, probably trying to contain the tears because I made her cry. I watch her make her way across the quad and into Sullivan, catch a fleeting glimpse of pumping legs through the window that looks into the stairwell that leads to her apartment. It’s like watching a replay of four years ago. The buildings are different, but the small, pained shape of her hurtling across campus is the same. A knife twists in my gut that I have anything in common with Will Chase.

  It’s for the best. She’ll stay away from me, get over it, find some nice vanilla guy who’ll tell her she’s pretty and make love to her. Not someone who wants to pull her hair, spank her until she cries, bind her up in black leather, and have her up the ass. In all fairness, I’d tell her she’s pretty, too, because she is. She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. And I’d tell her I love her, all the time. Because I do.

  I want to destroy something. But knowing I don’t have the cash handy to fix anything I break, I strip off my jeans, throw on some shorts and head down to the gym to lift. Because lifting weights is the simplest thing in the world and everything else is too complicated.

  Erin

  It’s the day of the fall art show. I used to half love and half loathe this day every year. Loved it because remembering the pencil drawings Shep did of me gave me a thrill. They’d been beautiful and took my breath away when I came into the alcove, unsuspecting. But after seeing them in his apartment when I confronted him last week—a glaring reminder of how he used to feel about me but doesn’t anymore—that makes me sad, too.

  I guess that just leaves the loathing. I’ve hated it because that was the night of The Mistake. Having what was supposed to be meaningless sex with Will is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

  Even though it was a Mistake, with a capital M, I do wonder. What would’ve happened if I hadn’t had a miscarriage? Would we have scrapped and struggled our way to a happily ever after? Or would it have been equally as disastrous, and having a baby would’ve made it all the harder to leave? But I do think of that tiny lost life from time to time. There was a reason I miscarried: the baby wasn’t viable and I can’t count how many people have told me it wasn’t my fault and it doesn’t mean anything. I believe them, I do. But I also want to mourn and no one wants to hear that, either.

  So my emotions are already running close to the surface as I shower and dress. I put on my purple ballet flats and a new dress I bought over the summer because it looked cute when I tried it on and I couldn’t remember the last time I bought a dress. While I was preening under the flattering soft lights in the dressing room, I did not, absolutely did not, picture myself sitting across a candlelit table from Shep, peeking over my menu to see his trademark gravity applied to picking out his entrée. Flushing when he caught me staring. “Accidentally” grazing his ankle with my foot under the table because we’d be sitting so close together our knees would touch.

  I had none of those thoughts then and I’m not having them now. Nope. And none of the sadness that wrings my stomach out like a damp hand towel because that will never happen. Stay away from me, Erin. His words echo through my head as if he were standing behind me, leaning over my shoulder and saying them into my ear. It’s harder than usual to apply my eyeliner and mascara because tears are making a break for my cheeks, but I manage and then I’m set to go. Is it selfish and awful of me to hope Shep won’t be there? It would only take a scrape of a razor to make me bleed and Shep’s always been more of a cleaver where my emotions are concerned, for better or for worse. I don’t know what it is about him that hits me so hard, but . . . Battered. That’s how I feel as I wander about my apartment for a few minutes before I can’t procrastinate any longer.

  I’ll put in my appearance, make sure my students who had invited me see me there, glad-hand any parents who’ve shown up and then I’ll come home. I’ve got a book waiting under my bed for me. It’s one that’s supposed to be especially filthy. I’ve been saving it as a treat and I’ll earn it if I can get through tonight without bursting into tears.

  Shep

  “Hello?”

  “Caleb?” The voice on the other end of the phone sounds too old, more like one of my students than my brother, but when he says, “Zach!” I know it’s my stubborn mind insisting he’s still six like when I left home and not about to turn fourteen. He could be one of my students next year.

  “How’s it going?”

  There’s a pause, too long, before he says “Fine.”

  “Dad there?” That would explain why he wouldn’t want to say much.

  “No.”

  “Mom?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s up?” Another silence so long it makes me want to get in my car and drive straight to Shamokin to shake the answer out of his head. “Caleb. Tell me. Now.”

  “I got my mid-semester grades.”

  “And?”

  “I’m getting Cs in social studies and English.”

  “Okay. How about math and science?”

  “I’m flunking.”

  Shit. I knew he’d been having a rough time—he’d told me so a few weeks ago—but I didn’t know it was this bad. I rein in my flip-out and try to keep my tone even. “What’re you gonna do about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe talk to your teachers? Ask for extra help after school? During lunch? Before school if you have to.”

  “But Dad says—”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about what Dad says. You can’t . . .”

  Flunk out. I won’t be able to help you if you flunk out. I haven’t mentioned it because I don’t want to get his hopes up, but I’ve been dropping hints with Headmaster Wilson about Caleb. His grades aren’t good enough to get him in here, but I’m hoping everything else he has to offer might give him a boost, and being my kid brother
won’t hurt. Once he got here, his grades would get better. It was sure as hell easier for me to focus on my schoolwork and on the soccer field once I had more than enough to eat and didn’t have to worry about which bill my parents couldn’t afford to pay that month, what we’d do without until they scraped together some more cash: Phone? Oil? One month it was so bad, we didn’t have electricity.

  “You don’t want to stay back, right?”

  “No.”

  “You want to go to college, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Defensiveness is building in his voice, and I’m struggling with my own impatience and fear. “Then you can’t flunk. You can’t.”

  “Fuck you, Zach. I’m not like you!”

  His bluster is uncertain; he swears like a kid who’s experimenting with how the words sound coming out of his mouth. My brother is not a naturally angry kid. He might be pissed at me, but that’s not the only thing going on here. I take a deep breath and scrub a hand over my face, catching a glance at my watch when I do. Fuck, I’m late to the art show. I’ve got to go. But I have to smooth this over first.

  Caleb’s a good kid. He deserves better than what he’s been handed. I can’t stand the thought of my Tiny Tim brother turning into a bitter drunk like our dad because I wasn’t good enough to save him and he wasn’t strong enough to save himself.

  “I know you’re not. I don’t want you to be. Nobody wants that. I’m an asshole.” He snorts a laugh and a relieved smile splits my face. I’m not known for my comedic timing, but I’ll take it. “What I do want is for you to get the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible. I know it’s the long game and it’s hard to see from where you’re standing, but you need to pass. I’m not asking for straight As. That’s not your style and that’s cool. But you can pull Cs. Can you do that? For me? If you pick up your grades I’ll ask Dad if you can come up and stay with me for spring break. I’ll drive you back and forth myself.”