Michael

by Marilize Roos

  “Feeling this now, I’m sorry I resisted for so long,” Tristan groaned. “You feel so good. Intense.”

  “Yeah?” Michael asked softly. He straddled Tristan’s thighs and withdrew until only the head was still inside, only to push forward again.

  “Yeah.”

  Michael leaned forward, wrapping an arm around Tristan’s shoulders, just needing to hold him close against his chest. Thrust by thrust, Michael could feel Tristan relaxing in his arms, wallowing in pleasure.

  When Tristan started grinding his own erection against the bedding to try for some relief, Michael knew it was time to shift up another gear. “Don’t you dare come yet,” he growled. “You get whatever pleasure I give you.”

  “Please, sir,” Tristan whined. “I don’t know how much longer –”

  “You will hold out until I tell you you can come,” Michael said, sitting up and riding him hard, his hands braced on Tristan’s shoulder blades.

  Tristan’s hips writhed underneath Michael, and when he felt the perfect point of tension in Tristan’s back and shoulders, Michael dug his nails into the skin of Tristan’s shoulders. “Come for me,” Michael growled, and Tristan arched his back, crying out as his passion was finally allowed to spill over; a few more bruising thrusts and Michael came, flooding Tristan’s bowels with hot come.

  Michael pulled out carefully and sat back on his heels feeling dazed and sated. As he watched, a little semen leaked from Tristan’s freshly-deflowered ass and trickled down to his balls; Michael caught the drip with the edge of his index finger, and Tristan moaned as Michael’s finger grazed his taint.

  Michael collapsed beside his lover and savoured the afterglow.

  “I suppose we’d better hop in the shower before we go down to lunch,” Tristan said.

  Michael snorted. “’Hop’ is right. I haven’t showered since the accident; hopping around on one foot in a slippery shower somehow just doesn’t seem like a good idea. I normally draw a bath, instead.”

  Tristan chuckled. “Pun unintended,” he said. He sobered. “But you could lean on me. I won’t let you fall.”

  Michael stared at Tristan. A few months ago – hell, even a few hours ago – Michael would have fought tooth and nail for his independence. He’d have rather died than admit that he needed help, and he’d worked hard for every scrap of self-sufficiency. Now the idea of leaning on this man for something so simple as standing in a shower made him want to hold on and never let him go, and he didn’t care how vulnerable it made him.

  “I might take you up on that,” Michael said with a soft smile.

  “Well, come along, doc,” Tristan grinned. “Our shower awaits.”

  ~*~

  Tristan watched from his perch on the corner of his desk as his Grade twelve Geography students filed into his classroom.

  They ambled in, taking their seats, and taking out their pencil cases and notebooks, they chatted quietly to each other while they waited for the class to begin. Tristan waited patiently for them all to be seated, then smiled, ready to begin.

  “Good morning, class!” He waited for the mumbled chorus of replies. “This is our last Geography lesson for the term, and since we’re slightly ahead of schedule with the syllabus, I’ve decided to make today a free lesson. I’d strongly advise you to take this opportunity to work on homework, but if you want to have a conversation with the person sitting next to you, please keep the volume down. If you want to read a book, go for it. You have –” he glanced at his watch – “forty-five minutes, ladies and gentlemen; use it wisely.”

  The students cheered – quietly – and immediately rearranged themselves in groups. Some of the students migrated into their various cliques to carry soft conversations. Others stayed in their seats and took advantage of the opportunity to get a head start on their homework. Off in the corner, one boy was teaching a girl how to juggle, using a set of soft red and black juggling balls, and three girls and one boy were gathered around a deck of Uno cards.

  Tristan settled back on his chair behind his desk. He’d barely noticed it was Monday; his mind kept replaying the events from the day before.

  Sunday had passed in a haze of tender lovemaking. Tristan had watched Michael bend Judith over the breakfast table, then had taken his turn immediately after, giving her a second load of come; Judith had immediately slipped to her knees and cleaned both Michael and Tristan’s dicks with her mouth.

  They’d taken a bath together in the tub in the basement, as it was the biggest, exploring each other’s bodies, each fold, and crevice and erogenous zone with soapy fingers.

  They’d cajoled Michael until he’d agreed to lie naked on the bondage table and submitted to a full body massage from both his subs, and he’d admitted that the treatment they’d given his left thigh had given him relief from the near-chronic muscle stiffness. His groans of pleasure had put a smile on both Judith’s and Tristan’s faces.

  And that evening had ended with the three of them in Michael’s king-sized bed, making love all through the night in various pairings until they’d fallen asleep, Judith sandwiched tightly between them.

  “Sir?” Tristan blinked away the daydream and focused on Savannah, one of his students. She was shy, probably because she was a year younger than the rest of the class, and because she’d been excused from school sports, due to her competitive horse riding schedule, she didn’t socialize much with her classmates.

  “Yes, Savannah,” he smiled.

  “I was wondering if you could help me with this question about speed, velocity and acceleration. I simply can’t understand why Mrs Norton insists the answer is ‘zero’.” She put the textbook in front of him and pointed to the relevant text.

  Tristan scanned through the question with a frown, and turned the book over to study the cover. “Phew! Science? It’s been a while, but I can give it a shot. Have you asked Mrs Norton?”

  “I did,” Savannah sighed, “but she just explains it again in exactly the same way I already don’t understand. I was hoping you could explain it differently.”

  “Alright,” Tristan said. “Give me a sec to read it again, and you can pull up a chair.”

  Savannah reached for an unoccupied chair and pulled it around to his side of the desk. Tristan made a few notes on an exam pad then pushed the textbook away. He drew an oval at the top of the page. He drew a slash across the line of the oval, meant to represent a starting line, and a tiny stick man behind the intersecting straight line. “Let’s take athletics as a practical example. If you run one lap around the track, and your finish line is exactly the same place as the starting line, what is your velocity?”

  She stared at the drawing, biting her lip, then looked up at him. “How fast did he run?”

  “Okay, what if I say speed, in this instance, is irrelevant?” When she just stared at him again in confusion, he smiled and pointed at the relevant paragraph in the book. “’Velocity is the rate of change of position with respect to time.’ Did it take him time to run that lap?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t know how long.”

  “Did he change position? Did he end up a distance away from where he started?”

  She stared at the page, and the light bulb went on. “No, he ended up where he started.”

  “So velocity is zero,” he grinned. He held up a hand, and Savannah returned the high five. “What is the velocity of a boomerang?”

  She grinned. “Zero – it ends up, theoretically, where it started.”

  “Correct. Measuring velocity of athletes on an oval track, or boomerangs, are a waste of time, and you normally wouldn’t bother. You measure the velocity of things that don’t come back. Bullets. Missiles. Rockets. Falling objects. But I can see why they’d ask you this question – they want to make sure you understand this definition.”

  “Thank you, Mr B!”

  Tristan shrugged, but a knock at the door drew his attention and he looked away from his beaming student. Mr Hennessey, the principal, stood at the doo
r, wearing a grave expression. With him stood the school administrator, Mrs Marais, and Drew Morris, one of the Maths teachers. Hennessey glared with disapproval between Tristan and Savannah, and the girl’s smile faded as she slunk back to her seat.

  “Mr Bennett,” Hennessey said. “Please accompany me and Mrs Marais to my office. Mr Morris will supervise your class.”

  “Alright,” Tristan frowned. Unease prickled up and down his spine. “Is everything alright?” Is it Judith? Did something happen?

  The principal and Mrs Marais didn’t say anything further as they marched down the corridors to Hennessey’s office. When they arrived, Tristan saw that the office was already crowded.

  Around the little round table off to the side sat a man in a suit with an array of documents in front of him. A middle-aged couple, vaguely familiar, also sat at the table, and they were glaring daggers at Tristan. “Please sit,” Hennessey said, demeanour cold, pulling out a chair directly opposite the couple. Tristan felt bile threaten to come up, but he sat gingerly.

  Hennessey sat in one of the remaining chairs and turned to face Tristan. “It has come to light that you have been engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a student,” he said.

  Tristan could feel himself blanch. “What? No! I haven’t!”

  “We have evidence indicating otherwise,” the man in the suit said, and slid a sheet of paper across the table. “A transcript, notarized for authenticity by the police station, of a text conversation between yourself and a female student.”

  “What?” Tristan reached for the sheet of paper, and through the buzzing in his ears, he read through it, feeling sicker and sicker the further he read through the text thread. The language was explicitly filthy, and he paused at the nude selfie on the page. “Edie? Edie said I did this to her? I’ve never seen these texts in my life!”

  The suit, presumably a lawyer, picked up his cell phone, tapped a few times at the screen, and Tristan’s phone rang in his pocket. “Obviously the number on the transcript is yours. The electronic forensics department at SAPS has already verified that the student’s phone hasn’t been tampered with.”

  “I didn’t!” Tristan shouted. “I didn’t molest – or even flirt – with any of my students. I don’t know how this happened, but I’m innocent.”

  “I’m afraid you have one of two options,” Hennessey continued, as if Tristan hadn’t spoken. “If you resign, with immediate effect, the student’s parents won’t press charges, and won’t hold the school liable. They, quite simply, want you gone. If, however, you refuse, you will be immediately suspended, pending a disciplinary hearing, and I am confident if it gets to that, you will be dismissed and face criminal charges.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Tristan shouted. The school bell rang in the background.

  The lawyer slid a typed letter across the table, an uncapped ball-point pen on top of it. The heading read ‘Letter of Resignation’. Tristan stared at it, and his hand shook when he picked up the pen. He licked his lips, then threw down the pen; it skittered across the table and fell to the carpet.

  “Think carefully,” the suit said. “If you resign, the matter ends there. If you are fired, any school or any company you apply to for future employment that runs a background check will see why you were fired.”

  “I am innocent.”

  “Very well,” Hennessey said, his jaw clenched. “You are suspended with immediate effect. You will be escorted to your classroom, where you may remove only your personal effects, and you will leave the school premises immediately. Your laptop, as it is school property, will remain here, where IT will conduct their own forensic examination. Your disciplinary hearing will be in one week. A copy of the school disciplinary policy will be e-mailed to your personal e-mail address.”

  The lawyer and the two parents stayed seated, the couple shooting him death-glares, as Tristan pushed away from the table and stood. He turned and fled the office, Hennessey and Marais on his tail.

  They supervised while he retrieved his car keys, briefcase and wallet from the classroom, then followed him to the parking area, watching until he’d exited the grounds and the gate slid closed behind him.

  It wasn’t until he’d reached the stop street up the road that the shaking threatened to overwhelm him, but somehow he made it home without remembering a single stop-street or traffic light.

  A scandal like this could cost him his career. No school would ever employ him again. It would hit the news. Any company that screened for criminal records would pick it up.

  He could land in jail; then again, Edie was over eighteen, so at least she was over the age of consent.

  If he lost his job, that left Judith as the breadwinner in their family. And she hated her job.

  Most troubling: If Judith believed these accusations, he could lose his marriage. And Michael? Would he believe Tristan when he said he didn’t do this? If Judith filed for divorce, would Michael stay with him or with Judith?

  Dear Lord, please don’t let me lose them!

  He knew alcohol never fixed anything, but he needed something. He opened the cupboard above the fridge and found the bottle of brandy he’d received as a gift of appreciation from one of his colleagues when he’d given her son extra athletics coaching more than a year before.

  Not bothering with a glass – his hands were shaking too much – he tipped the bottle back and took a swig.

  God, I hope this kicks in soon.

  What will I tell Judith?

  ~*~

  Judith heard the bike before she saw him pull into the driveway. She’d been waiting at the front door, and when she saw Michael arrive, she opened it before he could ring the doorbell.

  Tristan was scaring her.

  He’d been staring at the living room wall when she got home from work, the almost-empty bottle of brandy dangling from one hand, and he’d been unresponsive to her. It was even worse than that day he’d disappeared from Michael’s house, but Michael had been the one to bring him back from the dark then; she hoped he could do it again.

  Michael, dressed in jeans, a grey Henley and his leather jacket, stepped into the small entrance hall and took Judith into his arms for a brief hug. Judith soaked in the comfort, brief as it was.

  “What happened?” Michael asked softly.

  “I don’t know, he won’t tell me. He won’t speak at all.”

  Judith led Michael to the lounge where Tristan was still staring into nothingness. Michael sat on the edge of the coffee table opposite Tristan and took the bottle of brandy from his fingers, lifted it to study the contents, and put it aside.

  “Tristan?” Michael asked gently. “What happened?”

  Tristan wobbled his head in Michael’s direction, and Tristan’s blank expression scared Judith all over again. Michael steadied Tristan when it looked like he’d fall over.

  “Easy there,” Michael said. He glanced over his shoulder at Judith. “He’s drunk.”

  Judith felt her heart twist. “He doesn’t normally drink. A beer here or there, but that’s it. That brandy has been in the cupboard for a year; Tristan tried it once and decided he didn’t like it; I was planning on baking a fruitcake, just to find a use for it.”

  “Considering that he didn’t drink the booze for the taste, it must have been for effect. I wonder what happened.”

  “You fixed him last time,” Judith said. “Can’t you fix him again?”

  Michael snorted. “I’m not beating him while he’s drunk. But he does need supervision, considering that something prompted him to get this drunk in the first place. Go pack a bag for a day or two; the two of you are coming to my place.”

  Relief nearly buckled Judith’s knees. She made decisions every day, but somehow, this situation just felt too overwhelming; Tristan was too precious to her to gamble with his welfare. God help her if Tristan had been a mean drunk. “Thank you,” she said on a gusty exhale and flung her arms around Michael’s shoulders.

  “Easy, Princess,” Michael patted
her arm. “We’ve got this.”

  “I know,” she sniffed. “I don’t like to see him like this.”

  “We’ll get him better.”

  Judith dashed to their bedroom, dumped the dirty clothes out of their bag from the weekend into the hamper, and stuffed more clothes inside, including clothes for work. She grabbed their phones and chargers as well, put the bag in the car, then returned to the lounge.

  Michael helped her pour Tristan into the car, closed the door and walked around to Judith’s window. “I’ll be right behind you on my bike; head straight for my house. You did the right thing, Princess.”

  She let out a shuddery breath. “Thank you, Michael.”

  “See you on the other side,” Michael nodded and limped to his bike.

  Judith glanced at her husband, passed out in the passenger seat, and taking a deep breath, twisted the key in the ignition.

  She managed the drive to Michael’s house in Constantia somewhat impatiently; she cursed softly when she managed to spook a horse on one of the bridle paths that lined the road as she came around a corner a little too fast.

  She nearly panicked when she pulled up at the gate to Michael’s property and couldn’t remember the code, but Michael pulled up behind her and the gate opened on its own; he probably had a remote.

  They soon had Tristan settled in the bed in the guest room she and Tristan had been using, and Judith looked down at her sleeping husband.

  “He’ll be fine,” Michael wrapped her in a hug. “He needs to sleep it off, and when he wakes up, urge him to drink water.”

  “Thank you Michael,” Judith sighed against his chest. “I swear, I’m not normally so indecisive. It’s just that… this is Tristan. I thought he’d drunk himself into a stroke.”

  Michael laid his cheek on the top of her head. “We’ll take care of him.”

  Judith indulged in Michael’s embrace for a moment more, then pulled away, pulling herself together. “I suppose he won’t be in any shape to go to work tomorrow.” Michael shook his head in agreement. “I guess I should phone his principal and warn him; maybe he can get a substitute in.”