Imagine how lucky it would be to be her husband.
I clenched my teeth and immediately tore my eyes away from her to my desk. Oh my God, was I breathing heavier? How weak was I? Class hadn’t even begun yet. I kept my head down until I had to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, and after, attendance.
Some teachers liked to have fun with their attendance, making students say what they did last night or even make their students say their names in a pattern. Miss Wagner was a fan of the classic – ‘name, here, name, here.’
“Steve?”
“Here.”
“Nami?”
“Here.”
“Mina?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.”
I turned pink and eyed the desk again. That was possibly the most I’d ever said to a teacher in my entire time at this school, and I wasn’t even aware when it was exiting my mouth. I don’t know if anyone was looking at me but Miss Wagner just kept going, down the list of names. Then afterwards, she would stand up. And I would see more of her body.
Oh my God. What was happening to me?
***
“Hey Lucy?”
“What?” Lucy asked me, taking a bite of her sandwich, pretending she was studying like me.
“How many boyfriends have you had?”
Lucy gave me a smile, a ‘where is this going’ smile. “My fair share,” she said with an awkward chuckle. “Funny you should bring it up, I had three boys ask to go out with me on the same day yesterday. Three in one day! I think I hit a new record. Summer has been making these boys thirsty.”
“Wow, congratulations,” I replied, my heart not in it.
“I’m thinking I might go out with Artie, actually.” she continued. “I don’t know. I still have to think about it, see if he’s… you know…”
“Not scum?”
“He’s a boy, so my odds are low,” she laughed. “Why do you ask?”
“I-”
“Ooh, are you actually gonna go out with Johnny?” she interrupted excitedly.
“What? No. He never even asked me out,” I replied a little impatiently.
“Oh. Well, he should. You know, the only reason I never asked if he wanted to do something sometime was because I let you have-”
“You let me have him, yeah. How many times are you going to tell me that?” I asked, annoyed. I let a beat of silence flow between us. “I was just wondering how you know when you’re falling for someone.”
Lucy sighed heavily. “Okay, so there’s falling for someone, and there’s, like, falling for someone. I think the first time you feel like you fall for a boy, you won’t know what it is, but you’ll know it’s something, you know?”
I nodded, signalling for her to continue.
“So, the first time I really fell for a boy was probably Jack, last year.”
“Jack Marks?”
“That’s the one,” she replied with a smile. “And at first it was like, ‘yeah, I like you’ but after a while it just kept getting more and more powerful. I couldn’t look at his face without picturing his abs. I kept feeling my heart beat faster when he was around. And – ahh-ha-ha…” she trailed off nervously, looking around. “Okay, can I tell you something and you swear it won’t leave us?”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied.
“So… that’s when I actually started, you know… touching myself.”
I gasped. “Masturbating?”
She lowered an eyebrow. “Sure, if you wanna be a medical dictionary about it. Anyway, things actually got kinda bad, and I ended up forcing myself to stop being in the same… what’s the word… starts with a V…”
“Vicinity?”
“Thanks – vicinity as him. I don’t think we ever actually met, and it wasn’t like he was going to fall for me as soon as he met me. At most, I was just some girl he’d seen a couple of times.”
“Yeah, I can understand that,” I lamely replied, looking down.
Lucy looked at me for a couple of seconds. “Do you…”
I shrugged. “I can’t tell yet.”
Lucy squealed and clapped her hands together. “Oh my god oh my god! Finally! Who is he?”
I sighed in turn. “Okay, nothing leaves this room, right?”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“Promise?”
“Mina, I promise,” she said solemnly.
“It’s… not a he.”
The silence was deafening. “Oh,” she finally replied. “…Huh. Okay, just to make sure I’m covering all my bases, is it, like, me or something?”
“It’s not you,” I laughed, weirdly out of breath from the nervousness of telling her this.
“Okay, cool,” she also laughed alongside me. “Because, like, I have no problems with, y’know, that, but if it was like, with me, then we’re gonna have a problem, you know?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant but I thought the best course of action was to ignore that. “Not only that but… it’s an older girl.”
“Wow,” Lucy laughed. “You set your sights high, huh? Wait, does she go to our school?”
I was in too deep to back out now, but even still, there was no way in hell I was spilling my guts to that extent. “Lucy, I don’t get out. At all. Of course she goes to our school.”
“Okay, so it’s an older girl that goes to Hazelwood…” Lucy trailed off, thinking.
“And if it’s okay, I’d prefer if we… didn’t play twenty questions about who,” I continued. “I think this is just my Jack. She’s pretty unavailable and I don’t want people knowing I was attracted to her.”
“Uh, yeah, okay, cool,” she awkwardly replied. “But hey, maybe she feels the same way and you two will actually end up dating. It’s high school, there are no rules.”
“I really doubt it,” I answered. “Plus, we do have rules, the ones set by the teachers.”
She shrugged with a smile. “Yeah, but, fuck teachers.”
***
It was a few more days of pure hell in homeroom before I had been worn down. Every day became a little bit harder as I had to struggle with it. At first it was just denial – at first, denial that I actually had a crush on my teacher, then denial that it was here to stay.
It was almost pathetic how easy it was for her to wear me down. I would stare intently at her while she stood at the front of the class and just… taught, with that voice of hers. She had the perfect blend of authoritative voice and one of those ‘one of the girls’ voices. She almost had a lilt of Valley Girl to her voice, which made the fact that she was in charge of us that much more sexy for some reason.
Sexy. I never used that word beforehand. Now I was thinking about it a lot. Sexy, sexy, sexy.
It was like a drug. It wasn’t just her curvy, filled out, voluptuous body that was sexy. It was her voice. I needed a bigger hit, and I needed it to be addressed to me. Scared as hell but knowing I needed to do this, I raised my hand.
Even though she was only a few weeks into this job, she knew that I wasn’t the type to raise my hand. She stopped mid-sentence and looked at me. My heart skipped a beat.
“Yes, Mina?” she asked melodically.
“C-could I p-please go to the washroom?” I managed to choke out.
She smiled at me. I had to hold my breath to stop my quickening breathing from showing. “Of course you can,” she told me warmly.
Slowly and clumsily, I stood up from my dumbly-designed seat-desk and walked calmly out of the classroom. As soon as I was out, I was practically hyperventilating and ran to the washroom.
A heat was surging through me. I never had felt this kind of heat before, but now I just wanted the heat to flourish. I slammed the stall door closed and immediately rested my head against the wall.
This woman had barely even acknowledged my existence, and yet… I felt a throbbing down below that I had never felt before. A hunger. A heat.