Going Far

Mr. Marquette—Stanley she calls him in private—has fallen in love with Elise. He’s never loved anyone like this before, he says. He thinks about her all the time. He can’t live without her, he says. When she’s eighteen, he says, he wants to marry her.

At first, Elise thought it wrong because he’s too old and he’s the soccer coach. He even has a daughter Elise’s age who lives with her mother in Culver City. Elise has met her a few times at games, an unfriendly girl with a crew cut, hollow eyes and a pierced tongue. Elise wonders what this unfriendly girl would think if she knew that her father was in love with Elise. When they get married, Elise will be her stepmother. Elise thinks this is pretty funny, but she thinks Stanley is exactly right when he tells her that age is an artificial parameter, that true love has no boundaries. She thinks he’s right when he says it’s their destiny to be together forever. And she agrees with him when he says it’s best to keep their love a secret for a few years, until she turns eighteen. People don’t understand their kind of love.

They’re in his apartment where Elise has been coming after school to help plan a fundraiser for the team. It’s how they fell in love, planning a pancake breakfast and a car wash. They’ve designed a flyer and she’s going to help him stuff and address envelopes to send out to all the team members and they’re going to post them at the mall and on telephone poles. Elise’s mother is happy that Elise is on the fundraising committee. She doesn’t know it’s a committee of just the two of them. Elise’s mother likes Mr. Marquette. She even asked Elise if he has a girlfriend.

“Yes,” Elise told her mother. “He definitely has a girlfriend.”

“Too bad,” her mother had replied, watching Mr. Marquette with narrowed eyes.

They’re done working on the fund raising stuff, so she walks over to the sofa and flops her lanky body down. She knows what comes next and she’s looking forward to it. He comes and kneels next to the sofa and then he kisses her deeply. She kisses him back.

“No,” she says when his large, blunt fingers start to crawl up under her skirt to yank at the crotch of her Jockeys-For-Girls cotton undies. “Uh-uh.” She turns her head and pushes lightly at his chest, but she doesn’t really want him to stop. She knows what she’s doing. She’s completely in control; it’s just that she likes going far. She likes taking things to the very edge. But she’s not ready to go all the way and he knows it.

He pins her wrists above her head with one hand and uses the other to push up her blouse and the new lacy pink bra she stole from Victoria’s Secret. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you,” he says. He uses his mouth to explore her, to suck her budding nipples. She feels the tug and pull of it as a delicious ache between her legs. She likes the tickly abrasion of his grizzled whiskers against her downy armpit. Arching and twisting her toned-from-soccer body, she gasps and likes the way it sounds—sexy—like movies she’s watched on cable. She gasps again.

“I love you,” he whispers. His tongue runs over her bare stomach, probes inside her navel.

“I’d do anything for you,” he says. He slides his tongue down, down her belly, kisses the line where hair has grown, gold and stiff, like late summer grass, his hands on her hips now, the plaid skirt of her uniform pushed up around her waist like a sash. He pulls her to his mouth, inhales her through her panties. “God help me,” he groans.

She’ll stop him soon but for now, she exhilarates in her power, in his extreme love. It feels so good to be loved, so very, very good.

She grabs his head and it shocks her, how thin his hair is. Not thick like Oliver’s dark, stiff curls or Anthony’s ratty dreadlocks. Stanley smells sharp, bitter—not like the rain smell of boys her age, shaky boys whose voices slide with puberty, whose smooth faces shatter into zits. Stanley is forty and yet she owns him like she owns her shoes.

She’s the warm moisture that fuels hurricanes. That’s what he tells her. Lately, she’s noticed how grown men stare at her with hard, humid looks, and how their wives pull them away. Lovesick boys with trembling, sleet-cold fingers follow her, call her shyly on the phone. Boys who give up red-faced the first time she says no.

“No,” she says again. She turns her head to the side and sighs. Soon she’ll put a stop to this. Very soon, before it goes too far.

He yanks off her panties, embarrassingly damp.

“My angel,” he breathes against the inside of her thigh.

“I better go home,” she whispers. She pushes at his head, but his tongue finds lightning; her hips gnash of their own volition. She feels his muffled sob and the soft wet rhythm of his tongue. “No,” she says but the word comes out like a low moan. It’s time to stop but she wants just a little more. It’s time to stop but her hips press up into his face. It’s time to stop but his finger slips inside her and she wants it to go on forever.