What I Did for Love: A Breath-Taking Psychological Suspense

1

Mojito, the drink of my choice. My heart and my reason, my loss of reason. So wrong for me. But now, without Mojito, my life is an empty glass.

Mojito is not his real name, of course. It is the pseudonym I will use while I tell you this story. To protect his reputation. He was not of age.

Gasp. You are horrified? Well, that is my point, you see. To draw you in with the tawdry steam of my situation, my obsession, my bad choices.

What I mean to say is, picture this: under a gaudy blue sky, a tanned young man in colorful board shorts lopes across the hot white sand to the turquoise Florida surf. A tall golden lightly muscled teenager, fully emerged from boyhood, but not yet a hardened man. Imagine watching him toss the shiny yellow board into the clutch of the aqua waves and jump on. He lays flat, paddles out. Deftly shaking the sea from his eyes and hair. Wet, joyful, like a young seal. So carefree, strong, full of spirit. Full of life.

Got that? Now, imagine this: a middle-aged woman standing alone on the tideline, staring at the distant horizon. Thirsty, licking at her sun-dried lips. Wearing a broad-brimmed hat to shade her fine skin. Her freckles. Her (dear God) wrinkles.

You see now?

Was he the first young man I lusted after? No. I'd wanted others before him. So he had a precursor? He did, of course. I've loved many men over the years, men younger than I. In fact, I always preferred my men unseasoned. Even as a high school junior and senior, I liked the middle school boys with their wide eyes and virginal smiles. I kicked my cheerleader legs high for those kids seated passively in the stadium. I lured them in, the ripening jocks. By their freshman year, many of them had already been mine.

And in college? I did not respond to the creative writing professor who called me to his weed-hazy office in order to ogle my model figure and make suggestive comments on my work. No, thank you. Unlike the other coeds, I did not worship the ice hockey studs with their bearish manes and campus swagger. Instead, I had my heart set on the genius kid. You know, the four-eyed geek who skipped high school to breeze through college on a three-year track. I wanted his black-framed glasses on the floor beside my futon. I wanted his serious little face pressed against my naked skin.

That's how it's always been for me. Give me the boys, burning young and bright. Hold me up to these hot new suns and bake me to a crisp. After, I will cover myself with coconut crème and soak in tequila and lime.

But this Mojito, he was nothing but a typical American surf rat, you say? Not true. When the ride was high, he slipped away to test and retest his body and his prowess. Yes, he did. But he worked hard between wave sessions. High school senior by day, plus community college classes at night, studying on weekends for the SATs. He wasn't slacking. Too energetic for that, too full of plans for his blazing future.

My mouth is so dry. It needs wetting. The drink I crave, however, is not available. Will never be available again.

Back then in that dream, I slaked myself as often as possible. I lived high above the unfurling sea in a castle on the sugary sand, he in his father's princedom on the peaceful Intracoastal Waterway. I know, my prose here is laughable. But you can always count on a seductive murderess to have a book in her. We always do, you see.

So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, please take a hard look at exhibit A. Mojito, there in the distance on his colorful surfboard, glorious in the glance of the afternoon sun. The salt water glistening on his hairless chest. Toothpaste smile gleaming against the blue green water. Honey blond hair long as a girl's, but prettier. Wet trunks clinging to seaside thighs.

And me, here at the defense table. Pale, withering. Juiceless. Dry, so very dry.

He was a child, you say? Ha. He was seventeen. Smart. Aware. Sexy. Jacked on testosterone, full of passion. He had so much to look forward to. He was beauty. He was youth. Energy. Vitality. Everything that is irresistible to old age.

And me? I was incapable of resisting his youth-soaked charms. Because there I was, looking ahead to what? To growing only older. My lord, I was gripped by a funhouse mirror. I saw myself warped, in crisis, tumbling ever faster down the bumpy hill from forty. A woman alone, trying to survive the avalanche of aging, buried alive in unquenched desire.

On that, you see, I rest my case.

My story is, of course, a tangle of roses, stones, and broken glass. Someone had to bleed.

2

I f he doesn't turn in the paper by Monday, I will have to give him an incomplete for the term, I told Mojito's father, a tall graying man with a sincere handshake and a shy smile. And I don't want to do that. He could do so well if he took the time to focus on this class.

I always said that kind of thing to the concerned parents. Usually, it was bunk. But in this case, it was largely true. Mojito was not like most of my students. They tended to be disinterested kids of average intelligence with zero motivation to tap what they'd been given. Mojito was different. Capable, ambitious, and from what I could see in class, highly intelligent. But he was focusing on his college classes to such an extent that he no longer took high school seriously. Even though he needed the grades to get into a top university. Not the local college where he studied part-time. No, he deserved much better than that, which is what I told his father that day.

This sometimes happens with dual-enrolled students, I said, removing my reading glasses to look at the man. He had nice eyes. Charcoal gray but with a tinge of blue, almost perfectly matching his sharply cut Armani suit.

Mr. Mojito nodded, his handsome face serious. I understand, Ms. O'Hale. I will make this quite clear to him tonight at dinner. He began to rise from the metal chair, then sat again with a sigh. He looked at me across my cluttered desk. His eyes were like a wolf's, but lacked guile. I thought he might be a good man. His mother left us when Mojito was only six. I have done my best but I can only pray he doesn't go off-track.

The way he was looking at me indicated his mind was not on his son's immediate future but, instead, his own.

He cleared his throat. I thought, here it comes. The why don't we continue this discussion over a nice bottle of wine?

I stiffened. Yes, he was attractive. And he dressed like he had class, and plenty of money. But I would never date the parent of one of my students. One of my students, maybe. But not the old man.

He caught my eyes and scooped them up, his smile so sweet it was unnerving. I was wondering…

They are always wondering, these mature self-confident men. Wondering what it would take to seduce their kid's teacher. The old maid who existed only for her students. A creature of negative space who lived alone, drank tea with lemon, and pet her slinky cat while marking up homework papers in red ink.

Would you join us for dinner one night? We would love to have you to the house. Mojito speaks highly of you. He tells me you have read all the classics. I too love literature.

Yeah, right. All the old guys said this over the first drink. Then it turned out they had never heard of Zora Neale Hurston. Marguerite Duras. Lucia Berlin. The great female writers. I could understand the kids' ignorance. But I did not make excuses for the grown men who did not have enough curiosity to seek out truly great literature.

When I shook my head, Mr. Mojito reached over to put a hand on mine. His skin was cool, pampered, soft. Yes, he was definitely wealthy. This was not a man who held hammers, crowbars, tire irons, dead fish. His manicure was nicer than mine.

Please. Think about my offer. You don't have to answer, not now. This is a standing invitation. In the meantime, I will see to it that my son does his homework for Monday. Perhaps then you will agree to come to our house.

Not likely. Not unless the father was away on business and Mojito and I could…

An image of the boy flashed in my mind like a strobe. The first time I saw him outside class, jogging down the beach. His tanned back, smooth and rippling with new muscles. His long, wet hair. The tight ass.

Swiftly, I stood, pulling my hand away. Then I thanked Mr. Mojito for meeting with me to discuss my concerns about his son's schoolwork.

And so it began. The beginning of everything, the end of everything. How poetic. How unexpected for someone of my invisible status. For so long I was nobody. Now I am everybody's nightmare.

Where did I come from and how did I arrive at this point, you wonder. I wish I could say I was born in Paris and lived a glamorous life, but that would be a lie. I prefer not to lie to you now. The truth is, my life was unglamorous. In fact, it was dull. So dull it was almost normal. Like a glass of clear liquor with just a twist of lemon.

Sex being the twist.

Perhaps I should have seen a shrink. Taken anti-something-or-other medications. Detoxed, twelve-stepped, converted to Zen. Perhaps I might have averted disaster. But then there would have been no story to share, no book. No great doomed love.

There's no psychic reason to explain my predilection. I had an unremarkable childhood. A certain amount of family largesse and privilege, with too little affection. I would not pin all the blame there. That's a cop out. But lacking the flattering touch I desired, I naturally sought attention from the opposite sex. When my younger brother brought his friends home from grade school, I taught them silly games we could play in the dark corners of the cellar. Later, Hugh brought home his prep school roommates, gangly boys with crackling voices and hands that needed guidance.

I developed a reputation, and I was proud of it. Mrs. Robinson, the boys called me. Ha ha.

I won't tell you how old I was when I lost my virginity. And you do not want to hear how my sweet partner cried afterward. He was afraid of what his mother would say. That is until I told him not to tell her. He brightened then, and we did it a second time. I loved being able to comfort and advise, as inexperienced as I was. Me, taking control. Such a heady feeling.

High school, college, and always the younger boys milling about. Sweet kids who were ready, willing, always able and able and able. Times were fast, adventurous, exciting. And I was in charge. The boys, they were unconscious of their fantastic power. And therefore, did not abuse it.

While working toward my PhD in English literature, however, I reined in my appetites. Determined to stay focused, I avoided the temptation of high-riding testosterone in favor of nose to the grindstone. I practiced sexual discipline, reassuring myself that I could do so. That I would thus avoid making mistakes once I was ensconced in a teaching position. That is, if I chose to.

The key word being chose.

Graduate school served as a period of intense celibacy. I had something to prove to myself and I did just that. I practiced the art of resistance for five long years. I tried to be good, I really did. No sense being a professor, then losing out on tenure due to indiscretion. I learned to swallow my raging thirsts in favor of mature responsibility and a life of the mind. I embraced adulthood.

Or so I convinced myself.

By the time I graduated, I had lowered the bar on my career expectations. Why kill myself, and for what? I decided I was only interested in teaching the least rigorous of coursework. Florida Beach University accepted my application for a part-time lecturer position, and I moved to the east coast of the sunshine state.

I stayed away from family. My parents' bickering had become intolerable. I'd watched their petty differences change them from intelligent people into clawing animals. They remained on the west coast of Florida, where many of my relatives lived, and I kept the Everglades between us. I stayed single, refusing to embark on long-term relationships with the lineup of age-appropriate suitors who seemed interested in more than my body. Which, as I think I have already intimated, was sizzling hot.

I wanted to ignore the rest of them too, all the men who wished only to have sex with me. I tried to dress down, quelling my ardor, or they would flock, bloodripe, and I would be forced to confront them, to say no or to give in and have sex. And I was no good at resistance. I have a weakness, you see, one that I cannot overcome.

Obviously.

So my choice of relocation was purposeful. I was hidden away in the humid swamps of a forgotten town, teaching in a bottom-tier college. In sleepy Stormy Beach, I was no longer prey on crowded streets swarming with horny stalkers and pheromone sniffers. I was not exposed to daily temptation, and the living was easy. In Stormy Beach, I thought I was safe from them, and from my own desires.

Ha.

Determined to make the quiet little beach town my permanent home, I qualified for a mortgage on a one-bedroom condo overlooking the inlet. After teaching intro English lit and creative writing classes to dimwits all day, I spent long nights in the blue glare of my laptop, either out on my balcony or down by the condominium pool. I sat cross-legged on lounge chairs in the semidarkness that washed softly over the starlit water, working on a short story.

Then another. And another.

All were unpublished. Rejected again and again by the elitist literary presses. Each letter of refusal had the rich flavor of hell. It infuriated me, the editors' blindness to my creative genius. They preferred the silly to the serious, publishing only the fake fiction by the popular frauds.

Fortunately, due to my current life circumstances, this kind of homicidal dismissal will not be the sad fate that greets the story I am working on now. The one you are reading with such avid and perverse interest. I can just imagine it: the slight spittle forming on your lips, the lurid glare in your dark circled eyes. But listen, please. I did not plan on things turning out this way. This was not the plot I had in mind. However, I do take comfort in the turn of events. It bodes well for my literary aspirations.

A casual day-to-day routine firmly established in Stormy Beach, I kept to myself and avoided romance. At work, I dutifully lectured dullards more interested in their phone screens than the shocking beauty of works by Nabokov, Nïn, D.H. Lawrence. After work, I drove home and ran the beach. Shower, salad, writing until midnight. That was it. My life. Could it get any drier?

No. Which explains why I started drinking. Light beer at first, but one turned into six, my thirst never quite quelled. After dabbling in white wines, I branched out to the reds. Cardbordeaux. Soon enough I moved on to shots of tequila. Bottles of Mexican tequila. The hard stuff.

Needless to say, my commitment to celibacy evaporated and blew away in the briny wind. I traded running for happy hours, writing at night for sex on the sand. But none of my partners were appropriate. Always immature. Not ready for commitment. Not ready for adult life.

I am not talking about kids here. I am referring to grown men. This is who I picked up in the beach bars. Twenty-five, thirty, even at thirty-nine years old, these men were still boys. Apparently, while I had been growing older, the boys had all stayed boys. They seemed to have been, somehow, retarded in their maturation processes. They only looked older. Balding, spare tired, their teeth yellowed. They looked too old for me, in fact. But there was no debate: they were all boys. Groping, silly, cloddish. Needy. Overly chummy and sexually selfish. Many of them lived at home. Never grow up was apparently their unspoken vow. Where, I wondered, was Peter Pan?

When I had sex with these unappealing strangers, I wished I was home writing. Or slitting my wrists. Because I could not feel anything. I thought that part of me had died.

I kept drinking, but stopped going out with men. I preferred my lovers younger. Much younger, and willing to grow. Unschooled and looking to me for life lessons. How to please a woman. In the bedroom, in the kitchen, in every room. How to set a table for a woman, pull out her chair. Which fork, which wine. Yes, do apply to the MBA program, your salary will take a sweet jump. No, do not ask out your best friend's girl. Even though she's super hot. Wait until she wants you. Win her over, then let her come to you. Be a little hipper, a little cooler than your friend is. Than anyone else is.

A decade passed in this way. I drank, had occasional sex with a younger guy not quite young enough to please me, and went to work every day. I was always discreet around my job. There I remained the cool lit prof, sober, serious, but exuding something. The sexy-librarian teacher, the one the bad boys liked to wonder about. I was mysterious, aloof, tempting but unapproachable.

By then I had