A Tutor for Samuel

The mention of Linda didn't improve Sam's mood, but he did nod and tried to accept his dad's approval. Still, it seemed to him that not much had gone his way during this spring break, and his situation didn't get better when his friend, Miles, called him from Fort Lauderdale.

"Hey, Buddy! How's my favorite prisoner of parental concern."

"Hi Miles, and as you're probably already thinking, I'm miserable. Please tell me that it has been raining every day you've been there."

"I would love to make you feel better by lying, but the truth is that the weather has been hot and so are the babes!"

Sam held in a groan, barely.

"What's Jennifer been up to?" he asked, even though he didn't want to hear the answer.

"She won a wet t-shirt contest on the beach last night. I had no idea they were that big!"

"What!"

"Just fucking with you!"

"Jesus, Miles, do you have to rub it in?"

"Sorry, Sam, I couldn't resist. I've seen her running around with her girlfriends a few times. It looks like she is enjoying herself. That red bikini leaves little to the imagination I call tell you that much."

"If you can, get a photo. It may be the closest I come to her in it."

"I'll try. Look, you hang in there, okay? Things are bound to get better, Hell, they can't get any worse!"

"Don't jinx me."

"Back at you, Buddy. See you!"

Sam tossed his cellphone on the bed and sighed, "Naples, better be fucking awesome."

The afternoon wore on, and Sam busied himself with cleaning chores around the house and finally settled in front of the T.V. to watch a movie when a knock came at the front door.

He went to open it and was surprised to find Linda Siler standing on the other side. Even more surprising, she wasn't wearing sweat pants and a giant t-shirt!

His tutor loitered on his porch, looking almost embarrassed to be there. She was wearing a pair of denim shorts that hung to her knees but still managed to show off her tight, muscular calves. The absent t-shirt had been replaced with a button-down men's plaid shirt that at least fit her and gave just a hint of the large breasts that Sam had observed in her photos swelling underneath. It hit him at the same moment that she had also combed out her hair, and instead of a ratty pony-tail or a shapeless mass, it now fell in natural layers around her face. She was still not wearing makeup, but just these little changes made a big difference, and her fair, flawless skin didn't necessarily need it anyway. Linda had graduated from frumpy to downright cute in one move.

"Linda? I thought the lesson was off for tonight?"

"I know, but the more I thought about it, I decided that it would be selfish of me to impact your education in such a detrimental fashion because I was grieving over something that happened so long ago. That, and I'm sick of feeling sorry for myself."

"Is that why you ditched the lonely cat lady look?"

"I wear this outfit all the time when I'm going out in the field, which is why I'm here. I thought we could take a break from the books tonight and try a little field trip."

"Field trip?"

"Yeah. I know a dark site about forty-miles outside of town. I want to show you the pretty part of the Astro sciences."

"Sounds good to me."

Sam told his dad he would be back later and joined Linda in her jeep that had a bunch of equipment tied down in the back, including her portable eight-inch Dobsonian telescope. They drove out of town to the sound of "The Beach Boys" on the radio.

"I hope this music isn't too dated for you?" asked Linda.

"Nope. I can appreciate the classics. My dad has a collection of Beatles albums at the house. My favorite is "Abbey Road."

"Really? Which song? 'Come Together,' maybe or, 'Here Comes the Sun,'?"

"I always kind of liked, 'Something,'" replied Sam looking out at the passing cars.

"George Harrison...I think you are a romantic at heart, Sam."

"Don't tell my friends. They'll think I'm a wimp for liking the soft stuff," laughed Sam.

"There's never anything wrong with appreciating the beauty in something simple and elegant."

He found himself watching Linda more closely as they drove. The top was down, letting in the slowly cooling evening air and blowing her hair back into wildly flapping strands that dodged around her face. It was an everyday face to be sure, but her eyes and those full, pink lips gave it character. There was something about her mouth that intrigued him, and oddly he felt the worst urge to reach over and run his thumb across her plump, juicy, lower lip.

"Is everything okay?" she asked, noticing his attention.

"Oh...Yeah...I just thought that the breeze feels nice. It should be comfortable outside tonight," he replied awkwardly.

"Good thing for us," she agreed.

They had to park the jeep some distance from the site and dowse their lights.

"Nothing but red-tinted lights from here, or we will destroy our night vision," she cautioned.

They divided up the load with Sam carrying the more massive rotating base and Linda cradling the telescope tube with a knapsack of lenses thrown over her shoulder. A short hike brought them to a dark, mostly empty field with just a few other observers with their equipment scattered around. Linda assembled the telescope and got it calibrated while Sam set up some canvas chairs for them he had fetched from the jeep.

"Now for the practical lessons to begin!" said Linda with a flourish of her hand, making Sam laugh.

"Take a look at this," she invited him, nodding at the eyepiece.

Sam bent over and focused on the image. It looked like a gaseous cloud lit by stars both in and around it.

"It's beautiful. What am I looking at?"

"The Great Orion Nebula. It's a huge cloud of molecular gas where stars are being born even as we speak. A stellar nursery if you will."

"I would hate to have to diaper the baby," chuckled Sam.

"Very funny. Do you remember what we talked about in regards to stellar evolution?"

She made Sam recite back to her the necessary steps that stars go through as they form while hunting for their next target in the sky.

"Did you always want to be an Astronomer?"

Linda looked up, nodding, "I had a fascination with the sky even when I was a young girl. I used to lay on my back in our yard and stare up at all those twinkling lights wondering if on some other world a girl like me was doing the same thing."

"Did your sister share your fascination?"

"If Gina had been laying on her back under the stars, I guarantee you there would have be a man on top of her. Likely one with a girlfriend or a wife at home."

"Ouch! Sorry, I asked."

"No, that was very catty of me. I should be better than that."

"Did you two ever get along?"

Linda had to think about that one.

"I guess when we were kids, we got along okay, although Gina love to steal my toys when I wasn't looking. I should have taken that as foreshadowing."

"I'm sorry I brought it up," offered Sam, not wanting a repeat of their last trip down memory lane.

"It's alright. I need to stop being afraid of thinking about it. Facing your fear is the first step to conquering it."

"Did you get that out of a fortune cookie?"

"I saw it on a poster in my dentist's office."

"Now that sounds like foreshadowing."

Linda laughed and shook her head, "Okay, Funny Man. Try this one."

For the next couple of hours, Linda ran him through a long list of stellar phenomena, from nebulae to galaxies and planets while throwing in more colorful star clusters than he could hope to remember. The moon started to rise, but it was less illuminated now and didn't bother them as much as it would have earlier in the week.

"Tell me what you see here," she said, leaning back to give him room at the spotter scope.

"Ah...a bright orange star."

"Now, look at it through the eyepiece."

"Hmmm...There are two of them close together. Ones orange, but the other is more greenish."

"The brighter one is easier to find, but it's often true than many stars have companions that are gravitationally bound to them. They probably all formed from the same cloud of gas around the same time. As a matter of fact, most stars are at least pairs, if not more. Our sun is an anomaly being a lone wanderer."

"Maybe the stars are like people, and they just don't like being alone," said Sam pulling away from the eyepiece but hovering close to Linda.

In the soft glow of the moonlight, her lips glistened, and her eyes caught the faint light and magnified it, flashing at him when she turned her head.

"People don't always get a choice. Sometimes things just work out that way."

Sam was close to her like that day in the kitchen when he had held the ice to her burned hand. She could smell his cologne, make out his dazzling smile. Linda's heart beat faster in her chest.

"I think it would be a tragedy to stay alone if you didn't have to be, everyone could use a companion, someone special in their life."

"I tried that. It didn't work out so well."

"So you just give up? You don't strike me as a quitter, Linda."

"No, but I got good at hiding."

"Hiding is a kids game and only fun if someone comes looking for you."

"I doubt anyone is missing me."

Sam came closer, leaning toward her, and Linda stood in place, not able to look away.

"I think a guy would be a fool not to miss you and an even bigger one to have let you go in the first place."

"Sam...I..."

His head dipped down, and she felt his strong arms sliding around her waist. A nervous panic broke out inside her filling her stomach with butterflies. She wanted to run, wanted stay, feared to do either. Their lips were barely an inch apart, his breath brushing across her nose.

"Oh...God...He's going to kiss me!" she thought.

A loud sizzling noise like bacon frying in a hot skillet suddenly split the night and a shooting star pulsing with a blue light shot across the sky, leaving a trail as it went out with an abrupt banging. Linda and Sam were both startled and jumped back, looking at each other in awkward surprise.

"That was a big one," said Linda quietly.

"Yeah...Uh...shooting star, right?"

"Meteor burning up in the atmosphere. Had to be a good size to get this low."

There was a long, heavy silence with neither one sure what to say next.

"Linda..."

"It's getting late, isn't it? I think we should pack up and get home," said Linda in a rush of words.

She started to scrambled around their small encampment, putting things away in her knapsack while Sam stood fidgeting and not sure what had just happened or was happening now.

"Am I doing this alone?" snapped Linda sounding suddenly irritated.

"What? No...No, of course not," replied Sam, finally galvanizing himself into action.

They loaded up quickly and started their journey home. The ride back was silent and tense. Neither of them disposed to talk. Sam thought of about a dozen things he could have said but quietly discarded them all as they drove, not sure how to break through whatever mood had settled over Linda. She was white-knuckling the steering wheel and looking straight ahead of them the whole way, never glancing in his direction. When they arrived back at his house, he stepped out of the jeep but held the door open, desperately hunting for the right thing to say to repair the damage his impulsive move had caused, but all he could come up with was, "Thanks for inviting me. I'll see you for our next lesson."

Linda pulled away without looking, and he slammed the door shut quickly, watching her turn the corner two seconds later..

"Nice job, Sam. Way to go," he said to himself.

An hour later, Linda sat in the dark, sipping a glass of wine, and trying to make sense of her jumbled feelings.

"Sam tried to kiss me...Sam tried to kiss me..."

The words echoed over and over inside her head. He had taken her by surprise, but that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that she was not at all sure she hadn't wanted him to finish.

"If that shooting star hadn't burst over us...God...Where would we be right now?"

She didn't want to go there.

Her glass was empty, and she sat it on the coffee table, trying to resist the temptation to get another.

"Because I've been so good at fighting temptation lately," she mumbled, pouring herself another.

"He's a boy, a nineteen-year-old-boy, and I'm old enough to be his mother!" she yelled at herself.

He sure didn't look like a boy, though, no, not at all. Sam was all man.

"Fuck! Why does he have to be so damn good-looking! So fucking nice...so...sweet..." she lamented, downing half the new glass in one go.

She could almost hear the voice in her head telling her it had been nine years since the last time a man had touched her and maybe she should give herself a break.

"Break...yeah...sure..."

The alcohol was starting to make her sleepy, and she stumbled toward the bed. Linda had always been a light-weight. It was why she rarely drank. She tumbled into the bed without bothering to remove her shirt and shorts and dreamed of handsome young men that all looked like Sam.

The rest of spring break, what was left of it, passed without much fanfare. Sam continued his lessons with Linda, but they were more subdued now, very professional, without the warmth that had characterized their earlier association. He tried a couple of times to apologize for the near kiss, but both times Linda cut him off and made him return to the astronomy text. She didn't seem interested in hearing his explanation, which was just as well since he couldn't explain his actions, not really. He had just felt an overpowering urge like a moth being pulled to a flame. The more time he spent around Linda, the more potent that call seemed to become, so he was almost grateful when spring break ended, and they had to cut back to just having a couple of lessons a week so he could concentrate on his other classes as well.

The end of spring break and subsequent return of his friends had also meant the return of Jennifer Masterson.

"Hey, Sam. It's good to see you again," said Jennifer taking a seat next to him in their economics class.

Jennifer had picked up a golden tan on the beach, which made a nice contrast with her blond hair. She smiled at him, displaying rows of dazzling white.

"We missed you in Fort Lauderdale."

"Sorry. I wish I could have been there," he replied distractedly as he flipped through a text-book.

"That doesn't look like economics," she said, leaning over.

"It isn't. It's astronomy."

"How boring. I don't know how you got yourself sucked into that one."

Sam looked up annoyed, but it was hard to stay mad at Jennifer Masterson, especially when she was wearing a low-cut halter top.

"I made a poor judgment call taking it at the beginning, but now I'm kind of warming up to it. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"Huh?"

"It's Shakespeare. You know, Hamlet. I think that Shakespeare was referring to the limits of human knowledge though not pushing the boundaries."

"Right...Um...I was going to ask if you want to go out tonight. A group of us were going to check out that new mall that just opened."

Sam could tell Jennifer had no idea what he had been talking about. He had been spending so much time around Linda he was used to a woman who could think rings around him. Then again, men didn't hang around a woman like Jennifer Masterson because they loved her brain.

"Mall? I guess I could carve out some time to do that," he said.

"Okay...Call me," she said, returning to her seat as their professor entered the classroom.

Sam called his dad and told him he would be having dinner out, figuring he and Jennifer, along with her friends, would grab a bite to eat at the mall. The place was busy, the novelty would wear off soon enough, but for now, crowds of people wandered, checking out the sales and window shopping at the more exclusive boutique stores. He paced along next to Jennifer, admiring how devastatingly tight her ass was in a pair of jeans, but at the same time a little bored with the conversation. Jennifer seemed able to hold forth on only two topics with any authority, women's fashion, of which Sam knew nothing, and celebrity gossip which he could have cared less about.

At the moment, her group was knee-deep in a discussion about some teen soap opera he had never heard of, and he was doing his best not to appear ignorant. They made a turn in front of the food court when he spotted a familiar figure walking in their direction.

Linda Siler had her eyes on her phone, or she might have beat a hasty retreat the other way when Sam and his friends appeared in front of her. Lacking time to flee, there was nothing she could do but put a smile on her face.

"Linda! I guess you're enjoying the new mall experience along with the rest of us," said Sam, "This is my friend, Jennifer and her friends Skyler and Wendy."

She nodded at the younger girls noting how unearthly beautiful Jennifer was in her skin tight outfit with that huge cascade of blond hair. The hair color was wrong, but she was reminded strongly of her sister, Gina, and it made her stomach hurt. It didn't make matters any better that she was dressed in her typical casual clothes, including the too large t-shirt.

"Doing some shopping?" asked Jennifer, indicating the bag that Linda carried.

"Yes. They were having a sale at Neiman Marcus," answered Linda.

"What did you get? I love their line of Alexander McQueen dresses!"

Linda winced as she answered, "Sweatpants."

"Oh...Well...I guess whatever you like," said Jennifer, clearly not sure how to follow up that revelation.

"The girls and I were going to get something to eat if you want to join us?" asked Sam.

"No...Thanks, I was just leaving. You kids have a nice time. I'll see you Thursday, Sam."

"Who was that?" asked Jennifer after Linda had moved out of earshot.

"My astronomy tutor," he answered curtly.

"No wonder. I guess she's a professor or something. I've never met one with any sense of style," laughed Jennifer as her girlfriends joined in.

Sam's eyes flashed with anger, "Linda has more going for her than most women I know. A lot more."

Jennifer was thrown by his tone, "Hey...I was just kidding. I'm sure she's very nice. Why don't we just go eat, huh?"

Grudgingly, Sam headed to the food court with the girls, but he couldn't help but throw a look over his shoulder in the direction Linda had gone off in.

"Fancy dressed little slut. I can't believe the way she was looking down her nose at me. What does Sam see in a girl like that?" mumbled Linda to herself as she walked briskly through the mall toward the exit.

Running into Sam and Jennifer had shaken her, making her have flashbacks of her sister and Greg in bed together. It was a silly comparison, not even close, really, but it was upsetting just the same. She was about to leave the mall when she paused at a designer dress store. In the window, a black, low-cut dress trimmed in lace was on display. Linda hesitated, bouncing nervously on her toes before lowering her head and darting into the shop.

"Can I help you?" asked a young lady applying price tags to a rack of blouses.

"Yes," replied Linda, "that dress in the window. I'd like to try it on."

Thursday night, Sam was back at his usual spot on the couch at Linda's. She had been more animated tonight than he had seen her in a while, and he hoped it was a sign that things were getting back to normal between them after the fall out from their trip to the dark site.

"How did I do?" asked Sam.

Linda had prepared a quiz for him tonight, and she was grading it now, her glasses perched on the end of her nose.

"You've asked me three times in the last ten minutes. If you would just let me get to the end, I could tell you."