Edge of the World Ch. 01

She shook her head and lowered the radio's volume to a small drone. "Haven't lived here that long, but I know some faculty who never stop talking about winter storms. Guess they'll finally have a new story to tell after this week."

He nervously laughed and looked around for something else to discuss, to no avail. Lacking anything to talk about, he yawned instead. Now that she got a good look at him, he did look absolutely beat to hell.

"You can sleep in the-" she began, and ground to a halt. The couch in front of the fireplace was the only comfortable option. He could probably survive in her bed, she supposed, given enough blankets, but then there'd be an adolescent teenager in her most private sanctum, and that was a scary proposition no matter how much of a boy scout he came off as. The couch did pull out, if they rearranged it to make room, but sleeping in the same bed was a total nonstarter.

"The floor will be fine." he said, and examined his hardwood resting place with about as much enthusiasm as a doctor's appointment.

"I'll get you some blankets and a pillow," she told him, limping to her bedroom. She brought back the poofiest covers she had, daring him with her eyes to make a comment about the kittens and pink yarn balls sprawled all over them, but he took them with a thankful nod and began to set his little cot.

With the candles snuffed and a couple of hefty logs on standby near the fireplace, they both gradually settled into their makeshift beds and attempted to fall asleep. They both failed miserably for a good while. Jessica was used to sprawling across her bed, and if she had to guess, the boy didn't normally sleep in full daytime clothes.

"I, um, left you a set of pajamas under the pillows," she suggested at last, annoyed by his constant subtle shifting.

"It's not that." he claimed. "Well, not totally that. It's just...this is really weird. You know?"

Jessica knew, all right. "Try not to think about it. Maybe tomorrow we can get out and reach a shelter."

"No," David insisted, "it's...I mean, I'm really sorry about all this."

"You don't do anything wrong," she told him, mainly because if she had brought up his dumbass attempt to beat the storm then they'd both qualify as dumbasses.

"I guess? But since I got stuck here, you had to cancel your plans. Feels like I ruined Christmas or something."

"How on earth did you know about that?" she wondered.

"You know, I found all those supplies-"

In a flash, Jessica recalled him stumbling onto her mounds of prophylactics in the purse, of varying colors and formations and - oh god - flavors, and turned still as stone.

"-so it was pretty obvious me and this storm kinda wrecked your plans."

She was grimly grateful he was facing away from her, away from the sudden flushed face and beads of sweat he had summoned. She opened her mouth to respond and found nothing at first. The urge to smack the piss out of him was equally powerful as the urge to hide in the nearest unreachable hole in irrational shame.

"It's, um, not a, I mean-" she stammered, blindsided by his sudden boldness. Any relaxation she managed to obtain was instantly obliterated.

"I guess we can use some of it, at least," he yawned.

The urge to smack the piss out of him leaped ahead by a mile. She was a split second away from recovering, from marching across the room despite her injured foot and kicking him out to sleep on the porch for the night, when he continued, "I'll buy you more sauce if you want. I didn't how to use the paprika or whatever else was in there so I left it alone. The food was good though, right?"

Her infuriated mind ground to a halt. The kitchen supplies. He was talking about the shopping she'd done when the other David was still scheduled to appear and she wanted to properly winter wine and dine with him.

"The food?" she asked stupidly. "The food! Oh, yes, the food was marvelous. I forgot to tell you, I'm sorry. It absolutely hit the spot, David."

She barely contained a giggle fit and wiped the sweat from her forehead. The tension in both her body and mind unwound, until she was genuinely struggling to stay awake. Of course the kid would have suspected dinner plans; the supplies included a fine bottle of wine, a wasteful pile of ingredients all for a single decadent meal and tall red candlesticks not at all meant for an extended power outage. Any idiot could see where that kind of night would lead to, but at least it wasn't as...blatant, as a fistful of rubbers.

"You okay?" he asked, head tilted towards the sound of her muffled giggles.

"Everything's fine." she said, which wasn't the truth but also nowhere near as big a lie as she would have expected. "Let's just get some sleep and hope things calm down tomorrow."

***

The morning brought several early surprises. The first, right as Jessica clambered out of the couch's depths and sat upright, was the fire was still going strong. At some point David must have got up and thrown in the extra logs, keeping the combination living room/kitchen (and little else) toasty and warm.

Speaking of David, she glanced down at his meager bedding and found the second surprise: he had shifted his blankets closer to the fire sometime in the night and gradually untangled himself from the stifling sheets, laying bare. He had eventually broken down and switched to the other David's old, thinning pajamas, and had grown a respectable case of morning wood.

Jessica averted her eyes, though the moment was not as weird as one might expect. She had been with enough men to know such biological quirks were common and beyond their realm of control. It's just, teachers usually didn't see a student's hardened bulge, much less one nearly poking out of a pajama's single-button fly.

Rather guiltily, she set a candle alight and held it above him to better see. He was properly endowed, nothing monstrous but perhaps a little larger than her David. Employing an almost comical level of stealth, she eased some sheets over his crotch before tiptoeing into the much colder bathroom to freshen up.

Her ankle was tender but bearable, so she proceeded to quietly gather bacon and eggs for breakfast. Once the meat was in the frying pan she tried to peek through her windows, only to find them completely filled with snow. It was a troubling sight, especially when there should have been blinding morning sun peering through instead of dimly glowing snow, but she decided to wait until the boy woke up, instead of dowsing him with a splash of outdoor air from the front door.

The delicious smell of frying bacon soon filled the room, and it wasn't long after she heard David's first stirring mumbles.

"Morning," she offered, cracking the eggs into a bowl.

"Good morning," the boy grumbled, and rose into a wide yawning stretch. She noticed with a bemused smirk that he had turned suddenly to face away from her.

"Food'll be done by the time you've freshened up. You like your eggs scrambled or fried?"

"Um, scrambled please, thank you," David answered. He staggered, maintaining that conspicuous angle away from her, towards the bathroom down the hall. Once the door between them shut she let out a small laugh.

Jessica let her mind wander as the food cooked for a minute. In the aftermath of her weekend plan going to shit, she thought she had handled yesterday's events pretty well. More than that, now that the night was over with and they'd spent some unwilling time together, she realized how fortunate she'd been to end up with David on the side of the road and not...well, basically any other male student, aside from maybe the handful of obviously gay ones. He hadn't ogled her, either in the helpless adolescent loser way or, even worse, with the unwarranted cockiness the jock types employed, and pulled through in a moment of legitimate crisis to help her make it back home. She would remember, and be thankful, for his presence in that respect.

At the same time...

She set the eggs aside and reached for the radio. Just like last night, the rock station was still primarily focused on the weather emergency.

"Road crews continue to tow cars from the highway and keep the main roads clear from the latest barrage of winter precipitation, to limited success. Backup generators within shelters have continued to function and are reporting to be well fueled, alleviating fears brought on by earlier reports of the electrical grid's strain and reports of significantly damaged power lines across the state. Cellular coverage continues to struggle-"

She clicked the radio off with a sigh.

At the same time, there was no getting around the fact she was trapped in what was essentially a single room, with a young teenager. Even if he had been a decent sort, at some point the hormones hijack the rational mind and sexual urges demand their satisfaction. Hell she was a grown woman, and a lot of her internal bitching and bitterness from yesterday stemmed from the disappointment of talking to her boyfriend in another state. How could she expect an adolescent to master their urges?

Given the news that the snow had not let up and they were trapped for the foreseeable future, how long was it reasonable to contain the baser instincts before it became borderline cruel? Unlike a lot of the older crones she worked alongside, she held the radical notion that sex was a topic worth educating and enjoying, for young and old alike, but that wild liberal philosophy had never accounted for being locked up with an eventually horny student.

The door bathroom door clicked open, and she decided to put her concern aside for the moment. In the grand scheme of things, she reasoned, avoiding a student's hard-on was nowhere near the most serious threat at the moment.

Aside from complimenting Jessica's cooking and assuring her the pile of blankets was fine to sleep in, there was little talk as they ate. She allowed herself to contemplate the hours, hell the days, of uncomfortable silence they likely had ahead. The effect would be even worse as the television was powerless and cell phones were useless, leaving no distracting gadget available.

Breakfast was finished and Jessica piled the dishes into the filling sink as David slipped through the front door for a look at the situation.

"Oh shit," she faintly heard from the porch. Curious, she gladly neglected the dirty dishes a while longer to survey the damage.

There was one spot on the porch's screen mesh where David had knocked away the snow to see; the rest of it was thoroughly caked in snow. From the limited view, she saw a massive blanket of white, with more of it drifting down like dust. The entire yard was dotted with downed limbs, most of them twigs, some of them larger than she was, all of them encased in what looked like an inch of clear bumpy ice. Instead of bright blinding sunlight bouncing off the frosted ground, the sky was still a bruised dark purple, promising more frozen hell ahead.

"Jeeesus," she moaned, already beginning to shiver. Hopes of making it back to her car and dropping the kid off back at his house died immediately. Her car was probably sunk into a good half a foot of hard, icy snow.

"I think...I'm gonna be stuck here another day," David realized.

They hurried back inside, Jessica rubbing her arms through the robe, David hauling in more firewood for the dwindling flames. For a good while they discussed the weather, their supplies, whatever little blurbs the radio announced, and when things really began to die down not even an hour later, their preferred next meal even though neither one was remotely close to hungry yet. When that fell away as well, silence invaded the house.

David took a long, unhappy glance at her bookshelf full of trashy romance novels and asked, "I'm guessing you do have any board games or anything to kill the time?"

She shook her head but quickly went "Oh wait," and vanished to her room. Minutes later she emerged with a heavy, dusty checkerboarded box and set it upon the table. Pulling the wooden top away revealed rows of finely carved chess pieces.

"You play?" she wondered.

"I know how, but I dunno the strategy stuff or anything," he admitted, but with another brief glance at the pile of paperbacks with barechested male models on the front, he reached into the box and gathered the black pieces.

It didn't take long for Jessica to confirm that David indeed had all the tactical skills of a toddler as she lay waste to his pieces, sometimes sacrificing them blindly, sometimes blinded by a bishop's attack out of nowhere. He didn't take long in considering his moves, and was defeated within minutes.

"Yeah, I suck at this," he laughed, watching his overturned king roll off the board.

"Nooo," Jessica lied, "you just need some practice, and help, and patience, and-"

"You lost three pawns and a rook. I suck at this."

She tried to maintain a sympathetic eye contact and failed. With a laugh and a nod, "Okay fine, you suck at this. But you can improve! Let's try again."

They went another round, this time Jessica explaining why she made certain moves and what he should look out for. He still lost, easily, but she could see the cogs were beginning to turn and he was looking at the board with a growing focus. It was in their third game, in fact, where he made a series of moves she thought were random but placed her king in a tight check, she side-eyed him with a moment of suspicion.

"Did you do that on purpose?" she asked. It wasn't just the moves on the board she found suspect, but the way he had nudged her attention away from the game when he made them.

"Do what?" he asked. He was either oblivious to how close she'd been to checkmate, or possessed a little more guile than she thought. At any rate she still won, and they both seemed to feel three games was a good stopping point.

"Can I ask you like a career question?" he said once the board was wiped clear.

Jessica didn't want to bear more of her personal life to the kid, but said "Sure," mainly because the alternative was more painful silence. Besides, job stuff wasn't that personal.

"Do you enjoy what you do? Teaching?"

That...was a complicated answer, and probably not a very pretty one she should be sharing to anyone, let alone a subordinate to her profession. On the other hand, dismissal or denial would set the stage for a different kind of frosty atmosphere, and after what they'd been through the day before, she didn't want that for him.

"I like parts of it," she began, eyes cast up as she struggled to remember just what exactly. "The sense you're helping, when you see a good student receive their diplomas and talk about scholarships they've earned. Things like that make the paperwork and test grading go by faster. Are you thinking about being a teacher, David?"

The kid's voice sounded a little down as he answered, "Well, track stuff isn't a job for most people, I think the coaches get more out of me winning instead of working on other stuff, but I don't want to be stuck wearing a hairnet and apron for years after graduating, you know?"

Jessica nodded and knew exactly what he meant. The coaches often had "soft" classes like health and babysitting the scholarship hunters in the library on their off-season, so they were within the teacher meetings but far from involved. They sat in the corner, hogging the coffee and talking amongst themselves, vicariously living through whatever young quarterback or track athlete they had in their grasp at the time.

Granted, she only knew this because she inhabited the farthest orbit of the other side; family men and women discussing their offspring just as much as the school dealings. Not that she was stuck-up or distant to others professionally, she was simply the newest recruit from another city devoid of family or anything the others could easily relate to.

Still not wanting to lie to the kid or feed him hollow encouragement, she said, "Honestly it's a bit late for you to be working on this career path. There's programs and grants out there, but you're gonna spend a year flipping burgers until they're accepting new applications."

"Yeah..." the boy sighed with his head low. "I guess that's not so bad. My friend is making good money in a pie factory, but that's twelve hours climbing around giant ovens and pulling out dead rats-"

Jessica's mild craving for the frozen pumpkin pie in the freezer shriveled.

"-and my parents said no gas stations, afraid of a robbery I guess."

"Well if you're serious about it, I can write down the programs you're eligible for. I'll even let you use me for a reference."

"I'd really appreciate that," he smiled, "but I noticed it took a while for you to name the things you liked. If, um, you don't mind me asking..."

"You want to know what the downsides are," Jessica knew. The boy nodded.

"The pay isn't great," she began without a second of hesitation. "You do a ton of extra work at home without compensation. You're considered a mean or bad teacher if you don't pay for some class projects out of your own pocket..."

She eyed him for a moment, determining how much trust she could place in his discretion. Likely sensing this, David confirmed, "Scout's honor, I won't blab to anyone about it."

"Some of the other teachers are...judgmental, especially if you're new. You get checked up on a lot, your filing and class arrangement is always getting 'better' suggestions, students you write up for major infractions may get off easy because the staff thinks you don't know how to handle them properly. Then the students, they..."

She stopped, feeling like she was seconds from telling secrets to the enemy. Stranger still, she had already revealed more about her career to this student she'd known for a day than her own boyfriend, who may have caught her mumbling about some bitchy English teacher or another but decided to steer clear of the subject for the most part.

"Most of you are fine," she continued. "Some of the girls are..."

"Bitchy?" David suggested.

"They don't know any better," she suggested, but she smirked, also accepting his theory. "They'll lose that attitude if they can't find a man to put up with them...or they end up living with a lot of cats. Same with a lot of the boys. You know what I mean, some can't help being...weird, or awkward around women, you just have to get used to that. But some of them..."

"The sleazy jock types?" David asked.

Jessica nodded slowly, unsure of how much to reveal. The lecherous stares and "accidental" bumps she had endured after just a few years of teaching didn't exactly haunt her every waking second or anything, but the fact it often went unpunished irked the piss out of her. Writing up students for such reports was a taboo, as the report's existence would imply she failed to dress acceptable enough for work or instigated the event by leading a student on or much worse. Pretty women like herself were the problem, according to dickhead parents who didn't any any sexual perversion shit on their darling child's permanent record.

"When you review a lesson and the kid makes a mistake on the test, it is entirely the kid's fault," she explained. "With harassment, people go the other way. The punishment is so severe, especially when they hit eighteen, it's less painful for everyone involved if the victim takes the blame and parents hope their kid just learns to be more careful."

David said nothing, appearing contemplative and perhaps a little uncomfortable.

"And it's not just about me, of course. You see the same thing happen to girls who don't know any better, who will really believe it's their fault and think that's normal behavior."

Jessica stopped suddenly. On the one hand, she felt aghast at revealing so much of her grievances to a borderline stranger. She hadn't bared her thoughts to anyone like that since she was a little girl asking for her mother's advice. At the same time, there was a lighter feeling in her chest and an unfamiliar sense of connection.