Forbidden Fruit Ch. 01

(Author's Note: All characters in this story are at least 18 year old.)

* * * * * *

It takes fifty years to build a perfect life, and one day to ruin it.

Our Tom. That was what they called him within the confines of his small suburban life. When he was still a kid, back in the late seventies, just five or six years old, was when it began. When his mother would stand out by the end of the garden of their four-bed family house and chat idly with the neighbours it was always Our Tom. When his father would sit smoking his pipe with old friends from school, he was always Our Tom. His big sister, who had always doted on him, ever since he was a baby, called him Our Tom. The neighbours, the postman, the milkman, his teachers.

Nicknames of affection were a way to mythologise Thomas Lisowski in his neighbourhood and beyond, a form of veneration that had followed him throughout his life like an invisible gift. The son of two Polish immigrants who had moved to Britain after the second World War, Thomas had always been what his teachers would call an overachiever. The tallest boy in his class at school, with broad shoulders and a face that everybody could tell was going to be a knockout in later life, he put his physical gifts to good use.

In football he started as striker. In basketball, centre. Rugby, scrumhalf. Only the football team, which on three separate occasions won the under-eighteens county regional championship, and all three times with Tom as the lead goal scorer, had been any good, but it seemed as if anything Tom participated in served only to elevate his status as a local hero of sorts, a mythic all-rounder who excelled at whatever was put in front of him.

At the age of sixteen he won the under-eighteens county title for the one hundred metre sprint. A week later, he won gold in the two hundred metres. When a hamstring injury a year following forced him to sit out most of the season and focus on his schoolwork, he found a second love in history, a subject he applied himself to with great enthusiasm, finishing high school with the highest mark on any history test they had seen in years. Then, with the best of his sprinting days behind him, he turned his attention to distance running. At nineteen he won the under-twenty-one amateur half-marathon, regional and national, a feat he repeated a year later. Then at twenty-one, he won again. And again. Soon he could not stop winning, a prodigy over thirteen miles as he had been over a hundred metres, across a football pitch, by the hoop, between the posts.

If there were anything Thomas Lisowksi could not do once he applied himself to it, he never found out. At eighteen, after leaving high school, he went on to university. Tom, the first in his family to ever attend higher education and the pride of his neighbourhood, went into teaching. That was where they began to call him Sweetheart. Some of the other teachers called him A Great Guy. A Real Standup Fella, Our Tom.

Like such, his mythology was built. By twenty-two he was as handsome as they came, six-four and the shy side of two hundred pounds, broad-shouldered and blondhaired and fairskinned. Later that year he moved out of his parents' house and into a little place not far from where he grew up, a place where everybody still knew him by name and everybody would wave at him as he walked on by and some even called him Our Tom when they talked to each other about him as if they had known him their entire lives.

Sometime later he met the love of his life. Janet Lovegood was a quiet and unassuming girl whose parents, a cobbler father from North London and a dressmaker mother from Romania, knew Thomas's parents quite well. They, like everybody else, called him Our Tom, the Sweetheart. Janet had dreams of going into fashion, a starry-eyed brunette with a mousylooking face who would cut up old editions of Vogue and Cosmopolitan and TEEN Magazine and stitch them together in collages pinned to a corkboard on her wall, inspiration for what would culminate in a rejection from the London College of Fashion and a year of abject misery and three decades of working as an admin assistant at a local surgery. When she told her parents that Thomas Lisowski had asked her out on a date the first thing her father had said was, 'Thomas Lisowski? Our Tom? That Tom?'

'That Tom.'

'Great guy, that Tom. A real standup kid.'

They got along like a house on fire. In 1998, Thomas twenty-six and Janet twenty-five, they married. Six hundred people attended the wedding. Two years later their only child was born, a beautiful baby girl called Rose, who had her mother's mousy face and her father's striking blue eyes and, much later in life, his intense passion for history. Everybody knew Thomas. Knew Janet, knew Rose. Such was the destiny of his life that the Lisowski name held a sort of reverence to it, a sort of pillar of sensibility in a rapidly changing, digitalising world of chaos, a model others would aspire to and, more often than not, fall short of.

Why can't you be more like Our Tom?

Did you know that Tom Lisowski was a champion in both the hundred metres and the half-marathon? All while he was still in his teens.

Have you ever seen a man like Our Tom?

Such a sweetheart, that Tom. A real standup guy.

His mythos grew. Over the years he mellowed, slowly but surely, as most men do. He raised Rose with the same affection his parents had bestowed him and he loved Janet with all his heart, a woman to whom he had given himself entirely, had supported with his whole being, from the time they had met while waiting for the bus not far from where Tom had been working part-time as a greengrocer. The more the world changed around them the more he seemed to endure it. With time he greyed around the temples and then everywhere else and a congenital heart issue put a stop to the distance running and his eyes grew faded and distant in the way that those of a certain age do but he had never lost that smile, that calm in an ocean of turbulence.

At school the other teachers would envy him, the kids he taught look up to him. Around the neighbourhood where he and Janet lived with Rose he would get stopped in the street by the postman, the milkman, the electrician, the guy who cleaned his windows, the boiler repair man, the local preacher from the county sect of the Presbyterian Church, all asking him the same things.

'How's Janet and the kid?'

'Doing swell. Thanks for asking.'

'You look good, Tom.'

'You too.'

'Be seeing you around.'

'Likewise.'

And he would never forget a face. It was this, in part, that made him such a hospitable candidate for neighbourhood hero. Tom the everyman, with his rugged individualism and his indomitable perseverance, who never forgot who you were, or where you worked, or what your favourite scotch was, or when your son's birthday was. It was this gift of recollection he treasured more than anything. Days where he had played as a kid with his sister in the street. Days of warm reckoning. Then came Janet, then Rose. He remembered it all, with such fine detail, people and faces and names, forty-eight years of history. And when he first began to notice Phoebe Severt in that spring of 2022, he wished he had never been gifted such a thing at all.

* * * * * *

Students had come and gone. Some were great, few outstanding, fewer still spectacular, and the rarest few unforgettable. It had become somewhat of a tradition for him to see them off, as if he were the guiding hand across the Styx of further life, those that passed into further education and those that went into the working world and some who simply drifted away, never to be heard from again. There were so many it became hard to put names to faces, these vague watercolours shapes floating about somewhere in his head. But not her.

He had not known or heard of Phoebe Severt until her final year of school. One of the oldest in her year, she had turned eighteen in October, weeks after he'd first introduced her -- and the rest of the class -- to final-year history, a subject she seemed enamoured by. From what little he knew of her she was a brilliant student. Bright, if occasionally quiet and reserved, with a penchant for curiosity, always asking questions, always probing and analysing, decoding and decrypting, a brash, almost arrogant sort of intelligence to her that her teachers found equal parts infuriating and mesmerising.

Objectively there was nothing else strictly remarkable about her. She was not classically pretty or universally attractive but she was at least appealing. A tiny girl, barely five feet tall and proportionally as light, Phoebe carried herself with a certain tomboyishness, the top button of her polo shirt always undone and the collar messy, a short blonde pixie cut of hair that never made it to her shoulders and wickedly green eyes and a mousy, soft face. She was slender, so slender in fact that it would not be amiss to call her thin, or boyish looking, a diminutive frame barely filled out with tiny breasts and narrow hips and a slim waist and the vague suggestion of toned abs. And she was so pale too, almost milky, like a teenage girl fashioned out of porcelain and not human skin.

What had drawn Thomas to her was something else, something it appeared nobody else could see. Her intelligence, her quietness, the way she would never speak unless spoken to, her loneliness in class -- it all carried with it a certain mystique that was exhilarating. It was as if she had been cursed to dwell within the body of an eighteen-year-old, some wiser and smarter creature -- and she was not unaware of how smart she was, or how fiercely intriguing in her desire to always seek out the most efficient outcome in every situation.

He didn't know when his infatuation had started, but he knew it was there. It was sometime after Christmas. She sat on the front row, two seats to the left, a solitary desk to whom nobody ever passed notes or leant over to whisper or even acknowledged she was there. Only when he called upon her to answer did she make herself known. There was something about her silent confidence that was treacherous -- the way she would stand so elegantly and saunter to the board to write something, leaning up until occasionally her polo shirt would ride up or her skirt lift just a slight and he had to look away out of shame.

This continued for far too long. In September he had not even known her. By Christmas he found himself drifting to thoughts of her, just her, just there, Phoebe Severt in his classroom. By early spring it had become something more serious. Occasionally he would sit in his car before school began and peer out into the parking lot and swear she was there, walking on by, that skirt and that tight polo shirt and that blonde pixie cut that was so uniquely her and everything else about her. And then Thomas would hang his head and rub his temples and say: She's eighteen-years-old. Eighteen.

Younger women had never taken his fancy. When he and Janet had married, a year separating them, everyone else had become secondary. Janet had taken over his life. It was Janet in the mornings and Janet at work and Janet Janet Janet all the time, everywhere, for years. By the time Rose had come along that flame had dimmed but there it remained, burning in his cup of adulthood, never extinguished. Now at nearly fifty there could be an exception made. There was no room in his life for anybody but Janet, but what if there was? What if -- against his better judgement -- it was Phoebe Severt?

The thought made his head spin. Sometimes he wanted to vomit and on one such occasion he did, stood hurling into a narrow staffroom cubicle after a particularly agonising history class, a tent in the front of his pants, Phoebe on his mind. It was vile and shameful and so very un-Thomas Lisowski-esque and why was he getting hard at the sight of her and why could he not stop it? He thought of Janet, of Janet's full body and her pillowy tits, of Janet's mouth around his cock and Janet taking him deep inside her and Janet moaning his name like she had done so many times before. And then, before he could think of Phoebe, he stopped. There were lines he would not cross. Not now and not ever.

* * * * * *

Weeks passed. Things grew slowly worse. Soon he would think of her when washing his face in the mirror. After a while he would sit teaching some other class and imagine Phoebe sitting there on the front row, her delicate legs crossed one over the other, leaning her head on her hand, staring up at him. And then he would grow hard, and it would take a long time for it to go down again. And then the worst part -- it stopped making him feel ill. He found after weeks of quiet revulsion that no longer did he want to vomit at the thought of Phoebe. Worryingly, it was quite the opposite.

Phoebe seemed to understand this effect she had on people. She was nothing if not devilishly clever and this extended to her understanding of the world and the things contained therein, a perception of how people interacted, of how social structures behaved, of the power of femininity when embraced with outward confidence and the desperation of male lust when denied or otherwise ignored. She knew sex and knew of its devices. Knew sexuality. There was nothing about her that seemed anything less than fully in control of her own desires and her own needs and her own agency in pursuing those to their eventual terminus and it was this conviction in her own knowledge that was so wildly alluring.

The glances grew longer, the teasing more pronounced. He was not sure if it was deliberate, but it was. An unfastened button here, a revealing skirt there. A quiet rebellion against a restrictive dress code. Soon it became unbearable. He would steal glances at her in the corridor between classes, a childish sort of infatuation, the kind of looks he used to get from girls in school whenever the great Tom Lisowski would pass in a breeze of misguided neighbourhood heroism.

No longer would he call on her to answer questions, content to let her just sit there quietly, as if only her presence were enough. The obsession grew damaging. He soon forgot she was his student, with her own dreams and passions and future ahead of her. His feedback on her work became sloppy and distracted, his glances longer and more pronounced, his erections harder and more frequent.

Then, one Monday in spring, it all began to unravel.

The topic had been Britain in the 1830s. A country on the cusp of industrialisation. A time of great revolution. They were each to write a two or three-page summary of what they had learnt over the semester. It was no surprise that Phoebe's was the standout. She had written seven pages in the neatest possible cursive, with a heavy focus on the pitfalls of rapid industrial overexpansion and the issues that arose from a politically charged, socially conscious middle class. Her talent for academia was remarkable. There were postgraduates who could not write with the same grace, the same efficiency of language, the same eye for analytical detail. Each sentence had purpose. No ink was wasted. She had capped it off with a brilliant conclusion that drew it all together, even posing a question of her own for someone -- perhaps Tom -- to answer at a later date. Then, in smaller writing at the bottom, scribbled in erasable pencil, she had written:

'I'm not a virgin.'

* * * * * *

He saw her after class on Tuesday. The hour had been torturous. In the sweltering May heat he could not think straight and there sat Phoebe in her polo shirt with one of the buttons undone and all he could think was: I'm not a virgin. I'm not a virgin. I'm not a virgin.

She never took her eyes off him, even when they were alone. He set the paper on the desk and opened it to the last page and pushed it across the table to her. 'This is incredibly inappropriate, Phoebe,' he said. 'I don't know if it's some sort of joke or game between you and your friends, but you could get in a lot of trouble for writing something like this.'

He waited for a reply. It was a long time coming. Her voice was high and airy and innocent. 'I'm sorry, Mr Lisowski,' she said. 'I don't know what came over me.'

'Phoebe--'

'I just couldn't help myself. I don't know why I wrote it. It's just after seeing you staring at me I must've just written it and forgotten about it and never went back to edit it.'

Tom just sat there. The sweat was pouring from him. 'Excuse me?' he said, barely a whisper.

'I'm sorry, sir. It won't happen again.'

'I'd like you to leave, please, Phoebe.'

'Yes, sir. Was the essay any good? Sir?'

All he could do was clear his throat and nod weakly. She scooped it up and smiled at him -- not really a smile but a smirk, the corner of her lips just barely curved upwards, as if taunting him, teasing him for his weakness, for his inability to hide the way he lusted after her, lusted after a teenager younger than his own daughter -- and then she said, 'Thank you, sir. I'll keep up the good work.'

Then without another word she left.

That night he fucked Janet like he had not fucked her since before Rose was born. He fucked her like there would never be anyone else to fuck, pistoning into her, driving himself deep inside her cunt, pinning her down underneath his weight and slapping her ass and fucking her into the bed like a common whore. He had not felt her cum like this in years and the way she trembled around him made him feel incredibly powerful, a bestial urge to claim her and make her his, to reaffirm his love for her, his loyalty, his devotion. He had never cheated, though he could have. There had been so many opportunities. For years girls would throw themselves at him, the mighty Tom Lisowski, he of chiselled jaw and handsome face and smart hair and hulking great frame, he the football-basketball-crosscountry-sprint ace. But he had stayed true to Janet.

That, in a way, had been his failing. He could have confirmed himself as an unfaithful husband twenty years ago and they would have lived with that. For the sake of Rose and their parents and watchful eyes in the neighbourhood, they would have survived. Janet might have even forgiven him. But now he stood at a crossroads and he could see only one way out and now there would be no forgiveness and rightly so. Not for something like this.

When he came he lay there for a long time spooning her in his arms. Soon Janet was asleep. It took him another half-hour. The last thing he thought of before it overtook him for the night was Phoebe Severt.

* * * * * *

A sour, colourless adventure.

That was how he lived from day to day. There was something distinctly jejune in his approach to the universe and he knew it and knew it well. And it was not for lack of trying either. The world had existed always to him through a superficial lens, simplistic and workmanlike, as if he had lived his life only insomuch as fulfilling a certain quota of requirements, often if not always in the pursuit of pleasing others before himself. Things seemed not to matter at all. What had given him this life of perfect middle-class emptiness?

It was as if he had crafted for himself a way for his parents to save face, for his wife to feel wanted and necessary, for his daughter to grow up safe knowing she was the offspring of Tom Lisowski and not some other father from some other grey suburban household. Nothing had meaning, or finality in consequence. And no amount of praise from his parents or Janet or Rose or anyone could solve this within him and perhaps he was worse off for this or perhaps not. He didn't know.

Ever since giving up the running, what had he lived for? What was there for himself save a husk of a man he had been twenty-five years ago? He realised with a sort of alarming urgency that he could not find a time since the birth of his daughter that had fulfilled him, that had made him content to be here, like this, Our Tom Lisowski. He was living for the sake of living, for the sake of maintaining that façade. Janet may well have been some other woman he had never met before. Even their lovemaking was perfunctory and forgettable. This staleness of spirit he carried around with him like a curse, begging for it to end.