Graduation Ch. 02

Caleb smiled when she mused as much, standing arm-in-arm with her, looking out through the patio door. "Mom and Becca are driving up to Tacoma on the 14th for their anniversary. So if you're still feeling brave, I wouldn't mind having you over for a night to find out."

"God, we're just begging to be caught, aren't we?" Penny was shaking her head, more amused and resigned than nervous.

"Well, if you think about it, if we do get caught, that means everyone knows that you picked up the hottest guy in school and I nailed the hottest teacher in the world."

"'The hottest guy in school,' huh? When'd you get so cocky?"

"I think it started after I nailed the hottest teacher in the world."

Penny giggled and kissed Caleb on the head. It was the second time she responded that way to something Caleb said; she could see herself defaulting to it whenever he said anything, what with him always being so god damned adorable somehow.

Yeah, he was adorable, along with being hot as hell, and he deserved a little treat. She glanced to the basement steps behind her and said, "I think there's only one stop left on the tour."

"Actually, can I show you one more thing?" Caleb was quick to ask. "You might think it's cool."

Of course Penny knew that Amelia Bradstreet—or Amelia Easton, as the New York Times Bestseller Lists knew her—was a writer. Despite obvious mutual interests, though, Penny chose not to ask her about her work, opting to keep any parent-teacher conferences focused on Caleb. Partly because she figured Amelia would appreciate it, but also because romance novels weren't really Penny's thing anyway. All the same, Penny was fascinated by writer's spaces, and she was more than happy to let Caleb show off Amelia's...assuming that "You're sure this is okay?"

"Yeah, positive," said Caleb, entering her office, located just to the left of the front door. "Mom protects her time, but outside of that, she's not too precious about her space."

The office had a thin, unpadded carpet the color of a bright overcast sky, with forest green walls, an old comfy-looking couch, and three dark wooden bookcases stuffed with books. Amelia's ten published works had a place of honor on the top shelf of the middle bookcase, ordered chronologically instead of alphabetically by author. Bolted to that shelf was a long, thin plastic sign with bright white lettering: "REMEMBER: YOU DID THIS." Penny resisted the temptation to leave her fingerprint across the stark evidence of a successful author's resilient fragility.

The desk caught Penny's attention next; more accurately, the series of pictures next to the monitor, lined up in a cascading row. One was a posed headshot of Caleb from one or two years ago, wearing a tuxedo in the same way he tended to wear the shit out of anything; next was a casual snapshot of Amelia in a wedding gown, laying a smooch on a glowing woman—Becca, she presumed—in a snazzy white tuxedo, with short dark hair and a pleasantly round face. Penny was about to comment on how cute they looked together, but the last picture got her attention: a weathered but handsome man with tight wavy hair and a bright smile. "This isn't your Dad, is it?" Penny asked.

"Yep, that's him."

"Wouldn't expect your mom to keep a picture of her ex on her desk."

"That's because he's not really an ex," he explained. "Brain cancer."

Penny's hand collided with her face. "Oh, God, I'm so sorry."

"Dad wouldn't want you to be," he assured.

"Can I ask how your mom found Becca, then? Seems like there's an interesting story there."

"'Interesting?' It was kinda my college admission essay," said Caleb. "The short version is that I got creamed by a drunk driver when I was six." Off Penny's gasp, he said "Yeah, something like that. It was bad. 'Repeat the first grade' bad."

"Jesus! Did they catch the guy, at least?"

"Oh yeah. He did seven years, and there are still enough damages from the civil suit left over to technically pay for college. But that's a whole other story," he said. "Becca was my physical therapist after I got out of the hospital. She had to teach me how to walk again."

"How to— How the hell did you end up playing football after taking that kind of damage?"

"Persistent trauma surgeons, a lot of luck, and Becca being that awesome. I don't remember if you've ever met her, but the thing about Becca is, she doesn't give a shit. Like even now, after I walked in on her and Mom, Mom's all horrified and apologetic, and she's, like, making all these jokes about eating her out."

"Ew!"

"Yeah, that image isn't leaving my head for, I dunno, ever, but on the other hand, I kinda like that she doesn't do shame or decency. Because the other side of that is, when everyone's looking at you like you're the victim of this horrible tragedy that you're never gonna recover from, it's great to have someone throw all that bullshit out and say, 'Look, we're gonna put one foot in front of the other, and we're going to find your way back to normal.' I mean, yeah, give me awesome trauma surgeons, give me every lucky break that can come my way, but I don't ever really get better without Becca daring me to."

"Wow," was all Penny could think to say. "That...wow." Literally.

"Yeah, well," Caleb continued, "I loved Becca. But then there was Mom; she actually saw me get hit, and it really messed with her for a while."

"I can imagine."

Caleb nodded. "So she thought that Becca was too hard on me and I actually had to beg her to keep us together, and that forced the two of them to start talking to each other. And then after each session, I'd just see them talk more and more. I'd watch them, and I had no idea how the whole gay and lesbian thing worked back then, but I still had this sense that the two of them just...you know, fit together.

"I'm guessing it got pretty intense because they stopped talking after I fully recovered, and whenever I asked Mom about her she'd try to change the subject. Dad—oh yeah, I forgot to mention: This all went down before Dad got sick."

"Oh, shit!"

"Yeah. I don't remember Mom and Dad having any arguments about her, maybe they did a good job hiding it, I don't know. But Dad must've figured it out somehow, because a year later, when his doctor was telling him to get his affairs in order, his first call was to Becca."

"I can't imagine...any of that. I mean, I believe you, I just...I honestly can't even."

"None of us could, Mom especially. She tells me that's why she left Becca with me and locked herself in here for a week and a half after he died." Caleb walked to the middle bookshelf and pulled the third book off the "YOU DID THIS" shelf. "Getting it on paper was the only way she could work through it."

The book was called Critical Care; the jacket was a beautiful illustration of three hands resting on each other for comfort. According to the inside jacket, it was the story of an at-home nurse, hired to watch over a once-proud working mother with end-stage ALS, who falls in love with her patient's husband.

"What's crazy is, it ended up putting her on the map," explained Caleb. "I think Mom kind of resents it; I once heard her complain about it being her 'Tears in Heaven,' whatever that means. But I read it a couple of years ago, and I dunno, I think it's great. There's this one thing the mother says late in the book, about how she wasn't really afraid of dying, but that she hated causing so much pain for the people she loved, and that she thought she could die in peace if, like, she knew that her tragedy led to something beautiful. Obviously Mom said it a lot better, but that always stuck with me."

"You're a romantic," said Penny.

"Think I'm a little too perverted to be a romantic," he shrugged.

"Trust me," said Penny, "you're a romantic."

Caleb nodded. They remained silent for a minute, basking in the afterglow of his story. They both knew what was supposed to come next, but neither one seemed to be in any rush to get there. In other words, "I totally killed the mood, didn't I?"

"It died for a good cause," assured Penny.

Caleb shrugged and slid the book back into its rightful space. "Well...now what?"

* * * * *

"Ah," sighed the bottle blonde, seated behind a desk in a cheap drywall set made to look like a classroom, "I thought this day would never end."

"Wow," said Penny, swallowing a bite of her ham sandwich as she watched it happen on-screen, "right off the bat, stellar production values. You can just tell they cared so much."

Penny and Caleb figured that if they were going to use the gym, even just to roleplay, they should at least eat something first, food being fuel and all that. They quietly figured that while they ate, they'd need something to clear the slate; it was tricky to go from a deeply personal story about love and triumph in the wake of heart-rending tragedy to "pound that sweet pussy, baby." Caleb's wild idea was to sling some porn from his iPad to the TV, "even though I probably sound like a weirdo for suggesting it," and Penny amended that to bad porn to keep them from getting too turned on and going at each other on the couch.

Finding bad free porn was harder than finding good free porn. Most bad porn is depressing, amounting to blurry footage of two worn out bodies bumping against each other until one of them sputters to an inevitability. It can ruin the very concept of sex if you watch too much of it. The key to entertainingly bad porn was on-camera talent that still looked good and seemed into what they were doing, while being incompetently conceived and executed in every other respect. It was a tall order, but thanks to their morning conversation, Penny and Caleb had a good idea of where to start.

"Anybody still here?" chirped the teacher, looking around a classroom that should have clearly been empty at this point.

"I gotta be honest," said Caleb, "she's pretty hot."

"She really is," said Penny, "and she's costumed sensibly too. Nothing too revealing, yet still hot enough that you want to see more. That goes a long way."

After a couple of moments, the teacher stood and began to hike up her skirt.

"LADY!" cried Penny. "Get the fuck outta here!" laughed Caleb.

"God, I really need to relax," the teacher said, sitting at her desk chair, presumably facing the classroom door, rubbing her hand over the gusset of her panties.

"You can't relax in the fucking bathroom, at least?" asked Penny, more incredulous than she probably should have been.

"But see," explained Caleb, as the actress pulled her panties to the side and strummed her fingers across her vulva, "then it wouldn't be taboo, which means it wouldn't be sexy. Besides, how else would some lucky student realize that she's down?"

"I don't know, creatively?"

"This is kinda creative," said Caleb. "I mean, who expected this?"

"Being a teacher is SO HARD," she moaned, sucking on a pen.

"Point taken."

After three graphic minutes of masturbation, a buff man appeared from out of nowhere and started rubbing his own crotch, wearing a backwards baseball cap and the sort of loose graphic tee that adults thought all kids wore. He looked to be at least five years older than the actress, but since he kept referring to her as Ms. Miller, he was apparently a student.

"You can't tell anyone about this, Peter!"

"Well, Ms. Miller, that depends on what you can do for me."

"Funny story," said Penny, "she has him on attempted blackmail now, which means mutually assured destruction. Technically, he can't force her to do anything."

"Wouldn't it be her word against his?"

"It's her word against his anyway. Administration tends to favor the student's claim by default, but his claim would be a little bit wilder than 'oh, she slapped me on the ass.' As long as she kept her cool, she could probably bullshit her way through it. I mean, not that it matters since she's letting him face-fuck her now..."

"Aw, yeah, take it, Ms. Miller!" Peter was clutching Ms. Miller by the back of her head, repeatedly jamming his oversized cock down her throat. Ms. Miller was making duck-like gagging noises in response, but she seemed to be game for it. He cooed, "You like being my dirty little slut teacher?"

"I love it!" Ms. Miller cried out after being pulled off his cock, gasping for breath. "I love being your dirty little slut teacher!"

"If she gives him a grade at the end of this like I did with you our first night," said Penny, "I might get a little sick."

Caleb said nothing. Penny looked over and realized he seemed to be making an effort to keep watching the quasi-abuse.

Given Caleb's age, it was hard not to cheekily call it "a senior moment." The longer she observed Caleb's despondence over the action onscreen, the more his behavior since leaving his bedroom seemed to slide into place.

"Hey." Penny put a hand on Caleb's shoulder, getting his attention. "You do realize I'm not expecting you to do any of that to me downstairs, right?"

"Yeah, I know," Caleb blurted out. "Well, I didn't, but I mean yeah, of course you weren't."

"Well, you could if you wanted, but...you know what, pause this for a minute." Caleb paused the porn on a frame of Peter's hands stretching Ms. Miller's mouth into a large gape. Her heavy makeup was already starting to run, just like the fat wad of oxygenated drool spilling from her lips. "Actually, just—"

"Shut it down, yeah." Caleb closed down the video entirely, disconnecting his iPad from the TV.

"Okay, how do I put this," Penny continued, racking her mind for some kind of example.

Caleb jumped in before Penny could settle on her words. "Look," he said, "I get that it should be fun to have a little power over someone who used to be in charge of you, even if she was really nice about it. But that's the thing; you're not some horrible person I'm finally turning the tables on after a year of eating shit. You're...you're Miss Piper."

She nodded in response, unable to stop herself from smiling.

"I mean, it's not like I never thought about it. That first night, when you were sexting me, I kept thinking 'Okay, I'm going to pass this quiz, I'm going to run up to her apartment, and I'm going to fucking ruin her.'"

"YES," exclaimed Penny. "Can I tell you something? After I sent you that last question—"

"Still pissed about that, by the way. That was so cheap."

"Yeah it was, and I was bracing myself. I thought, 'If I unlock that door, he's going to kick it open, he's going to fuck me stupid, and I'm going to love it.'"

"Instead, I just stood there like an idiot."

Penny shook her head. "Don't do that. You gave me a chance to take the lead, and it brought out a side of myself that I didn't know I had. And I LOVED it. I wouldn't change a thing about that weekend."

Penny's hand slid down across the clothed ridges of Caleb's muscular body, just past his stiffening cock, coming to rest on the inside of his thigh.

"Now, though...you're experienced. More than that, you've turned out to be a good cocksman."

"A lot of that was you," he giggled.

"So? Even if it was," she said, "there are things you did to me—subtle things—that I never could've taught you." She rubbed up and down the inside of his thigh, pulling in closer, talking softly into his ear. "Face it, sweetie: You're kind of a natural, and I have to know what exactly I'm dealing with. So before I can teach you any more...I have to give you an assessment test."

On her next upstroke, Penny drifted up a little further to his sac and felt him twitch upon her fingertips.

"Mmm," she confirmed, "something tells me that sounds a lot more appealing to you."

"A little bit, yeah."

Penny kissed Caleb on the cheek. "So, don't overthink it," she said, before getting off the couch. "All you need to do is pound the shit out of me, the way you apparently fantasized about all year." She passed back through with her gym bag over her shoulder, rounding the bannister between the entryway and the wall. "You get changed into your gym clothes. I'll change downstairs."

"You're not just my hot teacher anymore, though!" Penny reentered the great room with her gym bag slung over her shoulder and turned for the steps. "What if I can't really do that to you?"

"Let me worry about that," said Penny, descending the stairs without looking back to Caleb.

She made sure her grin was evident in her voice, because the only other way to assure him was to tell him what she had in her bag.

* * * * *

For a little while after he dressed in his ratty Adidas tank top and mesh shorts, Caleb sat on his bed in quiet contemplation. After an admittedly short life-to-date facing down an extended hit-and-run recovery, a departed father, tough-talking coaches, and defensive linemen built like refrigerator trucks, his sweet and smoking-hot English teacher had reduced his inner vocabulary to one word:

Fuck.

He saw three ways this could go. In the first way, his hormones would go apeshit, he'd pounce on her, and commit to something that, if it wasn't rape, was probably rape-adjacent. He'd hate himself, Penny would probably be freaked out, and whatever was between them would be ruined forever.

Two: His self-control would win out. More accurately, his self-control would win out too well. He'd make gentle love to Penny, and while it probably wouldn't be grounds for a...break-up, he guessed, it would still disappoint her and possibly trigger some uncomfortable questions, however wrongheaded they were.

Leading to option three, the most likely thing to happen: the sex would turn into some awkward, uneven mix of poetic lovemaking and hardcore screwing that neither Penny or Caleb would know what the actual fuck to make of and would take years of therapy to sort out. Either possibility ended in failure, and Caleb's relationship with failure was up in the air.

Once again, Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

Caleb rolled his shoulders, working out the tension, briefly envisioning a 4th possibility where he never followed Penny downstairs at all. Of course, that was never a real option, so Fuck it, he decided. One foot in front of the other. He pushed his shoulders back, stretching out his chest, then got up and started toward his basement.

Caleb's small-ish basement gym was well organized: the exercise machine and treadmill stood against the stairway wall, facing a large mirror on the opposite wall, where an exercise mat laid between a heavy bag and a rack of free weights. The rubber flooring had the appearance of light oak, which worked surprisingly well and complimented the yellow chiffon walls. A door next to the weights led to a bathroom with a small shower.

On his way down the steps, Caleb finally began to consider what Penny told him before she disappeared into the basement, and realized she had to have some kind of plan in place to help him bring out whatever animal lust she wanted to see from him. He wondered what that plan could possibly be for the time it took to round the corner into the basement landing and see what she was wearing.

The glasses he loved so much were gone, but that didn't seem to matter. Penny's dirty-blonde hair was pulled back tight into a sporty ponytail. She wore a dark blue tank top that clung tight to her fit, luscious curves, and loose black nylon short shorts that left little to the imagination. He could see only one set of straps around her shoulders, which probably meant she wasn't wearing a sports bra.

And again, out loud this time, "Fuck!"

Penny turned to Caleb and delivered her hardest punch. The hard nipples that poked through the tank top confirmed the lack of a bra, and silk-screened on the front in bronze varsity lettering were the words "RAVENCLAW QUIDDITCH." Caleb swore his dick added another three inches to itself after he saw them.