The Kingdom of Childhood

“Is she young?”

He shook his head. “She’s in her forties someplace.”

Her mouth twisted harshly to the side. Nostrils flaring, she stood silent in the cold, clearly weighing what he had told her. Watching her, Zach felt a sense of dread that he had told her as much as he had. He had expected her to share his sense of shame, but not to look so angry.

Finally she said, “Zach, you need to put a stop to it. What’s going on is wrong.”

“I know. That’s why I’m talking to you about it. If I thought it was all hunky-dory I’d just keep banging her and stay quiet about it.”

“Does anyone else know?”

He gave an ambiguous nod. “One of my friends thinks he does, but I swore up and down it wasn’t true.”

“I mean anyone who works at your school. Any other adult.”

His laugh was scornful. “Hell, no. I’d be expelled for something like that.”

She seemed to wince. “No one is going to blame you for being—for being victimized. You do realize it’s statutory rape, don’t you? That what she’s doing to you is considered rape?”

He dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. “Believe me, I’m not having any trouble doing my end of the deal. No trouble at all.”

“That’s not the point. It’s rape just because of your age.”

He shook his head again firmly. “Technically, maybe, but that’s bull if you ask me. Nobody’s raping anybody. My problem is I don’t know how to get myself to stop.” He laughed humorlessly. “I don’t know how to make myself stop wanting to be raped.”

Rhianne regarded him with a hardened gaze, her lips pressed together. “Then you just have to resolve it to yourself, Zach. Tell yourself it’s over and stay away from her. If you want, I can talk to her for you.”

With a grimace, he turned down the offer. “Uh-uh. That would just be a bad idea.”

“Promise me you won’t see her again.”

“I can’t do that. If I could promise anyone that, I would have promised myself a month ago. I tell myself I won’t and then out of nowhere I’ll want her. It’s like bloodlust. It just comes over me and then there’s nothing but that. I can’t control it.”

Rhianne listened, eyes watchful. For a long moment his words hung in the chilled air. Then she said, “Well, don’t fool yourself into thinking she can’t control it. She’s using you, Zach. I don’t have to know who she is to know that. She’s flattered you into thinking you’re her unstoppable sex god, but really, she’s got you by the balls.”

Zach looked at her sharply. “No, she doesn’t. Nobody does.”

“Then break it off. You’re not so hopped up on hormones that you can’t turn down a middle-aged woman. She’d like you to believe you are, but you’ve got your free will.”

He sighed heavily, his breath clouding the air between them. “Well, it sure doesn’t feel like it right now. I keep laying down rules for myself about lines I just won’t cross, and then I run right over them. Before this, I thought I was a pretty nice guy. Now I look at myself in the mirror and think, ‘what a scumbag.’”

Rhianne reached for his hand and held it between her two gloved ones. He felt his teeth begin to chatter, but it didn’t seem to be from the cold so much as from his hammering heart. When he dared to look at her, she gazed out at him with hard eyes beneath the rim of her wool cap.

“You are a good person, Zach,” she said quietly. “Too young to know how ordinary these things are. Everybody struggles. Everybody loses sometimes. Even the people we love and look up to. I think you know that.”

He gritted his teeth and searched her eyes for meaning.

“If you want to solve your problem nice and quickly,” she continued, “turn her in to the police. Or if you don’t want to, I will. It’s the right thing to do. A teacher, for God’s sake.”

He shook his head and let his hand drop from hers. “No way. If I did that, everybody would know. It’d be in the newspapers, and—no.” With a grimace and a shudder along his shoulders, he wiped the thought from his mind. “I just want to make it go away. Break it off, like people do all the time. I’m not out for blood or anything. I just want to stop wanting her.”

A shadow of irritation moved across Rhianne’s face. “Get your head away from the idea that she’s somehow your lover. She’s manipulating you. Coercing you. This is what abusers do, Zach. They make the victim feel like they deserve it.”

He looked away. Now he wished he had never confided in her. She meant well, but she heard him only as a mother would, without comprehension of the roiling dark inside him. He could leave bruises. He could delight in seeing her on her knees.

“If one of your friends was in your shoes,” asserted Rhianne, “what would you tell him?”

Zach considered the question for only a moment. “That it’s stupid. That there’s no reason to be all hung up about some old chick when you could hook up with somebody hotter.”

“So why don’t you follow your own advice?”

He bent his head and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, weary with the fruitlessness of the conversation. “I’ll think about it.”

“Tell me her name.”

He looked up. “What?”

“Her name. Tell it to me.”