“You put that there?” She yanks one Kleenex after another from the box beside the bed and thrusts a handful at him.
He wraps the condom and, looking around, opts to place it on the floor. He falls back against the pillow. “I see where Angel gets her thing for factoids.”
“Ha. My major was human biology. Angel might like that. She’s really into science and math. We have to encourage her. She’s smart, you know.”
“I know. She must have gotten it from her mom. I had no patience for school.” He grins up at the ceiling, totally unself-conscious in his nudity, sweating into the duvet beneath him.
Brianna props up on her elbows, back arched, aware of the long curved line of her back and bottom, the lushness between her legs. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the bathroom door, and is, for once, pleased with what she sees. Her cheeks and lips are makeup pink, the sheet is wrapped pleasingly around her lower back. She feels little beside him, sexy and quick and lithe.
Brianna touches the scar on his right palm. “What happened to your hands?”
Amadeo regards them, front, back. “Oh, it was an accident. Carpentry.”
“Whew.” She smiles. “I really worried you’d been abused.”
“No. God, no.” He tucks them under the sheet.
“Could you turn that light off?” she asks, and when he does, she leans into him. They kiss a little more, and he touches her.
When she comes, a breathy little whimper, she strokes and strokes the same part of his bicep. Real affection for him seems to have bloomed out of nowhere. She tucks herself around him in the humid little ecosystem beneath the duvet.
“I’m glad we did this.” She burrows her face in his shoulder, then lifts it. In a rush she says, “So, until just now I was a virgin.”
His face flickers in the twilight, and he looks at her quickly, then away. Otherwise, his face betrays no feeling at all, which is how she knows he’s dismayed.
She flops back on the pillow, stomach clenched. Whatever composure and loveliness she possessed just a minute earlier has vanished. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. My best friend told me not to. Sometimes I do this thing where I know what not to say and it’s like I’m thinking so much not to say it, that it’s the only thing on my mind and then I say it.”
“That’s no big deal.” Now he turns to face her. Why does she care what this guy thinks of her? But why would she reveal herself to him? He smiles, and this sickens her, too.
“But, I mean, you’re twenty-five, right?”
“I’m not religious or anything like that,” she says defensively. “It’s just more of an opportunity thing.”
“Weird.”
“It’s not weird. You can’t tell anyone.”
“It’s just crazy that you teach all these teen moms and you were a virgin.”
Brianna has the sense that she’s drowning and the only one who sees her flailing from the shore is this ding-dong. “I mean,” she says firmly, “that you can’t tell anyone about this at all. I’d lose my job.” She’s almost afraid to say this next thing, afraid that she’s making an unreasonable demand that will cause him to pull away from her. “I mean Angel. Angel can’t know.”
Amadeo regards her for one beat, then another. “Hey, hey,” he says, pulling her in. “I won’t tell no one nothing.”
For a moment, relief. But, then what? Are they going to keep doing this and never tell anyone? Is this—secretive sex with the fucked-up father of one of her students—even what Brianna wants? She wonders if she used him for sex. What if he wants a relationship? The possibility fills her with a kind of warm excitement.