The Abstinence Teacher (26 page)

She pondered him for a moment, smiling thoughtfully.

“C’mere,” she said. “Let me give you a back rub.”

“That’s okay.” He still hadn’t gotten around to notifying her of his decision to put their sex life on hold for the time being. “It’s kinda late.”

“It’s no trouble.” She pursed her lips, a pouty little girl. “You seem tense.”

“Really, Carrie. I’m fine.”

She threw off the covers and stood up. She was wearing a sleeveless white undershirt of his, tight enough to emphasize the fullness of her breasts, and a pair of tattered maroon gym shorts, also his. It was a cute look for her, much better than the long-sleeved flannel nightgowns that he’d found so depressing the first few months of their marriage.

“Come on.” She took him by the arm. “It’ll feel good.”

“Carrie, please.”

“Let’s go.” She spoke firmly, a nurse addressing a skittish patient. “Lie down.”

Tim was about to protest again, but he was distracted by the sight of her nipples pressing against the flimsy ribbed cotton of the undershirt.

“All right.” He sighed. “But just a quick one.”

He lay facedown on the bed—the sheets were still warm and fragrant from her body—feeling both annoyed and excited. A soft grunt
escaped from his lips as she sat down on top of him, straddling his hips with her knees and settling the bulk of her weight directly on his ass.

A full chapter in
Hot Christian Sex
was devoted to “The Loving Art of Marital Massage,” and Carrie had clearly given it some study. Her early efforts had been timid and ineffectual, but recently she’d become bolder and more proficient, kneading and mashing his muscles with gratifying savagery.

“Oh yeah,” he croaked. “Right there. Little higher.”

“I can’t believe how tight you are. It feels like a bunch of tennis balls under your skin.”

She took her time—Carrie was nothing if not patient—moving methodically down his back, karate-chopping his shoulder blades, digging her thumbs into the knotty channel along his spine. Ripples of calm spread through his body, filling the empty spaces where the tension had been. Sensing his relaxation, she lowered her mouth to his ear.

“I was worried about you,” she whispered. “I expected you home a long time ago.”

“I was just driving around,” he explained. “Trying to clear my head.”

Her voice was warm in his ear.

“Is everything okay? You haven’t seemed like yourself lately.”

Tim felt a momentary urge to open up to her about his stubborn feelings for Allison, his close call at the Homestead, the sense he sometimes had that Jesus was losing interest in him, or vice versa, but it seemed like a shame, getting into a serious talk right now, when he was finally feeling loose and even a bit cheerful, so he clenched his butt cheeks and bucked his hips, not quite hard enough to knock her offbalance. She giggled and slapped his thigh.

“Bad boy.”

He did it again, and she laughed even harder. It was almost sad how
easy it was to please her, like she was a little kid who just wanted a playmate. He bucked a third time, and she let out a whoop.

“Yee ha!” she said. “Ride ’em, cowboy!”

AS USUAL,
Carrie fell asleep right after they finished making love, while Tim remained wide-awake beside her in the dark. Allison used to complain about the speed with which he dozed off after sex (at least on those nights when he wasn’t all coked up); she was one of those women who believed that a heart-to-heart postcoital conversation was as essential a part of the experience as a cigarette in an old movie, as necessary on the back end as foreplay was on the front. Tim, on the other hand, didn’t mind at all now that the roles were reversed. As comforting as it was to have Carrie curled up beside him, making the soft strangling noise that was the closest she ever came to snoring, it was a relief not to have to talk, to be able to follow his thoughts wherever they felt like drifting.

Not that they were drifting all that far. His mind remained pretty firmly anchored on those few bewildering seconds he’d spent inside the Homestead Lounge, peering dumbly over the lip of the abyss, as if he didn’t know exactly what kind of misery was down there at the bottom, as if he hadn’t spent the last three years of his life dragging himself out of it.

Something had made him turn away before it was too late, but what? It would have been nice to say that Jesus had come to his rescue, or that he’d heard Pastor Dennis’s voice crying out to him, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like pure chance. If the bar had been darker, or a good song had been playing, or a pretty woman had been sitting next to an empty stool, the night might have gone in a completely different direction.

Where were You, Lord?
he wondered.
Why didn’t You stop me?

He knew what Pastor Dennis would have said. He would’ve said
that Jesus had better things to do—sinners to save, sick children to heal, a world of hurt in desperate need of His love. He didn’t need to be wasting His time telling people things they already knew, or helping them do things they were fully capable of doing on their own. And if a man like Tim—a warrior for Christ—wasn’t strong enough to keep himself out of bars, then maybe he’d never accepted Jesus into his heart in the first place.

But I did
, Tim thought.
And You helped me. Don’t give up on me now
.

He would’ve been a little less freaked out if he’d had a clearer sense of what had brought him to the Homestead. It seemed obvious to him that Ruth Ramsey was at least partly responsible, but it was hard to say why. He’d said good-bye to her feeling pretty good about their meeting. He’d accomplished what he’d set out to do—she’d accepted his apology and assured him that she wasn’t going to make any kind of official fuss to the Soccer Association—without experiencing any embarrassment or unpleasantness. She hadn’t insulted him, or made him grovel, or taken any cheap shots at his religion, with the possible exception of that one weird comment about Cat Stevens, and even that made a certain kind of sense once she explained it.

On the contrary, she’d been polite and friendly, and he’d enjoyed her company, though not in the way he’d feared. He arrived at the house with his guard up, remembering how attractive she’d seemed at the soccer game, but now he had to wonder if that wasn’t some kind of illusion created by the sun and the blue sky, combined with the aura of scandal that trailed her wherever she went (the one other time Tim had seen her, she’d been standing before a school board meeting, issuing a grim, clearly coerced apology for making inappropriate sexual comments in the classroom). During their brief conversation at halftime, he’d been struck, not only by the weathered prettiness of her face and the surprising litheness of her figure—if he wasn’t mistaken, she’d looked a bit dumpier in the auditorium—but by something stubbornly girlish in her demeanor, a combination of feistiness and
shyness that he’d found instantly appealing, and that only made it that much more mortifying when she started screaming at him at the end of the game.

At her house, though, she seemed older and more ordinary, a forty-year-old woman with tired eyes and a melancholy smile, hardly the formidable opponent he’d expected. She didn’t express any anger toward him, just treated the whole prayer thing like an afterthought, nothing either one of them needed to worry about, and he was happy enough to follow her lead, to be absolved from the responsibility of having to defend what he’d done, or tell her what he knew to be true, which was that she needed Jesus just as much as he did, and that Maggie did, too. Because, really, who was he to dictate how anybody else should live their life, especially when he was a guest in her house, asking for a favor, and she’d been so nice to him?

Pastor Dennis would have seen the work of the Devil in that, and maybe he had a point; after all, how could you be tempted into betraying the Lord with your silence if you felt scared or repulsed by the tempter? All Tim really knew was that the moment he left her house, he found himself overcome by a strange sensation of emptiness and defeat, or maybe just loneliness, a feeling deep in his heart that what he needed more than anything else was some good music, a stiff drink, and a little more time away from his wife.

HE STILL
felt a bit rattled at work the next morning—jittery and furtive and antisocial—though none of his colleagues seemed to notice anything amiss. They were used to Tim’s keeping to himself in the morning, heading straight to his cubicle and getting a jump on his e-mail while the rest of them made a slower transition into the workday, analyzing last night’s episode of
Lost
, or catching up on the latest escapades of Aimee, the hot twenty-three-year-old loan processor whose complicated love life was the source of enormous vicarious pleasure to the mostly female staff of Loanergy Home Finance.

“So it’s back on with me and Vinnie,” she announced, ostensibly addressing Rita Mangiaro, but speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear. “We went out for a drink last night, like just to talk, right? And sure enough, I woke up in his bed this morning. I’m like,
Hello, Aimee? You are such a slut!
”

“You did not!” Rita gasped. She was the office’s top producer by a long shot, a retired teacher who got tons of referrals from her former students at Bridgeton High. Sitting next to her all day, Tim never failed to be both amazed and irritated by her inexhaustible appetite for gossip and idle chatter, which somehow didn’t interfere with her ability to make four times as many loans as he did.

Aimee gave one of her patented what’s-a-girl-to-do shrugs. She was a round-faced, voluptuous blonde with a salon tan, stiletto heels, and a cheerfully ditzy personality. She would’ve been a textbook bimbo, except for the fact that she also happened to be the best processor Tim had ever worked with, a fastidious, punctual, almost pathologically organized master of complicated paperwork who had saved his and everyone else’s bacon ten times over. The whole office would have fallen apart without her.

“It was crazy,” she admitted, with a rueful mixture of pride and embarrassment in her voice. “And then I had to get up and do the walk of shame, right past his mother. I’m like,
Hi, Mrs. Ruffo, long time no see.”

“Ouch,” said Kelly Willard, a single woman a few years older than Tim who was always going on adventure vacations to places like Tanzania and Chichén Itzá, then complaining that she hadn’t enjoyed herself. “Why didn’t you just go to your own apartment?”

“His was closer,” Aimee explained. “We were kind of in a rush. And I definitely wasn’t planning on spending the night.”

“I’m sure his mom was thrilled to see you,” said Rita.

“Totally,” Aimee agreed. “I’m like her most favorite person in the world.”

Even Tim had to laugh at that. Without really trying—the office
had an open floor plan, so it was hard not to overhear—he’d been following the saga closely enough to know that Mrs. Ruffo hadn’t been particularly fond of Aimee even before Vinnie, a short-tempered bodybuilder, had gotten himself arrested for assaulting Gary Wilkinson, the married real-estate agent she’d been seeing on the side. According to Aimee, Gary had been unaware of Vinnie’s existence, so he didn’t know enough to be alarmed rather than creeped out when this angry muscle-bound dude approached him in the locker room of the Ultra-Body Health and Racquet Club and asked if he wanted to see a picture of his girlfriend.

“Uh, sure,” Gary said, thinking it impolite to refuse. “I guess.”

Vinnie produced what was described in the police blotter as an “intimate Polaroid snapshot of a mutual acquaintance,” then gave Gary a couple of seconds to study it before punching him in the face. He squeezed in a couple more shots before being restrained by three bystanders in various states of undress, including an off-duty cop in a jockstrap. In the end, Vinnie pled guilty, and Gary’s wife filed for divorce.

“Was this a fluke?” Shelley Margulies asked. Too-frequent Botox treatments had left her with a single expression, an all-purpose grimace of unpleasant surprise. “Or are you guys really back together?”

“I don’t know,” Aimee replied. “We’ve been through this so many times, I’m kind of scared to say yes. But I really think we’ve grown a lot in the past few months.”

“The thing I’m wondering,” Rita said, “is what he’s gonna do about that tattoo.”

Tim had actually been wondering the same thing. After their most recent breakup, Vinnie had gone through a Billy Bob Thornton-style crisis that he’d resolved by modifying the “Aimee” tattoo on his massive left bicep so it now read, “Aimee = Bitch.” Tim knew this because he’d been present the day Vinnie barged into the office to display his revenge to its victim.

“I told him he could keep it.” Aimee smiled, tickled by her own magnanimity. “I’m the first to admit that I deserve it. And you know what else? It kind of turned me on to see it there. Plus, it’s really nice work.”

Like a lot of people her age, Aimee was a tattoo aficionado. She had four of them herself, including one she’d gotten just a couple of months ago, placed so low on her back that she’d had to undo her pants so her office mates could admire it.

“Tim,” she’d said, right before the big unveiling, “you may want to turn away.”

Tim’s coworkers knew he was a born-again Christian and a recovering addict; he’d told them early on, as Pastor Dennis had advised, and kept a Bible and a book of Devotions on his desk in case anyone forgot, along with a Gospel-Verse-a-Day calendar that Carrie had gotten him for Christmas. Today’s selection was Mark 9:50: “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”

“Thanks,” he’d told Aimee. “I’ll cover my eyes.”

Although Pastor Dennis frequently warned his flock to expect persecution and/or mockery as Christians in the secular workplace, this hadn’t been Tim’s experience at Loanergy. At worst, he suffered from a mild, intermittent sense of apartness, as if there were an invisible wall separating him from the rest of the office. If anything, his coworkers treated him with a little more solicitude than necessary, apologizing for using profanity in his presence, or telling him to plug his ears while they discussed
The Da Vinci Code
or one of Aimee’s drunken hookups. He sometimes had the feeling that they enjoyed having him around to shock, and he did his best to play the role assigned to him, though it wasn’t always easy to pretend to be scandalized by the revelation that drunken young women sometimes had sex they regretted, or that a fellow loan officer who happened to be a grandmother might call a double-crossing client a “shithead.”