They sat in silence as Cam drove her to her house, their tryst that began on the side of the road finally completed after he took her one last time in the cab of his truck. They had barely driven 10 minutes when he had pulled over to the shoulder, told her to get unbuckled, and pushed her head down to his lap. This time there were signs of other people, or at least visible houses and even a few street lights; they were approaching the outskirts of town. She knew there was no arguing with him, however, nor did she find she wanted to. She didn't even hesitate as she slipped his hard cock out of his jeans and took it in her mouth. He had controlled her rhythm and the length she took in with his right hand gripping her by the hair; she did take a moment to feel grateful that she had an over abundance of hair that would more than make up for the amount he had no doubt torn from her scalp by now.

But she had been hungry for him, so hungry, an appetite that had grown to match his as the night had progressed; or perhaps it had always been there, but she had been careful to keep it hidden, even from herself. She had licked and sucked and taken him so deep down her throat she had choked on him, but she had hung on to him, unwilling to let him go until the very last moment when the lack of oxygen threatened to make her pass out. Now it was her who was devouring him, and though she was unmoved by the sight and sound of passing cars and their headlights she was electrified when at last she heard him groan and she gathered all of her remaining energy—for by now she could feel the exhaustion in her body settling across her bones like a heavy blanket—and she focused it on pleasing this boy, this man, who was tightening his grip on her hair but no longer directing her movement, as he lost himself in the wonder of her warm, soft throat.

After he came—his cock plunged so deep down her throat so that she was only able to taste the last few drops of him that fell on her lips as she rose her head up—she had resisted the urge to ask him how she had done, since really all she meant was how had she done in comparison to Madysen. Because, she thought afterwards, her head resting against the rolled up window, her eyes half closed in an intoxicated daze caused, in part, by the smell of sex that clung to her, because if she couldn't give a better blow job than a teenaged half-wit, then what was the point of being a decade older?

This last thought snapped her awake, and she sat up straight as though someone had pinched her.

There was no point to being a decade older, because this was a one time thing, and there was no way it was going to happen again. Yes, she had relented to the pull of this beautiful boy, a boy who she had never noticed particularly much the entire year he had sat in her classroom, presumably eyeing her up and down, but who had at last switched on something inside her that had been laying dormant for much too long.

Except that first she had slept with his father. And all of it, this week of building attraction and tension, had handily coincided with a rising anxiety over the state of her mother and the anger of her sister. She didn't need a therapist, or a (nonexistent) best friend to tell her the obvious: the Walker men were her escape from reality and all that it needed from her.

She sighed audibly to herself, and caught Cam grinning one of his strange secret smiles out of the corner of her eye. She decided it was time to change the subject between them, even if it was an unspoken one at the moment.

She turned down the radio.

"You really think Melvin is going to tow my car and get it fixed without any trouble?" she asked. She wasn't just making conversation, she really was worried about the future of her little car in Melvin's hands. Among other things.

"I do Miss Park," he said. Then he turned the radio back up.

She turned it back down.

"Why are you so sure?" She had heard him on the phone with Melvin telling him where to find the car after they had stood up and dusted themselves off from the ground. She had still insisted that he didn't alert his father, and perhaps in the afterglow of two rounds of hot sex with his English teacher he was willing to let her have her way for once. Which, of course, begged the question as to why she was so compliant to this 19 year-old's wishes all the other times.

Something to think about at a later date. Perhaps when she was safely squirreled away in her $1,000 coach seat on a flight to Newark.

Cam only smiled his inscrutable Walker smile and shook his head.

"You worry too much Miss Park," he said.

A surge of sudden anger shot through her.

"This isn't a joke Cam," she snapped. "I have to get to the San Antonio airport tomorrow and my car is being picked up and towed away by the one person I trust least in this whole place. The guy who you caught going through my underwear drawer for God's sake."

"You used to say that to me all the time in class, 'This isn't a joke Cam,'" he said. Was that wistfulness in his smile? Surely not. "Miss Park, I promise you there is nothing to worry about. There are more than a few people in this town keeping their eye on Melvin right now, and he knows better than to mess with you anymore."

He looked over at her as he slowed down to take a turn. For a moment the tick tock of the turn signal drowned out the noise of one more singer mewling about love and disaster.

"You know, there are a lot of people who like you," he continued. "You probably don't realize it, but you were pretty popular with the other kids, and definitely with the parents."

"Oh yeah, you mean like Madysen?" she shot back, and then immediately regretted it. This was not where she needed to go right now. She glanced out the window hopefully but saw they were still a good 20 minutes from her house.

An awkward silence settled down between them, or at least it was awkward on her end. Cam's face didn't register much of anything. Had he been this unreadable, this annoying as her student? Why could she remember so little of him in her classroom? He hadn't participated much, that she remembered, and he sat with a group of other boys who always seemed to radiate a general feeling of indifference if not outright hostility to the books and plays and poems she tried to teach them to read and appreciate. Probably he had been too busy imagining her naked or something to attend to his English studies, a thought that made her scowl. And what did he mean by other kids "liking" her? Was there a line of former students waiting their turn to screw the Yankee English teacher? Is that what they had been snickering about in the back of the classroom all those times, what they planned on doing to her? Who would get to do it first? Did Cam win some kind of bet by getting her pants off first? She began to feel nauseous as her regret and paranoia mounted. She could still taste him in her mouth. It tasted good—so very very good—but ...

"Miss Park," Cam murmured, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. "Miss Park, what are you thinking about?"

She sighed. So he wouldn't let her sit and stew in uncomfortable silence. Fine.

"I'm wondering ..." but she paused.

"You're wondering what Miss Park? Why I'm such an asshole? A good looking one, but definitely an asshole?"

She snorted.

"Something like that," she said. "I guess I'm wondering how many people you are going to tell about tonight. Your friends. If I'm going to go back in the Fall to the news that I put out for my former students. Or just put out in general."

She didn't mention Cam's father, but she knew she didn't have to.

"Are you coming back in the Fall Miss Park?" he asked.

She turned to him in surprise.

"What? Yes of course I am Cam, why wouldn't I?" The paranoia gripped her again. "Unless you know something I don't?"

Madysen. Or her mom. Or that crusty old hostess at Denny's. It had to be one of them. Godammit.

"All I know Miss Park is that you were a great teacher, and we all liked you a lot," he said. "You were different, and you were nice, and you never talked down to any of us, no matter how dumb someone came off. I guess I thought you knew all that. And it would be a real shame if you left town tomorrow and didn't come back."

Her face burned as she finally took in what he was saying. No, she hadn't known that, that she had been so popular with her students, that she had, in fact, reached them in some way, if not the way she might have planned on. One more thing to contemplate on the plane ride home tomorrow.

"I'm not leaving Cam," she said. "My mom—I'll be back. It's just a visit."

He nodded in response. Did he believe her? Did she believe herself for that matter? Why had she been searching for one way plane tickets earlier? Then again, why did she do anything that she did? Her life had ceased to make any kind of rational sense long before Cam and Kyle had entered the picture.

"Cam," she said, and then stopped again. For being an English teacher, words had never been her forte, at least the spoken kind. Luckily, for the most part Cam and his father seemed content to let her squirm and sink into silence whenever a conversation got too much for her. Her fiance was able to do that too, though not quite as well, certainly not after they lost the baby. Suddenly he had needed things from her he had never asked from her before, things she didn't possess. As for her mom and sister? Forget it, all they ever wanted from her were words, more and more words. Well, maybe not so much her mother anymore.

"Cam," she tried again. "Cam I didn't know that, about the students. About you guys."

"Well it's true," he said, and she saw in relief they were turning onto her street. "And I know I wasn't that great of a student Miss Park. I wanted to be, I wanted to show you that I liked what you were teaching, but—well I was always running out of time."

They pulled into her driveway and he turned off the engine. An army of crickets were apparently invading her yard, their chirping suddenly replacing the sound of the truck and its radio.

"I understand Cam," she whispered. She knew he meant his sister. And his work keeping the ranch above water. And everything else he had to do at an age when other kids were enjoying their final carefree months of youth, before college or work or the military, before the concerns of the adult world started to grind them down.

He shook his head, not at her, but at something or someone that only he could see.

She went to open the passenger door but he stopped her with a hand and turned to look at her.

"I did memorize it," he said.

"What?" she asked, confused.

"The Hamlet monologue. You wanted us to memorize it and then recite it to you in person."

Ah yes, that. She remembered he had never shown up for his appointment. Actually, a lot of her students hadn't, and those who did had mostly stumbled through it, or else rushed to get the lines out so fast that she knew the words had no meaning for them. The whole exercise had been excruciating for everyone involved.

"So why didn't you—"

"I memorized the wrong one," he interrupted. "On purpose. So I didn't think it was worth showing up to recite it."

She looked at him in puzzlement.

"I memorized the one by Gertrude," he explained, and when her blank face told him she had no idea what he was talking about, he struggled to continue. She had never seen him like this, so uncertain.

He rubbed his face and jaw in discomfort.

"The one where she describes how Ophelia died," he said.

"Oh," she said, understanding at last. After Ophelia kills herself by drowning.

He turned away from her and lowered his forehead to the steering wheel. He looked so defeated, so sad, she wanted to reach out to him and to hold him. He looked up again.

"Can I recite it to you?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, "yes of course you can."

And there, at two in the morning, in a pick up truck parked outside her house, with only his English teacher and a host of chattering, fitful crickets as an audience, Cam recited it in full.