I just laugh.
“Of course.”
“Come on, I’ll show you where they are in case this happens again,” he says.
“You probably meanwhenit happens again.”
James just laughs. Since I started at Sprucevale Middle we’ve struck up an acquaintanceship, because James is easygoing and interesting and fun to talk to, particularly in the back row of all-faculty meetings where the principal tries to guilt teachers into chaperoning school dances.
Basically, James is great, and I’m pretty sure he’s single because he’s never mentioned a significant other, and I feel guilty about maybe having a crush because I’m sort of having sex with someone else on the regular and modern life is really fucking confusing sometimes.
“Here,” he says, after leading me around a corner and down a hall. “The breaker box is in here.”
He knocks on a nondescript wooden door, and when no one answers, he pushes it open. It's a small janitorial room and he points to a panel on the wall. When I open it, all the switches are labeled in an impossible-to-read pencil scrawl except for one.
That one says, in enormous, red, all-caps letters, FACULTY LOUNGE. I flip it and close the panel.
When I turn, James is closer than I realized. Not in a threatening way, just in a thought-he-was-over-there-and-he’s-over-here way, sort of looking over my shoulder like he’s making sure I don’t need any help.
I blink for a second, my heartbeat kicking up. The janitor’s closet of a crumbling middle school is not a sexy place, but James is definitely making the cinderblock-walls-and-bare-light-bulb thing work for him. He smiles and the bad lighting just makes his dimples look deeper, somehow highlightseverymuscle in his forearms as he shoves his hands into his pockets.
“Pretty self-explanatory, right?” he says and shakes his head a little like he's trying to get his bangs out of his eyes.
“I think so,” I say, smiling back and wondering what to do with my hands. “Hopefully we didn’t just shut down the power to the gym or something.”
“Oh, no, they might have to go outside for class,” he deadpans, and I can’t help but laugh but I also kind of shiver internally, because James has avoice.
I don't even know what it is about his voice but it’s, like, a notable voice: a little bit raspy and a tiny bit lower than average, maybe, but there’s something about thewayhe sounds that feels like… eating a complex, delicious cheese, or seeing a Michelangelo sculpture in person. He’s got the same backwoods, southern Virginia accent as the rest of us but the way the elongated vowels and too-hard final R's roll off his tongue sounds like a copper still polished to a high shine while the rest of us are beat-up cast iron frying pans.
I want him to read me, like,War and Peace.
“I don’t hear any screaming,” I say. “Probably got it right.”
“If you didn’t I’ll take the blame,” he says, and there are dimples again, and he takes a step back and opens the door of the janitor’s closet for me. It’s not the biggest closet and I get within inches of him as I go past, and—yeah, my stomach kind of flutters, and then one second later my brain screams BUT MAX, and then I’m out in the hallway and a sixth-grader is looking at me.
* * *
It’s maybeanother week later when I realize I’ve developed a problem that I never, in several million years, would have even considered a couple of years ago.
In my head, Max now sounds like James.
This is an issue for a couple reasons.
One, it’s rude to Max, who is still hot as fuck and getting me off several times a week, not to mention making me snort-laugh whenever thirteen-year-olds are being dipshits and ruining my day. I know he’s not my boyfriend but heisthe best sex partner I’ve ever had, and he deserves better.
Two, it’s also kind of rude to James, because now his voice kind of reminds me of Max, and sometimes if I see him in the lounge and we have an extremely, normal innocent conversation about lockers or whatever, I’ll start remembering that last night Max texted me from his parents’ house about something completely non-sexy, and then I texted him back dirtier and dirtier texts about blowing him under the dining room table until he excused himself to FaceTime me and jerk off in the bathroom.
And I like James, even though I’ve been kind of avoiding him because thinking someone is hot while also having an Internet Fuck Friend is really messing with me.
Once I realize what the solution to my problem is, it still takes me a couple of days to put it into practice because the thought of it makes me so fucking nervous. I finally work up the nerve while I’m still spread-eagled in a chair, shirt over my tits and shorts around one ankle.
Jesus, how do you make me come like that?
God put me on this earth for a reason, apparently
Was the reason to make nice girls come their brains out via voice-to-text?
Well. Just you, really.
