The door gave way with a deep croak. It was dark inside, except for the glow of a small camp lantern on a stool in the corner. I didn’t see her at first, but as my eyes adjusted I found her silhouette leaning against the window underneath the oak tree. She must have watched me approach. Her hair was pulled up and she wore a red plaid jacket. I crammed my hands in my pockets. I probably should have thought about what to say before I got here.
“Hello, LitGeek,” she said softly into the darkness.
I swallowed. “Hello, Hattie.”
“Why don’t you call me HollyG?”
“Because that’s not your name.”
“Neither is Hattie. Hattie’s a nickname.”
“But that’s who you are. You’re Hattie Hoffman. You’re a teenage high school student and I’m your married English teacher.”
She didn’t say anything or move from the window.
“You have to understand that it’s over. Whatever it was is over and I should have never—I shouldn’t have . . . Christ.”
I turned back toward the door, frustrated beyond words. The floorboards creaked.
“No, you shouldn’t have. But you did.” Her voice trembled slightly underneath the vowels.
“I’m married, Hattie.” Maybe repetition would help the idea sink in. “I have a wife.”
The barn creaked again and her voice was closer this time, stronger. “You were married a week ago, too, but that didn’t stop you from wanting to see me. It didn’t stop you from becoming the chicken whisperer.”
I laughed before I could help it. That’s what she’d nicknamed me after that first night of cyber sex, when it was all under the ridiculous pretense of seducing a chicken. The laugh died, though, as the words came back, with full-color images now of things we’d done, places I’d told her to caress, imagining my lips there instead of her fingers. The boards groaned underneath us and I spun around before she could come any closer. She’d crept most of the way across the barn and was near enough that I could read the longing and hesitation in her eyes. They were open wide and her mouth was parted and she looked so damn young. A child with a woman’s body. She didn’t even know how young she was. She probably thought she was grown up and ready for the world, with her acting career and her endless quips and comebacks and that brain that soaked up everything around her. She probably thought there were only a few years between us, but it was a lifetime—dark, undiscovered caverns of disappointment and compromises. She was the adult idealized. I was the adult that really happened.
“I’m your teacher, Hattie. Can’t you understand how wrong this was?”
The corner of her mouth tipped up. “What have you ever taught me?”
She took another step forward and my hands went up automatically, holding her back by the shoulders, keeping those last two feet of sanity between us. “I can teach you a few things about statutory rape laws.”
She looked down at my hands on her. “So you’ve thought about it.”
Christ, she wasn’t even listening to me. She was on a completely different planet having a completely different conversation.
“No. Well, yes, but only in terms of how long my prison sentence would be. You’re a child, Hattie.”
That got her. She stepped back, crossing her arms. “I’m seventeen.”
“Exactly.”
We squared off for a minute in silence. Agitation made her chest rise and fall and the movement squeezed her breasts against her arms. The fact that I even noticed only made me angrier.
“Look, Hattie, I only came here to tell you in person that I made a horrible mistake, but it’s done now. Over. You’re a good student and—”
“Good?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Great student, all right? You were my favorite student in class before this.”
“And what am I now? Your favorite what?”
I gritted my teeth. “You’re still my favorite student, or at least you will be if you drop this right now.”
Her face changed, became vulnerable. The arms crossing her chest looked more like they were hugging her body now for support. She dropped her face to the floor and her words were just above a whisper. “I don’t think I can, Peter.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“Not to you it isn’t. Open your damn ears. You’re the child. I’m the”—I barked out a laugh—“responsible adult and this?”—I waved a finger between the two of us—“will never fucking happen. I should be home right now grading papers while my wife and her mother watch bad TV, not running off to meet children in vacant barns in the middle of the night.”
“You keep calling me a child.”
“That’s because you are.”
She looked up and her face had changed again. She was like quicksilver, how fast she processed information and emotions and moved on. Now she had a speculative, smug look, like she’d figured something out. My body tensed up, wary at the lightning change.
“I think you’re calling me a child so much because you’re trying to convince yourself of it.”
“No, that’s just the fact of the matter.”
“I’ll give you some facts, Peter. Fact one: You’re unhappy in your marriage. You don’t love your wife anymore and you’ve realized that you chose the wrong woman.”