Home Field by Hannah Gersen

Author:Hannah Gersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The next two weeks were all about Laura. How to see her. When to call her. They met in the clubhouse, near the football field, and behind the concession stand. Once they unrolled a tumbling mat in the equipment room near the girls’ locker room. Dean felt as if he was discovering the high school his students knew, a place full of secret sexual corners. He and Laura even happened upon a young couple once, a girl and a boy Dean recognized from freshman gym. Their lips were so red and swollen that it was as if they’d spent the entire class period kissing. Maybe they had. Dean thought he and Laura would, if they could. But they didn’t have as much time.

One morning Laura met him in the parking lot with coffee and doughnuts. “Remember our old breakfasts?” she asked. “I liked you from the start.” He couldn’t say he felt the same without sounding like a cheater. He felt like he was cheating now. He wasn’t convinced that Nicole didn’t know. Somehow she was watching him. And yet that sense that he was getting away with something, the idea that being with Laura was some kind of cosmic betrayal, made their sex all the more satisfying. This, he knew, was the particular pleasure of adultery, enjoyed by many before him. For some reason, he’d thought he’d be immune to it.

Laura was cheating, too. She removed her engagement ring when she arrived at the middle school, putting it in her desk drawer. She told Dean she didn’t want to see it on her finger. She hadn’t broken up with Tim. It was complicated, she said. The complicated part, Dean guessed, was that she wasn’t ready to throw over the promise of marriage for him. Once, when Dean embraced her outside the clubhouse, still vaguely in view of the school, she pushed him away, saying, “I could lose my job!” But he thought there was something gleeful at the edge of her voice. Like some part of her wished to blow apart her life, to detonate all her uncertainties about Tim, about marriage, about small towns. You didn’t have to be a raging romantic to believe that love—or sex—could obliterate doubt. It could, for a time. Dean knew that from experience, from falling in love with Nicole for the first time—and for the second and third times, for all the times throughout their marriage that she was lost, and then returned to him.

He wasn’t falling in love with Laura. Or at least, he didn’t have romantic feelings about her; he didn’t walk around imagining a future with her and the boys, the four of them living together as a family. His emotions weren’t blurring his thoughts. His senses were sharper; he noticed more details: the subtle changes in Bryan’s and Robbie’s vocabularies, the variances in the strides of the cross-country girls, the moods of his students. The weather was changing, and the newly cold air seemed a piece of the sharpening, his alertness.

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