Disclaimer: I don't own.

A/N: :) Thanks again to all of my reviewers. You mean so much to me. Hope you enjoy this chapter. It, uh... was fun to write. Lol.

Oh, and if anyone is planning to google Isabel Sarli after this chapter, you might consider putting on your safesearch first. :) It may or may not help. Hehe.

Chapter Eleven:

I was thankful that I was buried under her hood and that most of the time she kept her eyes off me.

I had glanced up at her home that morning in the dreary, rainy, cold, making sure that I was indeed at the right place, and caught sight of the profile of her body, shimmying into her tight jeans, breasts bouncing at the action. Jesus Christ, that was enough to have me aching. I immediately averted my eyes down, knowing she can't have known I was there and thinking how unfair—how violating—my mistake had been. I took my time, breathing deeply, eyes focused on my knees, trying to reduce my…reaction. I was failing miserably, at first, berating myself for being no better than a peeping Tom who desperately wanted to take himself in hand and solve the problem. This thought, however, reminded me vividly of the time my mom had walked in on me masturbating when I was fourteen.

My house had always been silent, growing up, but the hours following that had consisted of the most oppressive silence of my life. I never complained of how quiet the house was, after that day. Which, of course, had ended with my mom knocking—she had never knocked before—on my bedroom door just before bedtime. My face burning red and hot, I had gotten up and opened the door for her. She wouldn't have heard me yell that she could come in, and if I took too long, she would be suspicious that I was doing it again. I had taken a single glance at her, and then looked away, despite knowing how much this limited her. Sure, at home, we occasionally spoke out loud. She didn't like the idea of me living in a silent home as we were both rather quiet people and she didn't listen to music or watch TV anymore, and she could read lips well enough for it... But it was just a force of habit—so natural from being out in public or at the gallery—to sign instead.

She stepped into my room as I backed away to sit on the edge of my bed. She seemed like she was going to come sit next to me, and then wavered, uncertain about sitting on the sheets I'd just been jacking off on not six hours previous. She sat at my desk chair instead, and after a long pause, had started speaking. "Gilbert… I'd like you to speak with Father Joseph."

I snapped my gaze up to her, feeling like my face would burst into flames if it got any hotter, shaking my head. "No. …No, I'm… I'm not… Mom!" I complained, hating myself for sounding so much like a child in that final plea when the basis of my half-formed argument was that I was growing up. I wanted to tell her that Dad would have understood… or that she couldn't talk to me about this because she wasn't my dad... but either option would have hurt her more than me, and I was the man of the house now. I stifled those words, but I could keep my eyes on her now. She was the one looking down, making her voice a little more mumbled than usual.

"Gilbert, I… I know that you're getting to be… about that age. You need a man to discuss your… body… with you. And you need to know that God wants you to save yourself for the girl you're going to marry."

I don't know that I'm an atheist now, but at the time I had prided myself on my sole belief in science. I went to church with my mother, dutifully, several times a week. She didn't have to remind me—by the time she got home from the gallery on Tuesday and Thursday I was dressed in my church clothes and had reheated leftovers. She'd smile and kiss my cheek and eat with me and I'd roll up my dress shirt sleeves and don her frilly apron and do the dishes while she changed for mass. Because she needed that, but I didn't. Not anymore. And though I didn't share that with her—or anyone—I was proud of my logical, unemotional assessment of the world. I'd dissected enough cats to understand death at this point, and there was no glowing ball of light or space where a soul ought to reside.

Still, I couldn't exactly tell my mom that even if I had believed in Him, I doubted very much that God cared whether I had dirty thoughts about Isabel Sarli or not. …I especially couldn't say this because I was certain I wasn't supposed to know who she was. I'd read about her in the New York Times at the library and spent a good deal of my allowance getting myself to a theatre in L.A. that was showing "Fuego." I'd expected to have to sneak in, but the man at the front seemed entirely unconcerned with the fact that I clearly hadn't been shaving a year. Even with subtitles, it had basically rocked my world.

"…I know that, mom. I don't need to discuss…anything. I have my biology books. I understand."

"It's not the same, Gil. I know it isn't easy for you… growing up without your…father." Her voice cracked over her words, and something inside me trembled and then broke—not in a sharp snap, but a soft, dissolving kind of way. I looked at my feet.

"I'll… try to talk to him."

This seemed to be enough. She nodded, moved over to hug me and kiss my forehead the way she'd been doing before bed since I was a very little boy, and then seemed to reconsider. She put a hand to my shoulder instead and squeezed, before leaving me to sleep. I wanted to take the coward's way out—not tell him and hope very much that she would never find out—but it had been hard for her to accept me as a man… to stop a ritual she'd followed as religiously as her actual religion. So I chose to be man, and told Father Joe that I had sinned, despite my sincere lack of concern over it. To this day, my face burned when I thought about it, but when I stepped out of confession and, at her questioning gaze, gave her a small nod, her look of relief and happiness told me it had been worth it. That was the kind of thing that men did. They made sacrifices and took care of the people they cared about and worried about the greater good.

This memory was enough to wilt any reaction the young and tempting Sara Sidle had inspired, and I'd moved to her door to pick her up for school. Breakfast had been cozy, but the shame was in my memory kept me in line. Hours later, however, with her in my classroom and then walking to her car, I couldn't entirely keep the image of her barely-clothed body from attempting to invade my mind. So it was very, very good that she didn't lean over her engine with me and that the way she leaned against the car obscured those body parts which were the most dangerous with me in this state.

Apparently, however, her voice was enough to reduce me to a silly, giddy teenage boy. I listened with rapt attention as she described the bed and breakfast she'd grown up in, a large, old, green beach house with white trim and a porch swing and five large guest rooms. The kitchen had opened onto a porch with stairs right down to the beach and she'd grown up in the waves of the Pacific. There was something about her… something about the way she described the ocean… that made me think that from this moment on I might never think of her without imagining that giant expanse of blue in correlation. Her words were almost… sensuous. She loved the ocean the way an infant loves the sound of its mother's voice or… the way a puppy loves the alarm clock in its box, reminding it of its mother's heartbeat. It was like a surrogate family… which seemed an appropriate description, as I'd yet to hear anything to indicate she had not merely sprung into existence from sea form like Aphrodite, except "My parents owned a B and B."

This line of thought, of course, then had my head filled with all kinds of images of Sara-as-Aphrodite. My mother would have been appalled at my vision of my brunette vixen standing straight and tall on a shell like in Botticelli's Birth of Venus. But this was the least risqué of my imaginings—I saw her underwater, brown curls billowing around her face and shoulders with angelic grace, her thin, lithe, naked body tinted a delicious blue from the water. I saw her head break the surface and her breasts heave as she drank in air. I saw her prone on the beach, a thin layer of sand clinging to the underside of her dripping wet body, legs parted just enough to seem inviting.

And caught up in these imaginings, I found myself talking about Minnesota and then the ocean and then laughing that she saw the Atlantic as so inadequate compared to her true love and first home that she hadn't bothered to make a single trip to the ocean in the three years since she'd moved across the country. In a moment of absolute, unthinking foolishness…I asked her to go to the beach with me. I was pretty sure I hadn't done anything like that with a girl since college, and I didn't know what I expected to happen once we got there. Like I needed to see her in a little swimsuit. …Like my own swimsuit would give me any means of maintaining dignity around her. It was just lucky that it was well into fall and the trees were turning colors. It was more likely than not that the next beach-friendly day would come next year. There was every possibility that my proposal will have been forgotten by then, and every possibility that I'll have gone back to Minnesota by then.

I contented myself with these rationalizations, managing to keep myself firmly under control, ruminating instead over the car—the damned car that I was supposed to be fixing. The only reason I was here with her at all. …The car that if I couldn't fix, would cost her a good deal of the money she didn't have. The car that brought her to me three times a week. I paid more attention after that, and the next time I asked her to start it… it did. I absolutely couldn't help the flood testosterone and pride that rushed through me, nor the resulting shout. I didn't drag her off to my cave by her hair, but I could feel that same primal kind of urge pulsing through me as I caught her surprised, elated, and deeply grateful eyes. I positively throbbed in that moment, and then she stopped moving towards me, hesitating. With every last fiber of my self-control straining, I pulled her into a hug and breathed in the scent of her hair. I was dizzy with her, and convinced that she even smelled like the Pacific. I murmured, "You're welcome, honey." because I felt the need to explain why I pulled her against me when she had wavered, and because I wanted to call her a pet name. I think that was part of the caveman thing—a term of endearment to prove that I could… that I was not so old for her that she couldn't be 'honey' to me.

She shivered against me when I did, and I was grateful when she pulled away because I had lost the ability to think coherently. I was so very close to an edge I hadn't even seen beneath my feet until this moment, and if she'd push me… just a little… I would willingly fall or gladly jump. Given just a little incentive…

But she was late for work. So she thanked me again, gave me a smile that would probably be illegal in several states, and slid into her car and out of the parking lot. I packed up my tools, walked to my own vehicle, drove home, and paced my living room thinking about her. It was wrong—so, so wrong—to want a student this badly. I talked myself out of going to The Lantern several times, telling myself that she would surely know that it had been intentional and if my affections weren't returned, she could talk to someone at the University about my inappropriate behavior. And if they were… if she wanted me too, as she sometimes seemed as though she might… well, that was worse, wasn't it? What on earth would I do if she admitted such a thing? Lifted the flood gates, so to speak. Who could fight back against such a deluge?

I had missed Allison's call the night before, and tonight I made my excuses—I was sick and had been for a couple days. I'd been asleep when she called and was about to head to bed now. She let me go with a sympathetic cluck of her tongue and her sincere wishes for me to feel better. The twinge of guilt within me was muted enough to push aside as I finally lost the battle I'd been fighting and grabbed a jacket on the way out my door, intent on finding her bar and seeing her again. Even if it was just in passing. Even if I didn't even get to talk to her. …It would be better than enduring tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night and Sunday and Sunday night and all of Monday morning until she appeared in the doorway of my classroom again. And, after all, it was a Friday night… I was in my early thirties. There was no reason I couldn't go have a drink at a local bar.

After a moment's thought, however, I went to change—jeans and a t-shirt. She had described the bar as a large hole-in-the-wall and I didn't want to look out of place. …And, you know, not that this was important or… or part of the decision to change, or anything, but… I looked a lot younger this way. T-shirts had a way of making my shoulders look broader than they were and while I looked kind of scrawny in a suit and button-up, in a t-shirt I looked a little more… manly. Not that I cared about any such thing, really. I had just wanted to go out on a Friday night. And I didn't know anyone my age in town. And this was the only bar I really knew about… and, you know, having sports on was pretty much a given, which would be preferable to some kind of dance club atmosphere. It was all very easily explained and justified.

Except for me leaving my glasses in the car when I finally found the place. ...The prescription was low and I would really only struggle to read very small print from far away… but I hadn't gone anywhere but to the shower without them since the day I got them.

Until now.