Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

But thirty-one is roughly seventeen years past my window of sexual interest.

Gross!

she unceremoniously dropped her cigarette butt to the ground without extinguishing it. I got the feeling she hoped it might roll beneath the vehicle’s gas tank and give her a true Viking burial.

The soul had always struck me as being a tricky thing to keep with the body: an easily bored aristocrat with the means to leave whenever it wished.

Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life, needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened.

There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

The older I became, the harder it would be to get what I wanted, but that was probably true of everyone with everything.

I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart.

deciding between the two of them was like being asked to pick a dance partner and given the option of a trained choreographer or an epileptic with a wooden leg.

“Because everyone acts disingenuous,” I said. “And then they all die.”

I’d be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he’d have afterward would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naïveté would be subtracted from my expertise to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.

Gross

Tonight is all we have. This is the night we’re going to dream about for the rest of our lives. Some of us aren’t ever going to make it out of this town, but for the next two hours we can go out on that field and feel immortal!

“That you’d be happier,” he finally added. “I am happier,” I countered. “It’s just a busier, more distracted sort of happy.” I worried about what would come next but he left it at that; he stood and went inside while I remained on the porch in the warm air,

He seemed to understand that resolution didn’t need to have anything to do with truth, and to choose a sense of harmony over insight every time.

He gave me a smile that didn’t fade as confusion and a slight terror overtook my face. “Some dream you were having,” he said. “You feeling horny, babe?”

a picture from my early college modeling days appeared behind them on a large screen—I was bikini clad, lounging on the hood of a sports car, my blond hair fanned back in the wind. “If you were a teenage male,” the commentator began, pointing a leering finger back at the photo, “would you call a sexual experience with her abuse?”

His pain seemed like such an internal, private thing, no different from excrement—something to be dealt with in private. But here he was, putting it before me and making me smell it.

When Boyd came back up to testify, his newfound confidence made his steps nearly buoyant; I half expected him to pause on the way up to the witness-box and do a backflip.

the next morning the DA offered me a plea deal of four years’ probation that I accepted. I couldn’t go within one thousand yards of a school, couldn’t be unsupervised with anyone under the age of eighteen, and had to attend group meetings for convicted female sexual offenders. But I was free.

On the day of my release, my attorney wrapped me in a congratulatory hug that suggested we’d proven triumphant in a noble moral struggle. “We did it,”

his eye flinched with what may have been a passing thought of discomfort, but only once. “Now keep your hands ...