By Jack Stratton

That morning, after we fucked, Amy told me that she had a crush on a boy.

I was still half asleep as she sat on the edge of the bed and slowly slipped on her bra. I watched as she fumbled a bit with the tiny bent clasps.

She was a pouting princess sometimes. There was a clumsy little girl charm to her, lazy and proud and seemingly unaware of how beautiful she was. Her little mop of short dirty blonde hair, always so perfectly disheveled. Her curious eyes, always hunting for clues. And her lips. My thoughts and my eyes always came back to her lips. Fat bee-stung, always a little chapped and often imperfectly stained with red lipstick.

Her lips made my cock hard.

She didn’t look at me as she explained that the boy she had a crush on had a girlfriend and that “they weren’t like us.” He was just a good boy who didn’t know any better, but he was tall and charming and had a crooked smile, and she liked him.

If he was good, what did that make me?

“His name is Matt. I see him all the time at school, he’s in the same graduate program as me. Sometimes we go out for drinks,” she said, as she pulled her underwear up her long legs.

Sometimes when we got dressed after sex, it felt like an affair. It felt like we weren’t in my apartment, but instead a seedy motel room and we had to gather all of our things and get out before checkout.

It felt like somewhere there were husbands and wives worried and waiting. It made things feel just a bit more dirty and forbidden, which of course made me hard.

The fact that she was somewhere in the middle of her twenties and I was almost forty certainly made that fantasy a little more potent and dirty.

“He comes to my house sometimes,” she admitted, gauging my reaction from the corner of her eye.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing like that, we just lay on the couch and watch movies,” she explained, slapping me on the arm for my look.

I imagined them on the couch, innocently cuddling. He was in his twenties like her, not in his thirties, like me. She explained that they were similar heights and similar builds and I remarked that it sounded like he was more her type than I was, perhaps. Though she had scoffed at this and said in no uncertain terms that she “liked older men.”

She sat in her panties and a bra, pulling on her socks. As she bent over to pull them up, her ass was right in front of me, plump and perfect in pink boy cut glory. I wanted her again, though we had just fucked an hour before, as the sun came up.

I wondered if I was capable of laying in bed with a woman completely innocently anymore. I felt very old and very jaded and for a moment very broken. I worked to keep up my façade of casual curiosity and friendly banter.

“What goes on, on that couch, I wonder.”

She shrugged. She wasn’t her playful self. She had a crush. She had a crush on a boy she couldn’t have.

I let myself be jealous. It felt good to feel heat in my veins. It was nothing, she wasn’t mine, not like that, but still, I wanted to be her crush again. I wanted to be desired and forbidden. I wanted to be worth breaking the rules for.