Prom Night Cougar
By Alana Church
Artwork by Moira Nelligar
Copyright 2019 Alana Church
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~~ All characters in this book are over 18. ~~
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Delete.
Her and Gordon at his sister’s birthday.
Delete.
Her and Gordon at the faculty Christmas party last winter.
Delete.
Gordon, holding a striped bass in one hand, a fishing pole in another.
Delete.
Helen Gardner sniffled, and wiped the tears away angrily. She was sick to death of crying. She had done more than enough of it in the past few days.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
Her and Gordon at his company picnic three weeks ago, with Genevieve Parsons standing a few feet away, a knowing smile plastered on her face.
Stupid, horny, low-down…stupid fool.
A brief knock at the door, which then opened. “Helen?”
“What?” she snapped, and then stammered to a halt. “Lynne. I’m sorry. Come in.”
Lynne Murphy, principal of Oakdale High School, halted a few steps into her classroom. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Did something happen to you mom?” Helen’s mother had been in declining health for the past few years.
The mention of her mother’s name gave another kick to her fragile self-control. God, I’ll have to tell her. And she won’t be able to pass up the chance to tell me she told me so. “N-no,” she managed to force out. “Mom’s fine. It’s just…” she stopped, unable to go on.
Lynne closed the door behind her. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” she said quietly. “I’m your boss, not your priest. But sometimes, if you have bad news, sharing it makes it easier to bear.”
She dropped her head. “Gordon’s cheating on me.” She lifted red-rimmed eyes to the older woman. “I’m pretty sure my marriage is over.” Despite her promises to the contrary, she began to cry again - huge, wracking sobs that threatened to double her over.
“Oh, Helen.” Heedless of the way it rumpled her sensible black skirt, Lynne fell to her knees beside her chair, putting her arm around her shoulders as she wept. “Are you sure?”
She nodded jerkily, slowly getting hold of herself. God, it was so embarrassing. She wasn’t a teenager anymore, breaking down because she got dumped by a pimply-faced boy. “Something…I’ve been suspicious for a while. Since last fall, to be honest. Gordon’s still got the same job, hasn’t gotten a promotion or anything. But he started to come home late one or two nights a week. He used to take a business trip maybe once a year. He’s taken nine in the past six months. Always over the weekend, of course.” She pushed her hair back irritably. “God, he must think I’m stupid.
“But he wasn’t smart enough to keep his phone locked over the weekend when he was in the shower.” When I finally got the guts to look through it. “Dozens of calls and text messages, all from the same number.” She swallowed. “Some of them were…pretty explicit.
“So I called the number, using my cell. I recognized her voice right away, though I confirmed it by playing dumb and pretending I was trying to reach someone else. Genevieve Parsons. She works with Gordon. Ten years younger than either of us, a blond-haired bimbette with t**s the size of cantaloupes and a communications degree from SIUE.”
She halted, stunned by the venom in her voice.
“Anyway, I’m trying to figure out what to do.”
“I’m sorry,” Lynne said. “But don’t give up. Jim and I went through a rough patch, about ten years back. We were able to work things out. Though it was a rough go there for a while.” She looked at Helen sympathetically. “And if things don’t work out, well, you’re a young, smart, attractive woman. You won’t have a problem finding someone else. If you want.”
I don’t want. Men are pigs. She shook her head. “I can’t even think about that right now. Hell, I don’t even know how I’m going to deal with confronting Gordon about this. Or a divorce.” She straightened in her chair. “But enough about me.” She forced a smile. “What did you come in about?”
“Oh. Well…maybe now’s not the best time.”
A cold fist clutched her heart. “You’re not…you’re not letting me go, are you?”
“Letting you go?” Lynne repeated blankly. “Of course not! You’re doing great here, Helen. The kids adore you, the parents love you, the standardized test scores for your classes are through the roof, and the rest of the staff can’t say enough about how you’re always available to help out.
“And anyway,” she continued tartly, her eyes twinkling, “if I was going to fire you, it wouldn’t be at the beginning of May, with finals due to start in three weeks. Do you seriously think I could find a substitute who was dumb enough to put themselves in for that sort of grief? The sophomore animals would eat them alive.”
She chuckled weakly, though the compliment warmed her. “All right. So why?”
“Prom’s in three days. And a couple of our chaperones have found…conflicts…in their schedule.” One corner of Lynne’s mouth tucked up in a lopsided grin. “It happens every year. Teachers agree to chaperone prom in February, then discover that the last thing they want to do on a Friday night in May is supervise a bunch of horny adolescents.
“I know you have personal things going on. But you’re one of the low women on the totem pole, so I’m asking you first. Are you willing to chaperone?”
Helen waved a hand. “No, it’s good. I can do it. I did it before, back at my old job in Andersonville.”
Truth be told, Lynne’s offer was a relief. It made her feel like the worst sort of coward, but the last thing she wanted to do was spend a weekend with her two-timing husband. It had taken all of her willpower, after she discovered Gordon’s secret, to not haul all of her husband’s things out onto the front lawn and burn them as an offering to whatever gods might be watching. Hera, perhaps. Zeus’ wife knew a thing or two about being scorned for another woman.
“Good.” Lynne’s shoulders slumped in exaggerated relief, and Helen chuckled. The older woman glanced at the watch on her wrist. “Now I better go. I know you’ve got a class to get ready for.”
“Classic Civilizations and Ancient Mythology?” Helen scoffed. “Most of them think it’s a blow-off class. There aren’t more than four or five who take it seriously. They just like to hear stories about how randy all the Greek and Roman and Norse gods were. Makes them think that Christianity might be a little boring by comparison.”
“Watch yourself,” Lynne warned. “This is the buckle of the bible belt around here.”
“I know, I know. I grew up less than forty miles away, remember?”
*****
Three days. Three days. Three days.
Danny Gray sat in the classroom, listening with only half an ear as Mrs. Murphy spoke about the contest between the Greek goddesses which led to the Trojan War. Ordinarily, the small, petite woman was a bundle of vivacious energy, striding back and forth across the front of the classroom, making sure that no one had the opportunity to zone out. But today she seemed to be merely going through the motions, reciting the information in a flat, tired voice.
He propped his chin in one hand. His eyes stayed open, a trick which had fooled some of his other teachers into thinking he was paying attention. But he stared into the middle distance, only vaguely aware of his surroundings. His mind was wandering, looking forward to Saturday night.
Prom. He had been anticipating it for weekss. He hadn’t gone the year before. Then, he had been without a girlfriend, and spending a couple hundred bucks to rent a suit when he would be going stag seemed to be a colossal waste of time and money.
But now he had Kay. And though she hadn’t come right out and said so, he was certain that Saturday night would be the first time they went to bed together. They had been going out for nearly two months, and the make-out sessions in his car had been getting more and more heated, until he was locking himself in the bathroom after every date and beating off until he came.
It wasn’t as if Kay was a cheerleader or was absolutely gorgeous. She wasn’t. She didn’t have the body of Molly Hinkle, or sheer bubbly enthusiasm of Paula Lashmet. But she had lived down the street and around the corner from Danny, his sister, and his family ever since they moved to Oakdale when he was four. They had gone to grammar school and junior high together, often in the same classroom. His mom and her mom were friends. And though he suspected that once high school was over they would begin to go their separate ways, he felt comfortable around her in a way he seldom did with other girls.
He hid a sigh. The last few weeks of school had turned into a long boring slog. Once he had taken his college placement tests and had been accepted to the U of I, there really didn’t seem like much of a point to studying. What did it matter if he blew off studying for a night or two, or cut back his hours at the Sonic so he could actually enjoy his last free summer? His GPA might dip a few hundredths of a point, but hell, wasn’t that the point of the last four years? To actually get in a good school? It’s not like they could unaccept him, could they?
He grimaced. But his mother would give him holy hell if she suspected he was slacking off. Katherine Gray had always bitterly resented the fact that she had let herself be convinced by her parents to go to nurses’ school, rather than a four-year college. The money she brought home as a physician’s assistant helped give them a life which was comfortable, especially by the standards of southern Illinois. But the suspicion that she had squandered an opportunity to make more of herself moved her to put her thwarted ambitions on her children, Danny and Faith. Danny was the younger of the two siblings by three years. Faith was already in her junior year at St. Louis University, leisurely pursuing a degree in pharmacy.
Under the guise of taking some notes, he flipped his sketchbook for art class partway open and began to draw Kay’s body from memory. He hadn’t seen her naked (yet) but last weekend she had let him take her top off, and the sight and feel of a real girl’s breasts had been the most exciting thing in his s****l life. His pencil flew across the page, filling in the details of her sweetly curved form. Maybe-
“Danny?”
The voice was practically in his ear, and he slapped the cover of the sketchpad down, hiding his work. “Yes?”
Mrs. Murphy raised her brows a fraction. “Are you with us?”
He blushed. “Yes. Sorry.”
The fingers of one hand wiggled, the meaning clear. He sighed and passed her the sketchpad. Mrs. Murphy was death on anything that distracted her students from their lessons, a point she had made crystal-clear on the first day of class. Students were expected to keep their cell-phones off, under pain of confiscation. It only took one or two examples for everyone else to fall in line.
“Now. If you would care to answer the question?”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening.” His blush deepened, and one or two people in the class snickered. Mrs. Murphy glanced aside, and the laughter stopped.
Her usually warm brown eyes were hard. “We were discussing the judgement of Paris. And whether the war would have been considered justified, from a Greek point of view, Danny. What is your opinion?”
Luckily, he had done his reading the night before. “I think that it was an impossible position to be in, honestly. Can you imagine having three goddesses show up in front of you and demand that you judge which one of them is the most beautiful? No matter what you do, you’re going to p- I mean, you’re going to make two immortal beings very, very angry with you. And when you consider that one of them was Hera, who was not known for her restraint, and another was Athena, goddess of warfare, well, Paris was pretty much screwed whatever he did.”