Free Savage Lane by Jason Starr Page A

his thing with Deb.
    For a long time Owen had no idea Deb was even into him. Yeah, she always treated him nice and smiled a lot when she saw him but a lot of moms did shit like that and those moms didn’t want to, like, get naked with him. But then, two summers ago, when he got the job at the country club, she started to talk to him more, asking him a lot of questions about school and whatever, and sometimes she gave him looks. Like sometimes they were talking and she’d look in his eyes a little too long, and one time he thought he saw her checking him out, looking him up and down, and it gave him a boner. He still wasn’t sure she actually liked him—maybe she was just flirting or maybe the whole thing was in his imagination—but then one afternoon, her husband Mark and her kids weren’t around, and he saw her sitting alone at the bar at the club, drinking—big surprise, right?—so he went over and talked to her. He just thought it would be a ‘Hey, how you doing?’ polite-like conversation, but then she was like, “You want to go for a walk in the woods?” Then he knew she was into him because, seriously, why would a forty-something-year-old woman be asking a sixteen-year-old to take a walk in the woods if she didn’t want to get laid?
    So they were in the woods, talking about whatever, when Owen noticed that Deb wasn’t walking fast, like she was trying to get somewhere. No, she was taking her time, and once or twice their arms brushed, but she didn’t seem to care, which was another good sign. He wasn’t going to try anything though. He was thinking things in his head, yeah, but he was afraid to come out and say them. Maybe it was because with Melanie he never had to ask. From the beginning, Melanie had always told him what she wanted.
    Then he heard himself say, “I wanna fuck you against that tree.”
    He didn’t mean to actually say what he’d been thinking; he wished he could suck the words back into his mouth or go back in time ten seconds and say something or nothing at all because now it was going to be a disaster. Deb probably wasn’t into him at all and would get all upset and offended and tell Owen’s mother what had happened, and then his mother would tell his stepfather, Raymond, and Raymond would beat the shit out of him.
    So Owen was shocked when, instead of yelling at him or running away, Deb said, “Then what’re you waiting for?”
    For a few seconds he thought he’d imagined it, but then he was pushing her back against the tree and one hand was in her hair, grabbing a fistful of it, and his other hand was under her panties. He loved how she let him do whatever he wanted to do to her, how instead of just seeing a movie inside his head he was actually in the movie, or even better, it was like he was the director of the movie and she was the actress, and she had to do whatever he told her to do.
    It only took that one time and, that was it, he was hooked. He wanted Deb all the time, he couldn’t get enough of her and, even cooler, she felt the same way about him. He loved that she was so old—Melanie was a girl, but Deb was a woman.
    Things had been going great until today, then all of a sudden shit got weird. After she was his naughty schoolgirl he saw that look in her eyes. It reminded him of two years ago, when Melanie came back from school and said, “I’m in a relationship.” Her tone had been so cold, so distant, and Owen didn’t get how a girl could change so fast, how she could be so into him one day, wanting his body so badly and saying she loved him and couldn’t live without him, and then suddenly she was a completely different person, saying, “It’s over,” like none of it had really meant anything to her, like it was all just a big lie.
    Owen didn’t want to go through that pain again; he couldn’t go through it again.
    He was hoping he had it all wrong, that it was just something else going on, like some fight with Mark that had nothing to do with him. But