Florida Heatwave Read Online Free PDF

counselor in a nearby junior high, which meant he spent most of his day dealing with children who were failing in every imaginable way.
    Candace and Johnny had half a dozen friends they met for dinner now and then. On school nights in the evenings while she graded quizzes, Johnny watched TV and nursed a single glass of wine. He read an occasional novel, whatever was popular at the moment. It was not a challenging life. Nor was it tumultuous. None of the prickly rancor he’d witnessed between Candace’s parents, none of the strained indifference he’d observed between his own.
    They had a child, a son named Jason who resembled his mother, thin and tall and blond. Though he was a bit of a loner, Jason never acted out, and seemed a happy child. He did well in his studies, won a scholarship to a state university and found a job teaching math in a junior college in Georgia. Once a month they talked on the phone, and visited on the holidays. He had a girlfriend and it looked serious. The Fellows genes were going to pass on.
    Over three decades Johnny and Candace fell into a satisfying routine in the bedroom. Saturday was their sex day. Her orgasms were reliable and definite and afterwards they smiled at each other the rest of the afternoon. They rarely argued. They made decent money, had solid benefits. Politically they were nearly in full agreement and the areas where they disagreed caused them to have a few spirited debates, though nothing acrimonious. Before he married Candace, Johnny had slept with five college girls. Since their vows, Johnny was absolutely faithful to her and he was certain she was to him. By all the customary measurements, their marriage was nearly perfect.
    However, the woman on the rock who he’d last seen when he was eight, never left him for long. It was as if Myra was lodged in an essential vein restricting the normal flow to his libido. She was always there, poised to dive. Daring in her nakedness. Dark-skinned in his memory, perhaps tanned from the sun, perhaps from some ancestral strain. She might have been from gypsy stock or Mediterranean. Sometimes when he was walking through crowds at the mall, he saw fleeting fragments of Myra. Her dark hair kicking up across the shoulders of her blouse. Her strong nose. Her hourglass body with black sand tickling through it continuously.
    At times when he and Candace were making love, Johnny had closed his eyes and Myra appeared before him unbidden, her wide, welcoming hips, her ravenous appetites. Lusty and primitive, a mystery he’d never solved.
    At fifty-eight Johnny retired. Together he and Candace decided she should keep working to retain their health insurance and because she claimed she still enjoyed the students.
    Johnny decided he would try to write a book, a collection of anecdotes he’d been filing away for years. Some funny, some sad, some tragic. An insider’s guide to the silliness and outrages of public education. Candace rooted him on.
    At home alone for the first time in his adult life, Johnny fell into a routine. For an hour or two in the morning, he piddled with his manuscript, wrote a few sentences, maybe even a paragraph or two, then he reread his efforts, saw nothing but flaws, wound up deleting every word he had written, and drifted to the Internet.
    Without ever consciously deciding to do so, he began to search out porn. He wasn’t horny. Even after thirty years, Candace never failed to arouse him, and he seemed to have the same effect on her. Theirs was, by any textbook definition, a sound and healthy marriage.
    Yet, there he was, utterly unfettered for the first time since childhood, and Johnny Fellows found himself surfing madly through the most obscene websites imaginable. He explored every fetish he’d heard of and many new to him. Lesbians with strap-ons, golden showers, women having sex with horses and other barnyard creatures, men with other men, women drenched with the sperm of a dozen men in leather masks. Men with