TORTURED TEACHER Chapter 5 - the Boss's advances
And two other things were bothering Susie.
One, Jim was spending more and more time at work these days, staying at the office far into the
evening,and often making out-of-town trips that took him away for days at a time. She knew that
it was a sign that Jim's business was becoming more successful. He was even talking about
hiring an assistant -- he said that he now had enough money to pay one, and almost enough
work to keep him busy. But he was reluctant, he told Susie, to take an associate until he got rid
of that "almost". It would be bad for morale, he said, to hire someone that he couldn't keep busy
full time.
And Susie couldn't argue with his logic, even though their sex life was dwindling to almost
nothing. Even on the nights that he was at home, he was usually too tired to be much of a lover.
Susie worried that Jim's declining attention to her might possibly have arisen from the fact that
she had always been straitlaced in her bedroom habits. Jim had tried -- had tried very earnestly -
- to get her to experiment with a few variations, but her Puritanical upbringing was too strong.
Anything but the missionary position was just sinful, she was sure. She even felt uncomfortable
when he saw her naked -- she hid in the closet while she undressed, and wore that heavy
nightgown even while they were making love.
She understood, of course, that accepting his "normal" sexual advances was a part of her wifely
duties, but she felt awfully uncomfortable about it.
And Jim was very nice about it. She knew that he would prefer for her to be a bit wanton, but he
never complained when she failed to respond to his invitations to adventure. But she couldn't
help wondering if her unyielding observance of the "niceties", as she called them, was as much a
factor in the cooling of his ardor as the job was.
In fairness to Jim, she almost wished that he would have an affair with some other woman, and
get some of the pent-up frustration out of his system. But she knew that Jim was too faithful to do
anything like that.
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The other thorn in Susie's side was the school Principal. She couldn't blame him, she supposed,
for being attracted to a sweet young girl like Susie, but somehow his leering propositions gave
the impression that he was making them simply because she was there -- that he would have
been equally aggressive toward any reasonably attractive woman that happened by.
She knew that her repeated refusals were making him all the more eager, but what could she do,
for Pete's sake? And there was nothing subtle about his approach. Right out in the open. "How
about coming over to spend the night at my place, now that Hubby is going out of town for the
weekend?" he would ask. Somehow, he always seemed to know when Jim was going away.
And it always seemed that he wanted her to work extra hours on those Fridays when Jim
was going to be out of town. And there was no "seem" at all about his propositions (in fact,
she thought, they were most unseemly) -- she could count on them, regular as clockwork.
And lately, it seemed that she was having to spend more and more time with the Principal.
Mostly talking about Angie, and the other kids who seemed to regard Angie as a ringleader.
Susie was at a complete loss with Angie -- and Angie knew it, of course. Kids can sense those
things, as surely as a dog can smell fear. Susie didn't dare to discuss the problem with Sheila.
She knew that Jim would resent anything she did that might cause ill feelings in the community.
And she knew that Sheila would hardly accept kindly any suggestion that her daughter was an ill-
mannered, immoral, trouble-making bitch -- which is really what the truth boiled down to.
