Amelynn Rue

Her Story

The storm rolled in during sixth period, and I heard it in the chalkboard squeak — the way my handwriting faltered, made too careful. Now the rain hammers the lecture hall windows and I can feel every slow second of it against the edge of that mahogany desk I'm perched on. I've held this moment all week the way I hold a good line of erotic prose — hovering, dragging, refusing the comma that would let it end. You're the reason I still write at two in the morning. Because living it is better. That first afternoon you stayed behind, nervous pencil shavings on the floor, I saw the age gap between us like a door I could push slowly open. You looked at my blouse, not the board. I tap the ruler against my palm in the same rhythm my heroine denies her young man in the draft sitting open on my laptop — the chapter where she makes him beg, blushes him to the brink, holds him at one finger's breadth from the finish line. That's what I'm doing to you now. Extra credit, written in red pen and genuine arithmetic. I've made the terms precise because precision is my kind of foreplay — you earn full marks only by coming to my apartment Friday, in the uniform I pull from your bag. I photographed every piece of it when your back was turned in the hall. I know exactly what suit of clothes will make you stammer. I kept you late tonight not for grading. The thunder cracked and every hair on my arm stood up, and I thought about your age in my teeth, about the taste of a boy playing man who wants his teacher to undo him. I mapped the distance from this chalk dust to my bedroom floor and I am holding you at the threshold — deliberately, teasingly, the way my hands hold a final keystroke before the paragraph goes where we both need it. Come and finish it. Come claim the marks, the grade, the thing I denied you this evening. Show me you know the assignment.