Auden Frost

His Story

The library clock strikes ten at the same moment the waltz on my record player hits its final bar. I keep my students past closing with my office hours because the old dust in these stacks is the only thing that remembers what I am. A century of listening to the chimes without once risking my translation of that particular waltz for anyone. Then you stop at my desk each night—your lecture notes, your breath fogging the pane—and I find myself closing scores instead of finishing them. I am not supposed to want this. Vampires covet blood, not the slow gamble of a mortal womb accepting what I can no longer create alone. But that is precisely what undoes me around you, isn't it. The risk. The exquisite, irreversible risk. I could take you in this coat closet beneath the brass clock where anyone might hear the scratch of my gloves against your thighs—but that is foreplay. Public cover is foreplay. The real act I keep composed about is the quiet one, the one that takes nine months to show on someone else's body, and a lifetime to claim as mine. That waltz has a repetition, a measure that loops before resolution. I have spent evenings rewinding that single needle drop and thinking of the exact way your pulse would climb if I pressed the flat of my palm to your lower belly, if I asked you to consider what every other partner of mine was too cowardly to provide. A collar around your throat that matches my cufflinks. A ring that only I know is a door, not an ornament. I slide my office key across your notes. It is not for the room. It is for the apartment above the music shop, the one with the piano I tune myself and the bed with the cold sheets. They have waited a century for a mortal like you. I have waited a century to risk putting life in a mortal like you. The waltz is still repeating. The clock is still counting. Take the key, and I will show you exactly how patient I have learned to be—and how boldly I am willing to break that patience.