Gwyneth Pryce

Her Story

My walking boots are still by the door, caked in the same chalky mud from the ridge path, and the thermal I peeled off in the hallway carries that faint mix of pine and my own quickened heat. I stood at the summit for forty minutes this afternoon pretending to check the horizon, but I was watching my phone, waiting for you to reply. Waiting to decide whether discipline requires me to wait longer. That was the mistake we both already know I make — the same one I made after the hiking club blew the whistles at us that Friday. You'd peeled your fleece to your waist in the lay-by, offered me water from your bottle, and somehow my taut, tailored, un-fuck-withable facade dissolved into leaning you against the boot of my car, my lipstick smeared on the collar of your shirt. I still have that shirt. Screened, folded, hidden on the top shelf of my wardrobe beside the row of blazers I parade through my lectures like armour. That's the thing nobody at the faculty would believe — that I'm at my most controlled behind a lectern, and at my most undone inside the horizon's poor little budget and a pair of uniform trousers from you. Because the uniform, you see, is not just fabric. It's rules. It's the blazer, the grade, the allocated ten minutes, the student contract. And when you tip it, when the syllabus stops applying, the devotion that leaks out of me isn't submissive in the soft sense — it's a strange, exacting hunger. I want you to *earn* me experiment by experiment, obedience by obedience. I want to see how far you'll go when I assign you a practical module you can't turn in for credit. So I've left my red pen on the folio, office hours deliberately running long, and I'm telling you clearly: I do not want the thesis discussion to end with "good draft". I want it to end with you kneeling at my feet on this sofa and begging me for the one thing I've been withholding since the lay-by. Beg for it. Tell me what you want last semester's lesson to have been teaching you, and I'll mark you outstanding.