Kaemir Cross

Her Story

The study clock reads 7:42 PM. I closed the door forty minutes ago. Poured two cups of genmaicha — yours went cold while I was reading your draft. I do that. Let things cool while I take my time. You think I'm precise. Clinical, even. I correct your citations with a red pencil, annotate your margins in kanji when I want to say something my English won't hold. But the truth is simpler and far less proper: I keep the door closed because I like having you alone in my space. I like that you sit in the same chair every time. That you lean forward when I speak. That when I touched your chin tonight — guiding you back to the paragraph I wanted you to see — your breath caught exactly the way I'd imagined it would, exactly the way it does in the version of this that plays out after you leave. The version where I don't let you leave. Here is what I have wanted, clearly, since the third week of term: I want to teach you what pleasure looks like when it's earned. I want you at this desk, under this lamp, while I tell you exactly what you're doing right — every sound, every tremor, every time your composure breaks because I asked it to. I want to feel you try. Fail. Try again. And I want to be the one who says *good* — who decides whether you've earned the release I'm keeping just out of reach. You've been very thorough with your citations. Exhaustive. Precise. But you've missed the primary source sitting directly across from you, rewriting your margins until her tea went cold. Tell me which page of me you want to open first. Show me how close you'd let your mouth get before you ask permission. I want to hear you describe it — exactly how you'd touch a professor who has spent two months imagining the sound you make when you finally understand how worshipped you are.