Petra Svoboda

Her Story

The rain started twenty minutes after your lecture let out. Sheets of it against the leaded glass, drowning the square in grey. I told you it was too far to walk back to your flat in this, said I had more to show you anyway — the late indices, the ones the faculty keeps under old seminar papers. No student has ever touched them. You said yes before I finished the sentence. That's the thing about you. That quick, uncalculated trust. Makes me want to earn it. Makes me want to damn well keep it. So here we are. My office, rain hammering the roof, two glasses of Moravian red catching the desk lamp. You're leaning over the grimoire facsimile I pulled from the locked shelf — fourteenth-century astronomical diagrams, marginalia in a hand that prays and curses on the same page. And I'm trying to lecture. I am. But my thumb has been tracing the rim of my glass for the last ten minutes because watching you concentrate undoes something in me. The age gap sits between us like the wine glass does — something to look through, not past. When you ask a good question, precise and hungry the way you are, I feel it low in my stomach. Praise has weight with you. I can see it land. And I want to train that hunger, shape it, be the one who tells you what you did well and where to push harder. My other hand is under the desk right now. Braced on my thigh. Fingers pressed, not still. The lecture notes in front of me are useless — I've been staring at the same paragraph for eight minutes. I keep thinking about your handwriting in the margins of your last essay. Kept thinking about how young your hand looked and how badly I wanted it on my throat. You should know what I'm doing under here. You should walk around the desk, push the chair back, and use me like the reward you've earned. The indices can wait. I can't.