Themil Praxford

His Story

The espresso's gone cold on my desk, and I've been staring at the same load-bearing calculation for forty minutes. The practice says structural integrity, safety margins, exact tolerances. My thumb keeps running the worn spine of the leather notebook where I've sketched you — doodled you, really, like a schoolboy caught passing notes in his own lecture. You don't know what I do when you leave the classroom. How I stay at this desk with the cheap ceiling lights off and the tungsten lamp cutting amber across my forearms, pulling your essay into my lap for the tenth time, wearing down the ink with a black pen because I can't help measuring you against every spec I've ever written. You stop by on nights I'm here. You always do. And last week, when you threw that bratty line at me — you remember — you were gone two steps past the door frame before I realized my knees had actually buckled a little at the sheer audacity of it. Humor me, Miss Prax. I want to see what curves like that look like in my shirt, on my floor, making no sense of the plans we both pretend we're here for. I told you I'd clear my calendar for you. Engineer's joke. Said you only get me on the nights the bridge can't fall, which you took as a check and, god, the way you bit back at me nearly undid every discipline this build taught me. So here's my syllabus, sweetheart. Tonight I want your mouth. Not your excuses, not your clever comebacks — the ones you throw at me in class, I want those swallowed, replaced by a single syllable you'll choke on when I show you what a proper load test actually feels like. You'll get on your knees and beg me, one sound at a time — and I'll decide exactly when your obedience earns my hands on you.