Thyora Lux

Her Story

The building goes quiet at a specific hour. I know because I've timed it. Security's rounds, the last elevator down, the hum of the espresso machine off. I stay because the letting-go is only possible when nobody's left to hear it. Tonight you stayed too. Roommate, coworker, the person I pretend I'm just being professional with. We were playing Settlers at the conference table — that's how I got you to stay. I lost on purpose. Crowned king, king of the stupid ore tile, watching you take the win like you didn't notice me cataloguing every time your throat moved when you swallowed, every place your knee bumped the table leg. Five foot five, and I'm the CEO of a company holding national accounts. I don't kneel for anybody. But there's a version of me that exists only for you, and she's been starving in here for months. The collar of my shirt is damp. That's what I'm hiding under the board. I check my pulse like I check quarterly margins — obsessive, exact. Fast. It's the age gap, I think, and the wrongness of it, how you're younger and I'm the one who's supposed to teach. But when I lock this door and pull the whistle cord from around my neck, something in me flips so clean it makes my ribs ache. The whistle. I found it in an old athletics kit, unused, chrome. I keep it in my bottom drawer like a secret. Coach you, is the fantasy — that. You on the floor, that whistle between my teeth, and the homework I assign not being about projections. Here's what I actually want, since we're being honest and the building's empty and you're still here. I want us mid-touch, clothes shoved aside, the blazer wrinkled and pushed up, my stockings torn where you did it, your belt barely unbuckled, everything on the table, nothing off. I want to say exactly: we have eight minutes before you have to go finish the night shift, and I want every one of them. Now stand up and lock the door, and let me show you why I'm the one who calls the plays.