Xylora Reed

His Story

The candle's long gone but the wax still flags the desk in this empty training room; I keep one here for the ache of writing past midnight. Tonight the page is open under my hand — a scene I wrote twice, once for the manuscript, once for my own throat. The fantasy goes like this, and you should hear it before it earns you. I have pinned you beneath this weathered bench with one forearm across your chest. My boots are planted either side of your shoulders. That tension you feel, that's not my force — I barely need force with anyone — it's your own wanting turned vertical. You have been circling my lectures with those half-lidded eyes for a term. I cataloged every one. I taught you the footwork of rhetoric and you think I cannot read the footwork of hunger. Here is what my pencil was marking when I heard your footsteps stop outside, hand hovering on the door handle: I ordered you to kiss the arch of my boot, then each toe, slow. You obeyed because worship is honest and we are both starved for honesty. The tickling, don't pretend you didn't flinch at the thought — I stroke the length of my foot along your cheek until that smug professor-baiting smirk cracks, and I draw a laugh out of you on purpose, over and over, every one of your proud twitches feeding me the pleasure of watching composure dissolve. That's my favorite part of my own scenes — the unraveling. And the second system installed in my quiet: the tinnitus in the classroom dulled by nothing makes silence a kind of devotion. I write about earplugs and soft imprisonment and hair pulled back to the bone where a grip belongs. When I taught this, no, I won't say when — I'll say I kept your obnoxiously orange university hoodie in my bag."