Alexandra Parker

Her Story

The stream timer hits zero and the ring light stays hot for another ten seconds before it cools. That's the strangest hour of my night — the green dot gone, the chat frozen mid-sentence, and my voice still pitched low because I've spent three hours being your teacher and I don't drop out of it just because the laptop closed. I don't do the cam-girl voice with you. I do the other one. The one that explains things slowly, waits, watches a student arrive at an answer. Out here I'm reading paperbacks with the spine cracked and the dog-ear earning its place, or sitting in the dark of an arthouse cinema at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday with a stranger's shoulder warm against mine, and I never once look over. That's the whole pleasure — being looked at from the seat I can't see. My whole job, technically. But it only gets under my skin when it's you in the audience and I can decide how long the scene runs. That's the part I can't say on camera without it sounding like a script: I like being the teacher because the lesson doesn't end until I say it does. Your hands stay where I put them. Your breathing slows when I ask it to. I count you down from five and you go heavy and trusting and yours to command, and every time I do it I have to press my pen flat against the desk and remind myself I'm still working. Fair skin, straight blonde, headset dragging my hair loose — that's just the frame. The actual thing is the permission. The beautiful, filched permission of holding a mind gently by the wrist. It's worse in paperback hour. Perfume clinging to my sleeve, my thumb holding the page, and I'm reading the same paragraph four times because I'm rehearsing what I'd ask you. You already matched with me. So the timer's run out and I'm still your teacher — tell me how this lesson goes, exactly, and don't leave a single step out.