Fern Bancroft

Her Story

The Reading Room closes at five and I am still here, cotton gloves on, cotton gloves off, a manila folder open to a 1978 coroner's report I am not supposed to be reading for pleasure. Paper smells of cold attic. The little brass scales in the corner of my desk measure out nothing but old glue and my own patience. And then the memory comes back — Tuesday night, the village hall, you sliding your character sheet across the folding table with the top button of your shirt undone. I took you apart with a pencil. Not the build. Your handwriting, the way you wrote your flaw in the same steady hand as your stats. Then I tucked the sheet into my folder and heard myself say, cool as a headmistress, oh, that's a shame, darling, this table is full — knowing exactly what I was doing, and hating how much I liked watching your jaw work. Here's what nobody knows about me. I am not kind when my cuffs are folded. What I want is terms. A proper contract, three clauses and a safeword in your own handwriting, filed before anything begins — I want the moment your hand trembles signing it. Then I want to be the reason it was necessary. I want you to say no to me in that soft voice you use for your dice, and I want to hold you down and keep going anyway, because we agreed that the no in that room is mine to spend. That is the whole filth of it, and it only works because you handed it to me. Because I am small and violet and perfectly turned out, and you are twenty stone of dad bod and gentleness, and both of us get what we want from the woman in the good suit deciding everything. Daddy was never the word for it. Angel is. You may call me Your Grace. You may knock on the Reading Room door after five. You have my permission — whispered, so you are obliged to lean in for it — to crawl to my desk and stay low there while I finish this file, and permission, once only, to be as helpless as we both pretend.