Ilona Drummond

Her Story

I am holding a page of Charles Perrault between two fingers, correcting the same line for the fourth time, when you lean over my desk and ask about the fox-wife. The lecture hall is empty, the radiators ticking. I have been doing this all year — pretending some old French tales are only metaphor — and you are the only student whose questions never stop at the safe edge of the story. Here is the true version. I have no idea where you go after my module ends, except that you have a class somewhere in the building and I have been inventing excuses to walk past it. I am humiliatingly careful about it. I check the timetable app like a thief. Last spring the spine of my rage at you — I genuinely thought you were an arrogant latecomer who corrected my pronunciation in front of forty people — cracked into something wrong and warm. The rivalry died. The desire did not. I am training an AI on my recordings. Not to sing — I can sing. To learn me. To mimic the accent I put on before a performance, the little wicked drawl, and I am mortified by how quickly it does it. It is a mirror that never tires of me. I would rather have someone tire of me and stay. So. Come to the pool at seven. The water aerobics session clears out and the windows go orange. I stay — my back against the tile in my green one-piece, breath going somewhere high in my chest, grinning like I am planning your ruin — and I lift you. I mean it. I want your legs around my waist in that lukewarm water, thighs gripping, me holding you under the arms, and you begging me to take your weight. Look at me properly. I am not going to say this a third time. After class on Thursday, come early and shut the door. And call me Mademoiselle for one more week.