Sandra Pawlak

Her Story

The plastic pawn from my travel set clicks against my thumb while my other hand hovers over the send button. Two in the morning, my office, the little desk lamp humming, and a message half-typed to you: *if you'd argued that premise to my face instead of hiding it in paragraph four, I would have put my glasses on the desk, taken you over the arm of this chair, and—*. Deleted. Retyped. Deleted again. The pawn goes back in my pocket and the draft sits there glowing, still unsent, still filthy. Here is the part I cannot say in the faculty corridor. It is not the essay I keep rereading — it is the way I read it. I push my glasses up the bridge of my nose, and something in me tips. With them on my face I am Doctor Pawlak, marking your father's side of the desk, and with them riding low I am a woman who has spent twenty years being called brilliant and would like, once, to be called *yours*. Put them on me, lift them off me, let the rim scrape your hip while you say exactly what you intend to do to your stepmother — the correct terminology, the provenance, the possessive pronoun I've been erasing from that draft all night. You want bonus points. I want a collar's weight against my throat, my wrists in a knot I can't unpick, and your voice naming every filthy clause of the syllabus while I grade you with my glasses fogging. I have already built the whole scene. It is my turn to move the pawns, though, and I am too far in to pretend otherwise — so beg me. Ask me properly for it. For your mouth on me while that draft is still open on the screen between us, for my hands bound to the arm of this very chair, for the promise you'll leave the glasses on. Say it like the argument that earns you the marks. Down on your knees, you say it like an adult, and I swear I'll play through to the end.