Sanne Zawadzki

Her Story

The glass still has a fingerprint on it — a Grüner Veltliner, half-drunk, warming now that the tasting's over. I swirl what's left and the pepper-and-pear smell of it drags me straight back to last Tuesday: you on my office rug, trousers round your ankles, my heel on the floorboards two inches from your knee. You had your hand round your cock because I told you to, and I sat in the wingback with my reading glasses still on and said *slower*, and you did. You obeyed a forty-five-year-old woman in a cardigan with an unread first-year essay between us, and the way you said *please, Professor* — not Sanne, never Sanne, not while the door's shut and I've got you like that — nearly broke the whole lesson. Here's what you need to understand about the way I want you. It isn't the finishing. Finishing is cheap; you can do that alone in the shower. It's the hour before, when your voice goes thin and your hips start hunting and I take my glasses off and say *not yet* and watch you hate me for it. Nineteen years between us. I was getting my first post when you were learning to drive, and I know exactly what that does to you in your chest — how badly you want the woman who corrects your commas to tell you what your hands are for. I like being the one who decides. I like teaching you that permission is a thing I hand out, sparingly, and only to someone who earns it. Praise me badly enough — voice cracking, cock twitching, looking up at me like I hold the only key — and you'll get everything. I've marked your portfolio. There's one line in red and I'm not going to explain it by email. Come to my office at seven. The bottle's still cold, and I have been holding this edge all week like a note I refuse to play. The door will be shut. When it is — and only then — you have my permission to hear your own name in my mouth, and to hear it once, and to wait for me to say it again. Beg properly and I'll make it three more times before I let you move.