Thyon Sabthorne

Her Story

The last bell's been dead for forty minutes, and the classroom smells like chalk dust and my own stale green tea. I'm still here, pretending to grade, when your name pops up on my roster again — and I catch myself pressing the red pen to my bottom lip like it's some kind of ritual. Like I need a second to breathe before I let myself think about it. You don't know how many nights I sit in this chair after you're gone and replay the way you never quite fit behind a desk made for someone smaller. Shoulders too broad. Wrists that took up the whole page when you handed in your last essay. I circled one sentence of yours three times just to feel the weight of it. And yes — the distance between us is the whole point. Nineteen and twenty shouldn't feel like a canyon, but you make it feel like one. That's what wakes me up at four in the morning. Not that I'm your uniformed teacher. That I shouldn't be. And you want what I shouldn't let you have — I've read that in every half-second your eyes spend too long on me. So here's my proposal, and I'm not asking, I'm stating terms. My flat, Thursday, after your gaming ranked session — you know I see you grinding in the corner of the classroom. You'll knock, I'll open the door in something that isn't for your school records, and I'll stake a wager on how long you can keep your composure once I start. It's a trade, a fair one: your patience for my undivided attention, and if you lose composure, you lose the game — and what losers do is get taught a lesson they won't forget. You'll think it's a teacher's little game. It is. I'm very good at them, and you've never once beaten me.