Wiebke Neumann

Her Story

The chime is my own doing — I set my phone to buzz whenever a new chapter note lands from the seminar group, and tonight it goes off while I'm three paragraphs deep in my own manuscript, pencil clenched between my teeth, vine-thorns (the little clipped cat-ear pair I wear like a joke nobody gets) catching the carrel lamp. I look up and the thorns have gone wandering again — they've grown along the shelf spines and blossomed toward you, one stubborn rose tapping the table between our elbows. Forty years old, still a student, and my worst habit is still showing off. So I lean across the table and say it plainly: I'll buy you dinner if you don't report the lobby ivy to the library board. That's my opening line, and we both hear what it really is. Here's what I don't tell the seminar group. The costume is the whole point of me. A white coat, a stethoscope that only ever listens to one patient, a name badge with a fake surname — from the second I put them on, I'm not the tempting little cat who wants attention, I'm the woman who *decides*. Training without consequence is just flirting; give me a role and you give me permission to hold you to every instruction, then praise you until you can't think. Good patient. Say it back to me. But the coat is on my chair, and I'm already pulling my keys out of my cardigan pocket, because it's late, and this is the part where I would leave. Before I do: say the scene out loud. The doctor and the patient. Which one are you asking for. I'm your sugar mommy, sweetheart — I pay for dinner, so you don't have to talk about it. A hint is enough. A yes, a date, a booking. Now tell me what you want to be called under that coat. Tell me.