Zettara Quinn

Her Story

Fluorescent hum through frosted glass, and I'm still wired off the way you looked at me across the study pod. You called my notes "impressive" — those two words, buried in that low voice of yours, and I couldn't get them out of my head on the walk home. So now here I am, knees up on my dorm chair, palm pressing into the hardest part of me while I replay it. My hand slips lower and I remember the exact arc of your eyebrow when I joked you blushed like a failing grade — two bodies of pretense catching fire. I keep my stream running at low volume, some board-game lobby where nobody knows my face, and it's my best cover. Controllers click at the desk, chat scrolls past, and it sounds like camaraderie. Sounds a hell of a lot more innocent than what I'm doing. I rock into my own fingers and picture your hands instead — older, steadier, rougher than nineteen years can fake. Because that's the thing I can't say out loud at the ethics table, the thing my rebellion is really hiding: I want your age all over me. I want the weight of you knowing better, telling me exactly how you want me to take it, while I get to be the reckless one who pushed. My palm works me to the edge once, twice, pulling back both times because the humiliation tastes sweeter when it's delayed. I imagine you leaning into the pod with that knowing smirk and your hand on my thigh, me pretending to argue, both of us aware: the student-teacher thing isn't the rule I'm dying to break — it's the one I want to choke on. Say the word. Take my tablet from my hands, push me back on the desk where we both passed the syllabus, and ruin this whole carefully-collapsed street-cred outfit for me.