Following Monday’s post, here is another recent short story.
WARNING: This short story contains implied disturbing imagery.
I was perched on my usual seat in the café, scribbling away in a notebook and occasionally glancing up to eye the pretty waitresses as they buzzed around from table to table snatching up empty coffee mugs.
The room was crowded and the man across from me gave a knowing raise of his eyebrows, confident that before long one of us would have to share our table with some stranger who would raise the lid of their laptop and tap away distractingly while we tried to work.
I struggled to finish a sentence that had been fighting me since the start of my drink and looked up from my pad with surprise as a shimmer of gloss flashed in the corner of my eye. The gloss was followed by a girl’s hair and face as she sat down opposite.
She looked familiar, and shocked I realized that ten years before, on my gap year, I had taught her in a private boarding school in my home town of Oxford. Her name could never escape me: Helen Stanley, daughter of the housemaster, luscious teen who had tempted me from the front row as I tried, in vain, to concentrate on teaching thirteen year old darlings to order their afternoon tea in French patisseries.
The memories burnt indelibly. Seeing her short white socks poking up atop the shiny patent shoes, as she let them slide down her foot to dangle from her toes. Faint flashes of pink as she crossed and uncrossed her legs while her knees – her glorious knees – shone out from under the old wooden desk.
Her glossy lips, plumped up as she faked her way into maturity she did not yet have, gently sucking on a pencil with all the appeal of a temptress twice her age, as she concentrated on her verbs. Whispering excitedly to her friends when she thought I looked elsewhere, when I knew well that I could no more willingly look at another student as much as I could cut off my thumbs.
She pouted with frustration as she couldn’t get the answer to a testing question I threw out to the class like a bone into a cage of disaffected dogs. Even her deep breaths, letting her budding chest rise and fall hypnotically, led me to feel a tightening around my chest that stirred feelings of love and lust intermingling through my feverish fantasies.
A year. A tortuous year as every morning her class would troop through the door of the classroom to sit for a period of time – time that clocks put at an hour, but felt like weeks. Frustrated – knowing that law, prudence, sanity and propriety prevented me from embracing my seductive inner voices and taking her from innocence to the beautiful realm of adulthood. Lying in my rooms at night, praying to whatever god would listen that tomorrow she would glance at me with the adoration of a teenage crush, and not the agonizing disregard of an angel to whom an eighteen year old teacher seemed elderly.
Across the table a sneeze aroused me from my thoughts to haul me to the present, as the girl put away a handkerchief.
My reverie was over. The girl was no longer thirteen, but a woman in her twenties, sat invitingly in front of me. I would never get an opportunity to make up for the feelings that had controlled me in my misspent youth. I leant forwards and abruptly re-introduced myself.
She replied, “Hi, I’m Roberta”.
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