Teach Me Dirty(17)

My stomach knotted.

“I want more than that… I want so much more than that…” She stared at me through the screen. “I have this… darkness… inside me… it’s more than a muse… it compels me, consumes me…” Another breath. “I’m not like other girls.”

A tumble of thoughts, all at once. Thoughts and memories. Of me, of Anna, of that wistful girl I’d met a lifetime ago, saying those exact same words before my lips pressed against hers and we found each other, truly found each other. I’m not like other girls. Helen’s eyes and her soft breath, wanting the same thing, needing the same thing, some validation, some other lonely ship on the waters. Needing someone, needing me.

A teacher. She needed a teacher.

I pressed my fingers to my temples. Focus.

“…can you see me? Do you see me? Sometimes it feels like you do, when we’re talking in class… or when you look at my work. Sometimes I feel like you see through my pictures and straight inside me. Like you get it. Not just the art, but me, too. That gives me hope, you know that? The hope that I can one day be myself, totally, not beholden to anyone or anyone else’s ideas of normality…”

She closed her eyes, and I watched her eyelashes flutter with her breath.

“…other times it feels like I’m all alone. I mean I have Lizzie, I love Lizzie… but…” She sighed. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. It’s just one of those times. I guess I feel alone today.” A long breath and I couldn’t take my eyes off her soft lips. “I feel alone… in a houseful of people, in a world full of people… I still feel alone…”

And I felt alone, too.

Teacher and man collided. They knocked heads, and fists, and somehow they drew a truce, a middle ground. I opened the comments window, stared at the flashing cursor for seconds that felt like hours before I tapped out the words.

You’re not alone.

I pressed send as a knock on wood sounded through the speakers, and there was a sudden fear in me. As though those simple words had condemned me, doomed me to some terrible retribution I didn’t yet comprehend. I heard the ping of my message being received, but Helen didn’t look, she didn’t see. Her languid body jolted to life, her face disappearing off-screen, body tense at the creak of a door. “Helen, I just wanted to talk to you… about dinner… I’ve spoken to your dad about the panto… he says that…”

And the screen turned black. Disconnected.

I logged out and pushed the tablet aside. Professionalism, where the hell was my professionalism? Listening to the ramblings of a teenage identity crisis on webcam, pretending this was normal, that this was coaching, that this was in any way decent. But how could I not? Helen was my student, and she needed a sounding board, she needed a guide, a friend. She needed a teacher.

I would be that teacher.

Just a teacher.

But a good teacher. A great teacher. The teacher an exquisite soul like Helen Palmer deserved.

I turned Jagger back on and poured myself another wine.

***

Helen



You’re not alone.

My heart was pounding with the need to tell Lizzie, but I was scared to. The words felt fragile, a quiet sentiment in the stillness that I feared would shrivel into nothing if spoken aloud. Speculation would be dangerous, a simple scoff from Lizzie could crush my flutter of hope, and yet the opposite was so much more dangerous. The what ifs could pound me into putty.

I held those words tight inside.

You’re not alone.

One little utterance on my chat window had picked me up from the floor. And I was going to paint the panto set. Go Mum and her powers of Dad persuasion.

Maybe I wasn’t so alone after all.

“So, what did you say to him?” Lizzie jabbed me in the arm, smiling her pretty little face off. “I so know you cammed for him last night. Don’t go holding out on me.”

I kept walking, focused on the cloud of my breath in the frosty morning. “Just stuff… art stuff.”

“Oh come onnnnnnn. Seriously?! That’s all you’ve got for me?!”

I shrugged. “It’s a coaching video, what did you expect me to say to him?”

She grabbed me so hard her satchel swung around to thump me on the ass, and her mouth was at my neck, warm against cold skin. “I love you, I love you, I love you, Mr R, let’s play school, I’ll be the naughty little girl, you can be big bad teacher man.” Her mock kisses were squelchy, they tickled.

I pushed her away. “Yeah, right.”

She groaned. “You need to up your game if you’re going to land him anytime in the next lifetime, Hels.”

I stopped in my tracks. “This isn’t a game. I’m not playing at anything, I’m just… talking.”

She rolled her eyes. “Are you for real? You have the best opportunity in like, forever, and you’re going to be all puritan about it?”

“I’m not being a puritan, I just don’t want to wreck it.” The thought of blowing it all made me feel sick. I resumed walking. “Being an idiot slut on webcam could ruin everything.”

She matched her pace to mine. “I wasn’t being serious about the teacher game, Hels, I just mean you should seize the moment. Seduce him.”