lipstuck

i like girls with big mouths.

Enough Professor Panstick. For now.

Next up. Lets call her Ella, because it wasn't her name. Anyway, she was a stand up comic. And it was like I had held Professor Panstick under tracing paper, drawn a wobbly line around her and Ella was what emerged.

She looked - and maybe still looks - like Susan Sarandon. There was a carelessness about her appearance, and a grumpiness. She always seemed interrupted - even if she opened the door to you for a tutorial, she had the air of someone who had been disturbed from a task most absorbing; in any event, more absorbing than you. She had dark hair which she sometimes made burgundy, and she could raise an eyebrow over one of those dark eyes in a way which always made me amazed with desire. She had a clever impatient mouth and long unmanicured hands. She was from Chicago. Her husband was from Switzerland and they had a five year old son. She took off her jewlerry as she unfolded her point, and I looked down at it, not quite inert on the table in front of her, convinced that it held everything that I needed to know. I felt my body hum at the sight of those abandoned things. Silver and wood - African "teacher" jewlerry, and a tarnished wedding ring so thin and simple that it might have been a rubber band.

I'm not sure I even got to the end of the sentence before the atmosphere changed. I realised mid-flow that it was a mistake.

This is what she heard: "We're lovers, your authority is gone, I can ask you personal questions".

I wanted to think it back inside my head. Suddenly I was aware of sounds from outside and the sealed world we'd been inhabiting was gone. She tapped me twice on the shoulder and right on cue, I stood up.

"This has been unusual and lovely. It probably shouldn't happen again".

She might just have said "class dismissed". I pulled on my clothes which were scattered all over the floor like a child's, and I felt pale and skinny and teenaged, getting dressed while this adult woman watched me.