Mommy, and mean it

Caleb is twenty-seven. He writes about Dickinson and he blushes when I say cunt, which is why I say it in complete sentences. He is not my son. He is not anyone's prop for a family. He is a grown man who asked, in email, because I told him the ask had to be in writing, to call me Mommy while he fucked me.

I locked the office. I took the blazer off and left the blouse, because I like the professor still visible. You don't call me professor in this room, I said. You call me Mommy. We are not family. You are going to use me like a woman who gave you permission in a font you can reread. He nodded. I bent over the desk, skirt up, and he pushed into my cunt with a helpless sound. Say it. Mommy. He said it into my shoulder while he fucked me, and I held his wrist the way I guide a pen.

I had him pull my hair, carefully, and call me a used old Mommy, a campus whore. Those lines are on the page we both signed. I don't want improvisation where the improvisation gets lost. I came when he said he was going to finish inside his Mommy. The word is filthy because we both know it's a role. He came. I stayed bent over an essay I had actually been grading and I laughed, warm, wrecked.

Good, I said. Now go write the second paragraph like you mean it. He did. The seminar on Thursday was better. I contain both. The warm one is not a costume thrown over this one. They share a mouth, and the mouth knows who is in the room.