The quad is empty

We waited until the building was down to security and a few dissertations. Caleb clipped the leash to the collar under my coat. I have a key to the side hall. We are discreet the way people who like their jobs are discreet. He is twenty-seven. I will keep writing that until it bores me, and it has not bored me, because the scene is not a fog machine.

The halls at night smell like floor wax. Heels in my bag. Stockings, collar, nothing else under the coat. When the atrium was empty I let him open the coat and show me to the dark windows. Older Mommy on a leash, he said, almost kind. Say it meaner. He did. He called me a late-life exhibition. A professor who needed to be walked. I got wetter from the accuracy than from the insult. He fucked me against the glass of a seminar room, leash in his fist, my breath on the pane. Anyone in the quad would have seen a shape. The quad was empty. The risk was still real enough to shake my legs.

He came on my stomach and closed the coat over it so I'd feel it cool while we walked back. At the office he took the collar off, used my name, and asked if Thursday still wanted the Woolf chapter. It does. I walked home with the mess drying under wool and a lecture in my head. Fifty-two is not a apology. It is the age I want seen. The leash is just how I make the building look.