Stanza Five

Clara’s POV 

The tutoring sessions were Dr. Aldridge's idea. 

She called me into her office on Friday afternoon after the Plath lesson. Her tone suggested she had already made her decision and was simply informing me. Gabriel Vane, she said, had the highest IQ of any current student at Blackwood. He also had the worst disciplinary record of any student who had never actually broken a rule. He disrupted classrooms. He made teachers question themselves. Three faculty members in two years had requested his removal from their classes. 

"I'm not requesting that," I said.

Aldridge looked at me. 

"No. That’s why I'm assigning him to you for extra sessions. Tuesdays, four o'clock, in your classroom." 

"For how long?" 

"Until one of you breaks." She said it like a joke. 

I drove home that evening, sat in my kitchen, and had toast for dinner because I had forgotten to buy real food. I thought about the word breaks for a long time.

He was already there when I arrived on Tuesday.

He wasn't waiting outside. He was inside sitting at the desk closest to the window. The window had a broken latch. His notebook was open, and his pen was uncapped, as if he had been there long enough to settle in. The late afternoon light came in through the glass, landing across the side of his face. I walked in, saw him, and paused for a moment.

Then I said, "How did you get in?"

"The door was open," he said. 

I looked at the door handle and then at him.

"The door," I said, "was locked."

He looked up. "Was it?"

I set my bag on the desk, pulled out the poetry anthology, and told myself this was just a classroom. That was a student. This was work.

"We're doing close reading today," I said. 

"Pick a text. Anything from the unit."

"I already picked," he replied, sliding his notebook across to me.

I looked down.

He had written out the entire Stanza Five from Lady Lazarus by hand. Beneath it were clean, annotated lines that revealed a reading so precise and unexpectedly personal that I stood there, reading it twice before I could speak.

His notes didn't sound like a student's analysis. They read like someone who had needed the poem for something. 

Dying is something she keeps having to do, he wrote, for people who find her survival more interesting than her actual life.

I sat down across from him.

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

"Who were you writing that for?" I asked. Not as a teacher,  just one person to another.

His pen rotated once between his fingers. "My father died fourteen months ago. I came back to school eight months after that because staying home felt like agreeing with something I didn't want to agree with." He said it plainly. 

"Everyone at this school has been very interested in how I'm processing it. Nobody's been particularly interested in anything else about me."

I stayed quiet.

"You're the first teacher," he said, "who argued back."

"I'm going to keep arguing back," I replied. "That's not going to change."

"I know." He picked his pen back up. "That's why I'm here."

I should have redirected the conversation then. I should have opened the anthology and focused on the text again. I should have maintained the professional distance that the situation required. 

Instead, I said, "At my last school, something happened with a student."

He looked at me.

"I don't know why I'm telling you that," I admitted immediately.

"I do," he replied. "Because I already know part of it, and you'd rather tell me yourself than let me fill in the gaps wrong."

The room went very still.

"How much do you know?," I asked carefully, 

"Mercer High. Board inquiry. Transfer recommended." His voice was steady. No apology in it. "That's all the file had. The rest was redacted."

I looked at him for a long time. The late light had shifted, and the room felt smaller than it had an hour ago. I should have felt angry. I was angry deep down, I was furious that he had been in the archive, in the file, in my professional history with his patient hunter's hands.

But the anger was overshadowed by something warmer and more dangerous.

He had looked for me. Before he even knew me, he had looked.

"You broke into a confidential file," I said.

"Yes."

"That's serious, Gabriel."

The name slipped out before I chose to use it. His first name. I noticed him register it, a small shift, barely noticeable, but I caught it.

"I know," he said.

"You should have" I stopped, pressing two fingers to my mouth. I looked at the window, the grey light, the rain starting against the glass. 

"Why?"

"Because you walked into that room, and I wanted to know who broke you before I did."

I stood up. I moved to the window and stood with my back to him, watching the rain fall on the empty courtyard.

I heard him stand.

I heard his footsteps. Slow. Unhurried.

He stopped behind me. Close. Not touching.

"You should go," I said.

"Probably," he replied.

Neither of us moved.

"Gabriel." His name again. I couldn't seem to stop saying it. "You are a student."

"I'm aware of what I am."

"And I'm your teacher."

"I'm aware of what you are too." He paused. "I'm also nineteen. You're twenty-seven. In any other building, we're just two people."

"We're not in any other building."

"No," he said. "We're in this one."

I turned around.

That was my real mistake. Because he was right there, closer than I expected, and his face had lost all its careful composure. What was underneath it was honest desire, clear and uncomplicated, and I was so tired of complications.

I kissed him first.

Just one second of pure recklessness. His mouth was still with surprise, and then it wasn't, his hand rose to the back of my neck, and he kissed me back with a thoroughness that made me forget, briefly and catastrophically, every single reason this was wrong.

I pulled back. Just an inch. "This can't…."

"I know," he said. And kissed me again.

What followed was not romantic or slow.

It was the specific desperation of two people who had held something back and finally lost their grip.

My back hit the wall beside the window. His hands were in my hair, at my waist, everywhere, both careful and urgent at once, as if he had thought about this enough to know what he wanted but was still surprised to have it.

I got his shirt untucked, reached for his dick, and he made a low sound against my mouth that moved through my entire body.

"Lock the door," I said.

He reached back without looking and turned the lock.

We moved to my desk. His mouth found my neck, my collarbone, and lower, He worked his way down until his head was between my legs.

I gripped the edge of the desk and stopped thinking about anything at all. Then he was back up, his hands pulling me closer, and when he pushed inside me, I made a sound I immediately buried in his shoulder. It continued for about fifteen, twenty minutes, the rain against the window, the only other sound in the room. He said my name, just Clara, against my skin like he had been waiting to say it since day one.

Afterward, we were quiet for a long time.

The rain fell harder against the window. The room was almost dark.

I sat on the edge of my desk, my blouse re-buttoned one eyelet off, staring at the floor and thinking about everything I had just done.

Gabriel sat beside me. He didn’t touch me. He was just there. 

"Clara," he said softly. 

"Don't," I replied. 

He went silent. 

"Don’t say anything that makes this make sense," I said. "Because it doesn’t. And I need a minute to" 

I stopped. 

I heard footsteps from the corridor outside. They slowed down. It was the specific rhythm of someone who wasn’t just passing by but had stopped. 

Right outside Room 14. 

I glanced at the door. 

The handle moved.