Free Eat Me by Linda Jaivin

of his pocket. Removing it from its fake tiger-skin case, he dialled a number and loudly instructed whoever was on the other end to ‘e-mail me the proposal’. He put the phone on the table, stretched his pinstriped legs arrogantly in the direction of the girls and ran his fingers through his ponytail-length, slicked-back hair.
    â€˜Wanker,’ Julia whispered to Helen.
    Helen rolled her eyes in agreement.
    The man then snapped his fingers at the waiter.
    â€˜That’s rude,’ Helen observed, sotto voce. The handsome waiter clearly thought so as well. He approached the man’s table. The waiter tilted his head back so that he was looking, literally, down his nose at the man. ‘Takes more than two fingers to make me come,’ he hissed. With that, he turned on his heels and strode back to the kitchen.
    Julia and Helen snorted with laughter. The man, who had gone red as a chilli pepper, pushed up his jacket sleeve to look at his watch, shook his head as though he’d been waiting for ages for someone who had failed to show, got up and walked out.
    Helen decided against mentioning her Goulburn adventure for now. It was already quite late. She had a class to teach first thing in the morning and needed to prepare for it. Besides, now that she’d written that letter, she was beginning to have second thoughts. The analytical bit of her brain, the part that had its hair pinned up in a stern bun and wore suits and black-framed glasses, was back from its holiday and wasn’t at all pleased about the mess on her desk. Ms Analytical interrogated Helen mercilessly: What was she doing having that sort of blatantly submissive sex, and with a total stranger at that? What on earth had she been thinking of? He’d handled her so roughly. And she’d liked and encouraged it. But there was another voice in Helen’s head. The chick with the short short skirt, long long legs and big attitude sitting on that desk, the one who’d piled up the cigarette butts in the ashtray and was swilling lemon Stolis. She pointed out to Ms Analytical that in fact Helen had taken the lead, and that they had just been playing at rough sex. It had been exciting and consensual and no one had got hurt. And it was safe—they’d used a condom. So what was her problem? Longlegs blew smoke in Analytical’s face. The upshot was: Helen didn’t think she was ready to talk about it quite yet. She wouldn’t mail that letter after all. She’d write another one to Fiona, concentrating on the conference this time, tomorrow at the latest.
    â€˜Do you want coffee or shall we get the bill?’ Julia glanced at her Swatch.
    â€˜No coffee for me,’ Helen replied. ‘I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I’d better get going soon.’
    â€˜Me too.’
    After classes the following afternoon, Helen stepped off the train, and hurried through the sad sleaze of King’s Cross to her tidy flat on Bayswater Road. Throwing her bag and the mail she’d picked up from her mailbox down on her kitchen counter, she set the kettle to boil. She fetched the container of freshly ground coffee out of the freezer and savoured its aroma before scooping out a few spoonfuls into her plunger.
    The phone rang. It was Marc, the student with the lime green pigtails, with a query about the final paper for the course. His voice triggered a replay in her mind of the day in class when he’d made that comment about the ‘beauty myth’, and how she’d reacted. If she hadn’t been so distracted, she might have realised that his question now sounded suspiciously like an excuse just to speak to her. She balanced the receiver on her shoulder while making her coffee. Only after he said, ‘I think you’re a really cool teacher, Helen,’ and hung up rather quickly did it occur to her there might have been, as they liked to say in film studies, a subversive subtext.
    She pushed the thought to