I was thirty, teaching English literature at a university tucked into the outskirts of a fast-modernizing Chinese city. The campus was an eclectic mix — ancient pines and stone courtyards brushing up against the edges of steel-glass towers. It was a place where time folded in strange ways, and it was there I met her.

Her name doesn’t need repeating — it’s etched in the heat of memory. She was American, unlike me, from good old Australia, and she was a generation ahead. A professor from a prestigious university in the USA, she’d come for a sabbatical year, invited by the faculty for her reputation, her brilliance, and perhaps, her presence.

She was in her mid-fifties — silvering hair pulled into a soft knot, sharp eyes that flicked between you and something deeper, as though always measuring the weight of your soul. Everything about her was composed—until it wasn’t.

We met at a departmental dinner, a boozy welcome to teaching in their esteemed university. She wore a black linen blouse, collar open just enough to suggest confidence, and she carried herself like someone who’d learned to own silence better than most command words.

I was intrigued. Drawn to her like gravity.

Weeks passed. Shared lectures. Long talks over beers after work that turned into late dinners. Her apartment was just outside campus, tucked behind a carved wooden gate. A courtyard flat filled with books, the faint scent of sandalwood lingering in the air. The first time I visited, she poured wine — not the sweet rice kind common there, but a dark red she’d brought from home — and we sat close, the window open to the hum of the city below.

She touched my thigh. Firm, sure. A question and an answer in one motion. There was no awkwardness, no preamble. Just the opening of something inevitable.

That first night was not hurried — it was symphonic.

She undressed like she was unburdening herself. Her body—soft, real, powerful—was not the lithe, sculpted ideal the world worships, but something better. She was lived-in, and she knew things. Her hands taught me more about pleasure in minutes than years of younger, fumbling encounters ever had.

She instructed with whispers and pressure — how to read her breathing, how to trace circles that built, then paused, then dove again. She showed me how a woman’s climax could be teased from a whisper to a storm, again and again, until her body folded with exquisite exhaustion.

I remember one afternoon, a rare cyclone warning had closed the campus. Rain lashed the windows, and inside her apartment, she took me apart with just her mouth and the curve of her fingers. She liked to dominate at times — not cruelly, never — but with the grace of someone who knew. She liked when I listened, when I let go of all my trying. And in doing so, I gave her everything.

We became lovers in the truest sense. Not romantic, not in the fragile, needy way. But intimate. Curious. Fearless. We taught and shared, touched and tasted — across months of stolen mornings, midday trysts between classes, long weekends where I barely left her bed.
Sometimes, she wept when she came. Not in sadness, but in something deeper. Release. Power. She told me once, over bare skin and cold sheets, “You don’t take a woman’s pleasure. You invite it. And if she trusts you, she’ll burn your name into the walls of her mind.”

I can still smell her perfume — vetiver, musk, something ancient. I can still hear her voice, low and thick with desire, as she leaned into my ear and made promises I felt long before they came true.

Eventually, her contract ended. Her time was up. She returned to the States, and I stayed. There was no goodbye in the cinematic sense — no grand farewell. Just a final night, drawn out, unspoken, and unforgettable.

She left behind a single book on my desk — Anaïs Nin’s journals, annotated in her own careful handwriting. Inside the front cover, she’d written:

“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer them. You were an answer.”

I was never the same. And I wouldn’t want to be.