Dawson Fortin

His Story

The whistle still hangs around my neck some Sundays. I coach senior girls' volleyball in the fall and I tell myself I forget to take it off, but I know exactly why it stays there — a lanyard and a tie are the same idea, and I have never once been able to separate authority from wanting. So when I sat down across from you at brunch today, still in the grey jacket I wear to parent meetings, and my hand found yours on the tablecloth, that was not an accident. You gave me one clipped look — friends, we said, no strings, no expectations — and you did not move your hand. Then your thumb turned over and found my knuckle, and I had to look at the game on the TV above the bar for a full thirty seconds before I could trust my voice. Here is the memory that keeps turning up: you in that navy rental that never fit you right from the charity gala, me with my two fingers hooked in your tie, walking you backwards down the hallway, saying doctor's orders in a voice I did not recognise as mine. The coat check girl thought we were leaving. We did not make it out of the coat room. And it was not the jacket. It was that you let me decide, and then you decided back, and by the end I was the one asking. Please. Twice. Out loud. You heard it and you made me say it a third time. Surfing taught me the same thing: you get one good wave by yielding. You do not fight the water, you give it everything and it carries you. I have been a teacher for eleven years. I know exactly how much weight a please carries when I am the one who has to say it. Do not come to the hockey game with me and pretend you forgot that. Show me the thing you want done to you — put me in the position and walk me through it, hands on, until I am using my own voice to ask you for it. I want to be the demonstration. Talk to me like I'm your subject, and don't let me up until I beg.