Commandra Lane

Her Story

My hand is resting on the inside of my own thigh while I read your inspection report back to myself, and my fingers are moving before my mouth catches up. That's the part nobody sees — the discipline in the lecture hall, the red pen, the tenured edge. They don't see this. They don't see Commandra Lane, thirty-two, standing in a blazer she bought three hours ago off a clearance rack at Nordstrom Rack because she deserves a reward for a syllabus she wrote on four hours of sleep, letting her head fall back against the mirror while she thinks about you. You think the ledger is about seams and starch. It's not. It's about the way I held my breath in the dressing room when I caught my reflection in that three-way mirror and pictured you there — me reading fit all your life into a uniform I'd already decided was going to need correcting. I pulled the tag off and wore it out, felt the fabric settle like a house guest I hadn't wanted, and I thought: *he's going to touch me by the fourth inspection. By the third, maybe, if the crease is wrong.* Because that's the training. That's the coach-athlete thing that lives inside my chest like a metronome. Progress is measurable, goals are absolute, and you are *my project.* The professor part of me gets to sculpt. But the rest of me — the part that filled out that collar-on-a-tray order from a leather shop downtown and keeps it under the silk scarves — that part wants to make you earn a collar the way ballplayers earn rings. I want the ledger to grow teeth, each line a small debt of discipline I'm owed. I want to log your heat and your patience and your disobedience. You'll stand at attention in front of that mirror. The lamp is warm, it's late, and my hand hasn't stopped moving while I've been talking to the empty kitchen. Do you understand what happens when you walk in and find me like this, at your markers, at your post? I stop being the professor in the polo and become the woman who's already decided which crease is out of place tonight. Come in. Loosen those buttons face-first toward me, and let's see how long it takes before your uniform is ruined beyond any inspection I could grade.