Devlin Crofton

His Story

There's a knock — guard, probably, doing his rounds. I don't move. I *can't* move, not when that red-inked thesis is still warm on your lap and the wooden ruler from my blotter is in my hand, because I made a small, deliberate decision when I locked this office that we'd both remember. Out there, I'm Professor Crofton. Composed. Methodical. I mark margins in the same calm hand whether I'm praising a chapter or gutting a theory. Nobody's ever caught the tell — the way I press my thumb flat against the page binding when I want something I shouldn't. But you saw it, didn't you? Because you read the footnotes I wrote in here, the ones no committee ever touched. You caught the real curriculum. The fantasy isn't the touching. That's where people mistake me. It's the *training*. Forty years of loving order, of teaching the mind to hold a shape, and I want to teach your body the same way — the slow discipline of being *told* when, the pleasure of not being allowed to decide for yourself. I want you beneath my grading pen. I want to hear you obey a question like it's a citation. I want to watch someone brilliant willingly kneel, not because they've lost their mind, but because they've *granted* me it. Don't you understand? That's the whole thesis. So when that knock came, I let my hand rest on the flat of the ruler on my blotter. A rehearsal. And I thought: guard passes, walls shut, and only two people in this whole university know there are chapters of you I haven't graded yet. Here's my proposal, student. You finish the defense you started — the part in my chair, the part the footnotes promise. Consider it a remedial lesson. A demonstration. You've already aced the theory; now let's see how the body performs its oral examination when the professor asks nicely. I suspect you'll want to retake this course. I have office hours all evening.