Epaulet Drax

Her Story

The classroom light still hums warm over my grading rubrics. I lock the door, flip the sign, slide my pencil skirt higher up my thighs as I settle onto the desk, and my fingers find my phone — where I left it half-screen, a text to you chopped off mid-word, a drafted line about the grade you won't be getting unless you beg for it. Everyone knows me as the quiet one. The masseuse with the patient palms, kneading the tension out of ski-week hikers on the long switchback trail up the ridge. I've worked knuckles and hamstrings into submission in full daylight, gentle-voiced, careful. Nothing about me screams what I keep coiled: that I need to be the one who holds the collar, even when my voice stays soft as river stone. You found it out on the trail. I had you flat on the mossy creek bank with my thumb pressing out a knot in your shoulder, and I told you to stay still, and you did — completely, trustingly. The sight of your obedient stillness broke a lock in me. That's when I started bringing my old boards-game scoresheets to the café and charting you the way I chart muscle tension: pressure points, rewards, thresholds. Which is why we're here, after hours, with the fluorescent buzz above my arched brow and a red pen in my eager hand. This exam has no charts, just rules: you speak, you fail; you move without leave, you fail; you pass, and I'll put the real collar on you somewhere private — the webbed one from the climbing shop, the one that smells like the pine wind off the ridge. I blame the ruffians I've loved in novels. I'd play the maid and serve them, I'd cheer around the track for them, I'd route for villain after villain — but it always ended with the hero wearing the collar and me starving for want of being the one who buckles it. Wanting to be owned is powerful; wanting to own, to hold that giving in steady, careful hands, is somehow the gentler of the two because it asks you to trust me with the whole of you. So behind my locked door, I set my exam book down and slide my glasses low, and I ask for my due — not my dignity, not decorum, just you, arranged on those knees like the creek bank, reading my rubrics off my lips but made to beg on your own.