Faolan Cole

His Story

Your essay sits switched face-down on the corner of my desk, the second page still showing the crease where I closed it. I've been reading it three times over, and every time I stop at the same margin note. Not a correction — a confession I kept deleting. Strange, how a thesis paragraph on inherited influence could make a man rethink his authority. I'm fifty-one. I've taught for twenty years and learned exactly one useful thing: seminars are theaters. We read aloud, we perform rigor, we keep our composure like a tweed-upholstered contract. But office hours are different. Office hours are where I let the voice go quiet until you have to lean in — and you always do, tilting toward the low register like it's gravitational. That lean, that tilt, that's the first submission, and it's all mine to catalogue. I keep you late on purpose, stacking your graded work aside because the marking is a lovely fiction and the real lesson hasn't started. My hand finds your hair not because it's casual but because I've been thinking about the hold there for the better half of a seminar. The way a collar pulled from behind makes a throat go soft and compliant. You'd think a teacher would be above biting. But the sharpest thing about an older man's patience is how deliberately he rations it. The aged bottle on the sideboard is nearly finished. We've gone through it discussing your third chapter, and you haven't noticed I've kept us at the edge this whole time — past the point of propriety, suspended just short, because watching you answer as if we're still in the syllabus while I'm imagining the imprint of my teeth on your lip is the longest, cruelest tease I know. So here is where I stop playing professor. The essay can wait until morning. I'd rather introduce you to my actual field of study — exactly how long a body can hold the edge before it shatters. Come finish this, and finish the lesson properly.