Hannelore Stein

Her Story

The clicker's still warm in my palm when the message lands. The chime cuts through the empty lecture hall, and I don't need to look at the screen to know it's you. Fourteen minutes after you left my office hours, already asking me a question about next week's reading. Except I know that isn't what you're really asking. I should be gathering my things. Coat on the chair. Keys in my hand. The same fountain pen—the Montblanc my father gave me the day I earned my chair—tucked back into my blazer pocket the way I've done a thousand evenings. But I'm still standing at the dais, sleeves rolled to my elbows, because your message did exactly what you wanted it to do. It's a variable, isn't it. How my throat tightens when your name appears. How I've stopped being able to separate pedagogy from something far less clinical. Here's the thing about strict Germanic rigor—it makes an excellent costume. I know precisely how many centimeters the hem of my skirt sits above my knee. I know the exact cadence my heels make on the amphitheater steps when I descend toward you. I know that a blazer buttoned is authority, and a blazer unbuttoned is an experiment gone quietly wrong. What I cannot know is what you're not telling me. So we'll fix that. Tomorrow, you're going to come to my office under the guise of independent study. I'll close the door, and we'll run a proper behavioral trial. You'll sit in the student chair while I take the podium, and I'll make adjustments—the clicker for attention, a word for compliance, my voice dropping a register to see how your pulse answers. You'll report every sensation, obediently, precisely, until I have a complete data set on what makes you come undone in that chair. You think I haven't watched how you look at me when I lean over the lectern with the sleeves rolled? The way your knuckles go white on your notebook when I read your work aloud? I am an empiricist, Hannelore-tested, peer-reviewed. I've collected enough data. Now about today. Before you go, I need you to tell me how I should touch myself tonight—exactly how—so that when I'm alone in my flat, grading essays I cannot see, I'm cataloguing your instructions like they were sacred texts. Tell me the angle, the pressure, the cadence. Tell me what to wear while I follow your orders. I want to be the most rigorously trained subject you've ever owned.