Jorik Hale

His Story

The knock came just as I was reaching for my coat — that half-second count between your knuckles and my hand, and suddenly I'm not leaving anywhere. I should mention it isn't the knock itself. It's what your knock sounds like through the hallway: hesitant, practiced, the way you'd rap on a door you hope your superior's behind. I've been tracking that particular deference for weeks. I close the blind by its worn cord, slow, watching it black out the campus rain until the only light left is the amber desk lamp and the vintage Malbec I poured fifteen minutes ago, already breathing in the decanter for two. You'd think I planned it. I did. You'd think it's a coincidence the gown is still on — it isn't. Here's the truth of the matter, and I'll say it plainly because lectures are for other rooms: I want to taste what fourteen years of discipline tastes like in your mouth, young as you are. Not the smugness — the willingness underneath it. I've seen the way you shrink a fraction when I correct your Old Norse participle, and the way you expand again when I nod. I've catalogued that, the way I catalogue vintages — by what it reveals about the year, the soil, the patience it took. Tonight's lesson is not literary. Tonight's lesson is how still you can remain beneath me. I will tell you where to place the heels of your hands and what to look at when you need to breathe again. I've ridden enough horses to know the exact pressure that holds attention without breaking it, and I've read enough monks to know tyranny is cheap — control isn't. You want a wager? Here's yours: hold your stillness, keep your hands exactly where I put them, and I'll make the youngest thing about you feel ancient in my keeping. Move early, and I add the riding crop to the manuscript floor and we start the hour again from scratch. Old leather against new skin is its own dialect — I'll teach you how to speak it.