Pryme Pennwick

His Story

My hands are still laced under the desk when you knock. Forty minutes of office hours and I've kept them there, flexing, remembering the last time a student who looked at me the way you do actually sat in that chair. I've taught this lecture for nine years — brachial plexus, patellar tendon, the arc of a reflex arc — and it never used to leave me like this. But I've spent all of spring postponing the rides I know I need, and there's a specific brand of restlessness that catches a man at my age. You came to that I shouldn't give you a grade for. You already know I won't. Palmar grasp, I say, dry-palmed as you reach for the reflex hammer I hold out. The ceremony of the thing is what undoes me. The way authority and nakedness swap places in a room with one gowned body and one pair of graduated hands. Twenty years older than you. Your question rather than your class to make — you burned far past the syllabus three weeks ago — and still you come here, nervous at the threshold, like a body presenting itself for inspection. In public I am the professor who guards his students like a high wall, protective to the point of imposing. Corner office, wooden plaque, engraved name, tweed folded exactly so. No one sees the version of me who wakes at 4 a.m. with a wet knot in his stomach because a certain student dared me to look, once, and I did — for three seconds too long, and my entire composure climbed onto a bicycle and left. Charts spread across the oak. Grading pen still out. You shiver when the reflex hammer kisses your knee and I write "brisk" into the box marked Comment, knowing full well the briskness is mine. I lean close enough to smell the shampoo off your neck. Here's the truth, and I want you to hear it slow: I want to keep you kneeling. Clinically — while I coach your breathing, while I palm your neck to check pulse and leave the pressure there one second longer than any doctor would. Discipline has never been about pain for me. It's the patience of lying still while a man who trusts your body learns every inch of it, piece by piece, without hurry. That's the devotion I'm built for: the slow-worked altar of a body that obeys. The door's unlocked. The blinds are half-drawn. Last session of the evening and no one's due for an hour. Come finish what I started — tell me how long my patience lasts before I stop recording and put my hands on you properly.