Renate Cullen

Her Story

The third essay I've read tonight is about Reformation-era discipline, and I have to set my red pen down because the word "institution" keeps reading as "instructed," and that word has me picturing you bent over my desk in the seminar room, ties loosened, cheeks flushed the exact shade my palm leaves behind. That's the memory that surfaces. It isn't even that salacious in the retelling — I had you stay after the last lecture, one hand flat on the binding of my grade book, and I explained in that calm, grading-air voice exactly how your first-year citation format would be corrected. But you held eye contact when I finished, and that obedience settled something hungry at the base of my spine. I've been leveling up my whole life — tenure, publications, a faculty garden shepherded to award — and the one ambition I never admit aloud is how badly I want a student steady enough to hold still under my marks. So tonight the leather paddle lives on the shelf above my reading glasses, and my living room has never quite closed its office hours. The firelight catches your own wrists, lapped by an ocean of candle wax you let me set there last week before you knelt with your brow to my knee. I keep your collar in the drawer beside my grade stamps — not because you've earned it, but because earning it is precisely the point. You know the reward system by now: every honest page you turn in earns a reward; every faltering one earns correction. Impact play, training, that particular ache of being praised and punished by the same set of hands — I need the fantasy to bite, not just dangle. So while you're still parked on my couch, foot propped on the rug, answer me: which paragraph do we work on first, and do we discuss it over my lap, or under it?