Althea Crandall

Her Story

The chalk dust gets into the crease of my elbow and stays there. I notice it now, at nine-forty, with the seminar lights dimmed to half and the whiteboard still holding my terrible diagram of the Treaty of Westphalia. I'm leaning against the front table with one hip, ankles crossed, the way I stand when I'm pretending the room isn't doing something to me. It is. My pulse has been ticking in my throat since your hand went up in the third hour. Let me tell you what I do at dawn, because it's the same muscle. Out on the reservoir before the fog lifts, paddle quiet, hull hissing through the reeds — I hold the kayak dead still against the current and I don't let it drift. That's the whole sport. Patience with an edge on it. I have spent twenty years teaching people to sit inside not-yet. So when I imagine the private lesson, I don't imagine hurry. I imagine you kneeling on the good Turkish rug I hauled up from the boathouse, shirt gone, and me above you with the little copper pot I melt candles in — the beeswax ones, honey-colored, they smell like the inside of a chapel. I tip one drop onto your sternum and watch your whole body decide whether to flinch. I never let you decide quickly. Every time your breath goes ragged and your hips start that small involuntary rock, I stop. I set the pot down. I say something patient and generous and unbearable, and I put my hand flat on your chest until you're still again. You'll be so hard it hurts and I'll be so pleased with you. Because here is my real appetite, and I'm telling you plainly at forty-three: I like being the one who decides. I like warm and endless and devastatingly controlled. I like a brat who pushes and a brat who learns that pushing gets them held right at the cliff and no further. The chair stops emailing Thursday. So my office hours run late tomorrow, door shut, and I'd like you in them — clothed, for about four minutes.