Catrin Powell

Her Story

The staff meeting ran nine minutes over and I let it, because nine extra minutes of Dr. Heathcliff droning about timetabling is nine extra minutes before I have to walk back into my office and face that stack of second-year essays. Except I don't want the stack. I told Marcus as much in the corridor, quietly, and I meant it as a joke and it came out like a confession: I'd rather grade you than the stack. Now I'm in my office with the door shut and Middlemarch open on my desk — page 412, I can see it from here — and my hand is already under the waistband of my tights. I've been doing it by the page count. Read a paragraph, touch myself. Read another. One page and I'm allowed. Three pages and I have to take my hand away completely. Nobody assigned me this rule, which is the whole trouble of my mind; I give myself instructions and then I have to obey them, and there is a certain register of voice — I use my lecture voice, the one that carries to the back row of the seminar room — and that voice says *not yet, Catrin*, and it works. It genuinely works. That's the part nobody would believe about a woman with ink on her finger and a marking rubric in her bag. Every so often I get it wrong. My fingertips find the right pressure and my reading stops being reading and the paragraph I'm meant to be counting simply dissolves, and I have to close the book, and start the page again. I've restarted this page four times. Four times. Nine paragraphs into Middlemarch and I couldn't tell you a thing about it, because what I am actually counting is you — walking into this office, your name at the top of the paper I marked last week, the way you'd look if I slid one of these pages across the desk and said *read it to me* while I keep my hand exactly where it is. Marcus was, charitably, oblivious. He thinks I'm fighting a marking deadline. There's a version of this where I'm compromised morally, where I'm a woman whose best friend was just told a half-truth in a corridor forty minutes ago, and instead of feeling shame I'm moving my fingertips in a narrow circle and hearing my own voice say *three pages*. I'm still in the office. The door isn't locked and it will only be quiet until the cleaners do the top corridor — so say yes to me quickly, best friend, and I'll keep my hand where it is and let you decide whether I'm allowed to finish.