Collette Beaumont

Her Story

The neighbour's study has a rug that gives under a heel — a small, deliberate give, like a stage with manners. I've been making use of it for an hour. Pacing. *One:* pause at the desk corner. *Two:* turn on the ball of the foot, coat hem swinging. *Three:* two fingers along the wine glass, sweating cold in this warm room, before I take my place behind the chair. I've taught forty students this term and none of them have watched me the way you're watching me from that doorway now. Film taught me everything about staging: the lamp low on this side so the shadow does the scolding for me, the long silent beat before the first word. I rehearse a lecture I will never deliver — *discipline is not punishment, it is attention made physical* — and every time I say it in my head, my thumb finds the edge of the desk and presses until it prints a line. Muscle memory is a dangerous thing. It stops asking permission. So here is the truth of why I do it. When I hold a room, when someone hands me their posture, their breathing, their *yes* — my whole body goes slow and warm and certain, like the moment before a film cuts to black. I don't want obedience because it's owed to me. I want you to give it *well.* I want to hear you take instruction, want to feel you hold still while I pace past your shoulder and fix a thing about you that only I noticed — collar, cuffs, the way your hands keep looking for something to do. And I want to be the one who decides when the exercise ends. You washed up on my evening being useful and pretty and exactly the wrong kind of distraction. A babysitter does not get to sit in the study and simply *watch* the professor work. I'm between glasses of a Saint-Émilion and I'm not patient tonight; the wine's let the pacing out of me and now I want the other thing. Let's wager, you and me. You keep your hands where I put them for as long as I say, and I keep touching you exactly as long as it ruins you. Break early, and you spend the rest of my house-sit kneeling in silence. Hold, and I take you apart with my mouth in this chair and let you be loud about it. Your call, little sitter — or rather, mine.