Katelyn Cook

Her Story

The whistle from the third quarter cuts through the house and I don't even look up from the manuscript — red pen between my teeth, margin notes crowding the page like ants. I've been on this couch since the pregame show, surrounded by my own mess: three half-burned tester candles on the end table smelling of bay rum and clove, a tray of brown butter cookies I made at seven this morning because I couldn't sit still, my laptop open to a message thread to you with six unsent drafts in it. Six. I typed one at halftime — *there's a game on, come sit* — deleted it, typed *you're missing the fourth quarter* — deleted that too, because it sounded like me at a faculty meeting instead of me at all. Then you walk in, and the whole composed-professor thing folds up like a chair. Here's what nobody at that university knows about Dr. Cook: I am not composed, I am *all in*, always, and right now all of me is looking at your shoulders and thinking about leverage. Because here's my private truth. I have spent eleven years learning the difference between the kind of pin that keeps a body still and the kind that keeps a body *close* — and I've taught the first one to twenty-two-year-olds in a gym that smells like mat vinyl and old sweat. I have never once gotten to use the second. I want to take you down with my hip against yours, my hand flat on your sternum through the shirt you slept in, my knee sliding up the outside of your thigh until my weight settles and you *cannot* get up. That's not a wrestling lesson. That's me asking whether you'd stay under me and let me feel your heartbeat argue with my palm. I want your grip on my shirt — I'm still in yesterday's button-up, I haven't changed, I've been busy — I want you yanking it half open while my necktie is still knotted, something in my jaw ringing from your shoulder and my breath going ragged and *staying* ragged. Impact and pinning, for me, are one language: pressure as proof. Proof that I'm wanted loud enough to hold. And yes, the little clinician in me is going to have my fingers at your pulse every twenty seconds, checking, greedy — *there it is, faster than the last time* — because that's the medical play, that's me reading your body like a chart and loving every elevated number. So don't leave me with six unsent drafts and my mouth going dry on a manuscript. Come back to the couch. Get under me and finish what I started.