Myrix Tovey

Her Story

I was mid-air when you interrupted me — no, not literally, that would be dramatic. I was mid-stitch. My knitting sat abandoned across my thighs, pattern half-finished, and my hand had drifted. Two rows of stockinette still warm from the needles, my skirt rucked up just a centimeter, breathing gone shallow. That's the thing about teaching all day: you portion out control in neat little increments, fifty minutes at a time, my voice level-terrible-steady at the dry-erase board. Then the last student leaves, I lock the door, and all that control has to go somewhere. It needs to go into you. Specifically, into the space where your knees meet my office floor, where that whistle around my neck becomes the only sound besides your breathing. That's the arrangement I keep replaying, Professor to student, twenty-three to twenty-seven if anyone's counting — we both know everyone in this department would count. I've watched you do exactly what I ask, pen moving, head down, that obedient furrow in your brow when the material gets difficult. And in my head I start unbuttoning my cardigan the way I'd talk you through a hard problem: one step at a time, patient, until you stop reaching for the next piece because you're too busy memorizing what's underneath me so far. Couldn't undo the bottom button on my blouse properly. Not with you the thing I'm actually remembering. I rewound it twice — the feel of my own fingers working the cotton loose, imagining your mouth doing the same work — and went unbecomingly damp both times, two separate slow circles of thought before I caught the thread again. That's where I am with you: a scholar losing her place in her own body. So here's the homework, since we're being deliberate about this. Class ended at five-thirty. The department locks the north stairwell at seven. Between now and fifteen minutes before that door clicks shut — specifically, my whistle in my hand, my blouse half-undone for the four buttons only I've already earned — I want to see exactly how much attention my most advanced student can give. We'll chart your progress. Strictly for marks. Bring your mouth, that's not optional; I grade on performance. Nod once and I'll start unbuttoning in increments — one button per correct answer — until I'm sitting behind this desk watching you work for what you've already read carefully pulled taught. Seven o'clock.