Chapter 3 The Man Behind The Pages

• I didn’t tell anyone what he said to me.
• Not because it was secret, not really. There were no threats, no seduction, no touch. But something about it felt… sacred. Or maybe just dangerous. As if repeating it would make it real in a way I wasn’t ready for.
• “You chose the wrong draft.”
• That sentence haunted me for days. I played it over in my head, trying to find the edges of his meaning. Was it a test? An invitation? A warning?
• I reread that discarded version of my paper—now tucked in the back of my notebook like contraband. It wasn’t eloquent. It wasn’t even complete. But it was mine. The first thing I’d written that wasn’t for a grade or approval. Just impulse. And he’d read it. Somehow, he’d found it, and instead of dismissing it as weakness, he’d… noticed.
• I was still thinking about it when I saw him again.
• Not in class. Not in his office. In the library.
• He stood in the poetry section. Alone. Reading.
• I almost didn’t recognize him out of the suit. He wore a black sweater, sleeves pushed to his elbows, revealing forearms etched with veins and time. His hair was messier, or maybe it always looked like that and I’d just never been close enough to notice. He didn’t move like other people. There was no hesitation, no casual posture. He existed like a statement—finished and closed.
• I froze at the end of the aisle. I wasn’t stalking him. I really wasn’t. I had come to return a book and maybe lose myself in an anthology, something wordless and dense. But there he was, and suddenly everything else felt fictional.
• He turned a page. His fingers were long, precise, almost delicate. The book was thick. No dust jacket. I wondered what he was reading. I wondered what kind of man read poetry alone in the middle of the afternoon, and not just for show.
• I should have walked away. But instead, I stood there, watching.
• He didn’t look up. Or maybe he did and just didn’t react. Maybe he wanted me to stay.
• That night, I opened another one of his books.
• This one was more personal. Less academic. A Private Grammar of Power, published years ago under a small press I had to request through interlibrary loan. The dedication read: For the one who dared answer honestly.
• That line felt like a key to something I hadn’t even found the lock for yet.
• The essays were meditations—on truth, language, shame. He wrote about how we censor ourselves not for morality but for belonging. That obedience wasn’t goodness, but fear wearing the mask of virtue.
• I read it in bed with the lights low and the window cracked just enough to let the wind in. Each paragraph felt like a quiet trespass into my own mind.
• By the time I reached the middle, I was sweating. Not from heat. From discomfort. Recognition. The ache of seeing myself on the page before I was ready.
• And then there it was—an essay titled The Scholar and the Hunger.
• I sat up.
• It began like this: “She was always hungry, but didn’t know the name of what she craved. So she fasted from herself, mistaking silence for safety.”
• My throat closed.
• I didn’t know who “she” was. But I felt known. Not personally. Not literally. But in the way someone might feel exposed by an archetype.
• I didn’t sleep that night either.
• I kept imagining him writing it—his fingers moving slowly across the page, lips pressed together in quiet restraint. I wondered if he ever let anyone read his drafts. I wondered if he wrote for someone. For her.
• That question stuck with me. Her.
• There had to be a “her.”
• No one wrote about women like that without having been undone by one.
• The next time we had class, I avoided his eyes. Which was difficult, because he looked directly at me when he spoke, like I was the only one who mattered. Or maybe that was just how I wanted it to feel.
• He walked past me to hand out the next assignment.
• As he did, his hand brushed the edge of my desk. Not me. Just the wood. But it was enough to send a chill through my legs.
• The new prompt was a poem. One I hadn’t read before. Dark, lyrical, full of contradictions. It began with a woman confessing to touching herself while thinking of someone she wasn’t supposed to want. It ended with her silent at a dinner table, unable to meet his eyes.
• We were told to analyze it. But beneath the assignment line, in the margin, someone had written: “How much of yourself do you hide in the name of good?”
• It was his handwriting.
• I traced the words with my thumb.
• Was he asking all of us that? Or just me?
• I couldn’t focus the rest of the class. I tried to take notes. I wrote the same word three times: hunger. Hunger. Hunger.
• Afterward, I left quickly. Too quickly. I didn’t want to give anything away.
• But that night, in my dorm, I read the poem again.
• Then I closed the blinds.
• Then I locked the door.
• And I read it out loud.
• My voice cracked halfway through. I tried again. This time slower. Softer.
• I wasn’t just reading it.
• I was confessing.
• When I finished, I realized I was crying.
• Not from sadness.
• From shame.
• And something else I still couldn’t name.