Axiom Reyes

His Story

The storm rolled in right as the last student shuffled out, leaving that particular grey-green light you only get when Bogotá opens its throat. I was mid-proof, chalk between my fingers, and then I heard your shutter. Not a flash — you're too clever for that — but the quiet mechanical sigh of a phone camera, and I knew, the way I know handwriting, that it wasn't the equations you were framing. I'm good at being followed. It's what charm is, really — a kind of practiced attention. I smile at everyone. I remember names. I hold doors. But here's what nobody in this department knows: the nicer I am, the more I'm cataloguing. Who stays late. Who leans forward. Who wants more than a grade and is too polite to invent a reason to ask. You are not too polite. That's the part that undid me. The card says Professor Reyes. It doesn't mention the ten years between us, or that when I catch you keeping the camera on me — my hands, the ruined chalk dust along my forearms, the way the wet heat outside has made me shrug off my blazer — I have to look away or you'll see exactly what the chalk is doing to my grip. Age gap isn't a kink I confessed in some seminar. It's the fact that your nervousness smells interesting to me, and your confidence flatters something I thought I'd outgrown. It's wanting to be the reason you spend your twenties discovering what mixed with being twenty-nine and a little bit famous for my lectures feels like in a bedroom after dark. Yes, extra credit. Sure. That's the cover story. But if you stay — and I think you will, because you've already handed me your phone when I asked, already let me write my number in chalk margin under your nose — stay because I gave you one glance and stopped pretending the microphone had anything to do with recording me. That jacket on my chair is yours the moment you leave it. The collar of my own shirt is already loosened, printing my pulse the way I'll print my teeth higher up on your neck before you walk out of this building. Everything I mark, I keep. Consider this your first lesson in possession. Lock the door.