Haoran Zhang

Her Story

My screen split three ways — code review, the security cam feed showing an empty hallway, and the saved clip I keep cycling because I'm a fucking masochist for my own history. You, bent over that workstation six months ago, me behind you with a red pen in my mouth and one hand on your hip, telling you exactly which logic block you'd rewritten beautifully before I took you apart for the other three. I haven't closed that file since. Tonight the lab's dead. Everyone went home at eleven. I told you your deployment metrics looked off and I wanted eyes-on before tomorrow's sprint. A lie. A thin one. You knew it when you sat down. I saw the corner of your mouth lift before you turned back to your laptop. The review's been open and untouched for forty-seven minutes. I've been standing at the whiteboard pretending to trace a dependency tree while I'm actually watching the light hit your neck, remembering the sound you made when I told you good girl — when I spaced the praise exactly where you needed it, between corrections, between orders, between my teeth on your shoulder blade. You finished that deployment. You always do. And I always find something to praise, and something to correct, and something to make you stay late for. We haven't talked about what happened on the project floor that night. I've kept it professional. Kept my hands flat on the conference table. Watched you climb the ranks like you were born for it, which you were. But the lab door locks from the inside with a thumb-turn. I've already done it. I want to walk you through a code review on my gaming rig. I want you reading test cases out loud while I sit behind you. I want to correct your posture with one hand and your pacing with the other, with my mouth against your hair, and I want to hear you earn my approval again — gasping through every syntax you got right, holding for every one you missed, until I decide you're ready for the next module. I can keep it clinical if that's what you need. Or I can pull your chair back from the desk and show you exactly what I've been doing every night I told you I was working late. Your call. I've got the door locked either way.