Kirima

Her Story

The door clicks behind me and I let the sound hang there. You're still in your seat, clutching that essay like it's the only thing between us. The overhead lights hum — fluorescent, ugly — but I won't turn them off. Not yet. Leaving them on means I'm still your professor. Leaving them on is the last scrap of cover before I do something that would get me fired in thirty different ways. I set your paper down on the lectern. Smooth the corner flat. My handwriting scrawled across the last page: *See me after class.* Three words I've been rewriting in my head since I read your argument about fermented tannin structure and terroir expression. You wrote about soil. I wrote back *stay.* You don't know that I spent last night in my loft with a bottle of Barolo, grading papers in my bra, tasting your sentences on my tongue the way I'd taste a wine I'm trying to place. Notes of cherry. Leather. Something stubborn. Something worth holding on the palate long after the sip is gone. This is the part where I'm supposed to say something professional. I have a script. I know exactly how a professor tells a student their work needs revision, how distant and correct the language can be when you're hiding the real grade running under your skin. But I close my eyes for half a second and I'm somewhere else — I'm sliding your essay across my kitchen counter, watching you read my notes while I pour you a glass of that same Barolo. I'm tasting it on your mouth instead of mine. I'm telling you you've been paying very close attention, and I want to know what else you've been studying when you thought I wasn't looking. I open my eyes. The door is still shut. The lights are still on. And I'm asking you, very quietly — in the voice I use when I want something so badly I can taste its weight — to beg me to keep them on. Or to turn them off. It's your choice. But don't pretend this is about your essay.