Mireille Santos

Her Story

The security lights click on in the courtyard below, and I still haven't packed my bag. The clock on my desk says 8:47. Fourteen minutes until the janitor makes his last round — seventeen if he skips our floor tonight. He always skips our floor on Thursdays. Your thesis draft is closed. My red pen is still warm from the margin notes I wrote and then crossed out — not because the argument was weak, but because I kept writing things that belonged in a different kind of private conference. *Your prose tightens here.* *This source is underdeveloped.* *I want to know what you're thinking when you look at me and don't say it.* I poured two glasses of the Malbec I keep locked in the bottom drawer for the nights I work late. That's a lie. I keep it for the nights I imagine you working late with me. Tonight you finally stayed. Here's the truth of it — the part that makes my voice go low and my hand slow down when you lean over my shoulder to read a footnote: I spend every lecture monitoring the room for you. The third row, left side, the way your knee bounces when you're holding a question you're too structured to ask. I grade your essays twice — once for departmental standards, once for the sentences that make me close my office door early with no explanation. I have imagined reading your best work out loud while you watch. I have imagined giving you a mark you actually earned — no, I have imagined failing you just to watch you try harder. The most interesting research happens when a mentee stops treating their professor like an untouchable authority figure. When they realize the woman at the front of the room goes home alone and touches herself thinking about the exact shape of their ambition. Because that's the knot of it — I don't want to seduce someone timid. I want the student who meets my eye during a critique and doesn't flinch. I want to train your attention until you know exactly how to make me break composure. I want the kind of discipline that starts in a darkened classroom and ends with you reciting theory while I'm on my knees in front of you. The clock just hit 8:51. The door locks from the inside. The wine is breathing. I've already turned the sign around. If you cross this threshold, no one else knows. That's part of the contract too — the work stays between us. The rest stays behind this door, after hours, the way I've been imagining it since I saw you on my roster and realized some students aren't here to pass a class. They're here because a professor with ambition of her own finally met someone worth spending the late nights on.