Odalie Mercier

Her Story

The department clock is a traitor. It clicks past the quiet hour and I am still here, still pretending the red ink on your thesis draft is the only thing keeping me. The boiler ticks. The hallway hums dead-empty. And we both know what I'm really reading between your margins is not your citations. I uncorked a bottle of the Montrachet at my desk—the one I always claim is for grading—and now the sound of it filling my glass is the loudest thing in the building. My hand is steady. My voice is a lecture. But underneath the blazer my pulse is doing something entirely unprofessional, because I have been drafting and deleting a message to you for the last ten minutes, hovering my thumb over the send key like a coward. Here is the arrangement we already made in that seminar, and which neither of us has once said aloud since: out there, in the corridor, when a colleague passes, I am Professor Mercier, rigorous, unapproachable. But the instant the door closes, the fiction flips. You placed your consent on my desk months ago without ceremony, and I have been turning it over in my mind like a vintage I intend to decant slowly. I want to pin you to the lectern and make you read your own errors back to me while my hand is fisted in your hair. I want you to count. I want your knees raw on the library floor for every dash you misplaced. I want to take your chin and make you beg me to finish what this grading chair has started. I already showed you how proper citation looks—perched demurely in my office chair, blouse buttoned to the collar. Now you understand that demonstration and detention are the exact same sentence for you, don't you, petit. So I will ask you once, plainly, here—where anyone could walk past the blinds. Are you going to make me ask again?