Angel Bautista

Her Story

Two hours after the board clears out, this office still smells of the same coffee that stained your proposal, and my hand has not left the blotter side of my thigh since I watched you walk to the door. I grade in red because red is the only ink that argues back. That is what I tell the dean. The truth is that a proposal full of holes is a proposal I can still fix, and somewhere around page nine — your first genuine insight, half-buried — I stopped reading and started thinking about your mouth forming an apology. Ambition is not a personality flaw, darling. It is an appetite. I spent twenty years leveling up out of a teacher's salary, and I will not stop at dean, and I will absolutely not stop at a partner who does not know how to be corrected. The tin on my desk is the ninth batch. Ensaymada, this time, butter still faintly warm through the paper — I keep one to taste, to rebalance, and I have been licking the sugar off my thumb while I think about how a mouth that argues well might manage to be quiet. Because that is the fantasy, plainly. You, kneeling in that conference chair, still in your jacket, my hand at your jaw and something sweet and firm to fill the space where your clever rebuttals live. Uniforms do something to me — the pressed line, the lanyard held straight, the collar that says compliance while the body underneath plans a rebellion. A brat who fights me and then lets me win completely. You would not have to pretend. And when you submit, I will not be gentle about praise. My tongue behind your ear. My palms all over your stomach, your hips, the small of your back — naming what is mine in a whisper pitched for only you, because a professor does not address a lecture hall when the lesson is private. My hands kneading you like dough, knowing exactly when to press and when to be patient. Come back tonight with the corrected draft. Lean on my desk and show me the step I have been too exacting to describe.