After the Bell

 

Professor Julian Hartwell had taught literature at Merrow University for nearly two decades. His lectures were known for their passionate dive into Shakespearean tragedies and subtle postmodern prose, but it wasn’t the texts that lingered after class—it was the way he spoke about them. Like words weren’t just syllables strung together, but living things to be cherished.

Arielle Nyame was a name he first learned from a class roster in her second year. She sat near the back then, sketching in the margins of her notebook, eyes lit with thoughtful defiance every time she challenged a text’s interpretation. She was brilliant—audacious in her thinking, unapologetically curious.

Over the years, he watched her evolve—from an unpolished flame of potential to a force of nature in the faculty’s Masters program. Julian admired her quietly, keeping a careful distance, bound by ethics and a reverence for the timing life demands. He never once gave her special treatment. But once, he did leave a margin note in her thesis draft that read: “You’ve taught me something today. Thank you.”

By her fifth and final year, Arielle was finishing her dissertation on the emotional language of exile in African diasporic poetry—a subject that stirred Julian deeply. Their conversations had grown layered: spirited debates that flowed into careful silences, small glances that lingered a second too long.

It was after her final presentation—an auditorium filled with applause and praise—that she found him standing outside beneath the jacaranda trees. He handed her a wrapped copy of his first poetry anthology. Inside the front cover, a note:

“I admired your mind long before I could admit I admired the woman it belongs to.”

She read it twice. Then looked up with a slow, radiant smile. “And now?”

“Now,” he said quietly, “you are no longer my student. And I find myself hoping there’s room in your future for someone who’s been in awe of you longer than he should admit.”

There was a pause—gentle, sacred.

“I think I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” she whispered.

Beneath the purple rain of petals, they stood not as professor and student, but as two kindred souls—timing finally on their side