DIANA
The lecture hall is a monument to institutional beige, but Professor Sofia Dawn-Antonic makes it feel like a stage. I sit in my usual spot, three rows from the back, off to the left, where I can observe without being fully seen. My sketchbook is open to a fresh page, but my pencil is still.
"So, we must ask ourselves," Mrs Sofia's voice, clear and resonant, cuts through the drowsy afternoon air, "when we look at Titian's Venus of Urbino, who is the painting for? For the Duke who commissioned it, or for the woman who had to live within its frame?"
My gaze is fixed on her. She wears a tailored blazer the color of red wine, and her dark hair is swept back in an elegant twist that seems both effortless and deliberate. She moves with a grounded confidence that I, in my oversized grey sweater, can only aspire to.
"The male gaze," she continues, pacing slowly, "is not merely about men looking at women. It is about power. The woman is styled, posed, and illuminated to be the perfect object of his desire."
My pencil finally moves, not drawing the slide of the reclining Venus, but sketching the sharp, intelligent line of Sofia's jaw. She's not an object, I think, my charcoal smudging. She's the one holding the frame.
The lecture ends, and the hall erupts into chaos. I linger, slowly packing my bag, waiting for the crowd to thin. I have a question. I always have a question. It's my flimsy pretext to stand within her orbit for a few precious moments.
Finally, it's just me. She's wiping down the whiteboard, her back to me.
"Professor?" My voice comes out softer than I intended.
She turns, and a faint, polite smile touches her lips. "Diana. What can I clarify for you?"
"It's about… the alternative," I say, clutching my sketchbook to my chest like a shield. "How does a woman artist learn to see for herself? Without that filter?"
Her smile deepens, becoming less polite and more genuine. It's a rare, transformative thing. "That, Diana, is the multi-million-dollar question. You start by questioning everything. You find your own light."
Our eyes hold for a moment too long. I feel a flush creep up my neck. Her gaze is analytical, but there's a warmth there that feels different.
"Thank you, Professor," I mumble, my courage spent.
"Sofia," she corrects gently. "Outside of formal assessments, it's Sofia."
The sound of her name on her lips sends a jolt through me. "Sofia," I repeat, testing the weight of it. It feels like a secret.
I turn to leave, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs.
"Diana," her voice stops me at the door. I turn back. She's leaning against her lectern, arms crossed. "The university art exhibition submissions are due next Friday. I think you should enter. I'd be very interested to see what you create when you're looking for your own light."
It isn't just a suggestion. It's a challenge. An invitation.
"I… I'll consider it," I say, and then I flee.
SOFIA
The door swings shut behind her, and I let out a slow breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.
The hall is suddenly, profoundly quiet. I look at the spot where she was just standing. Diana Martins. She's a ghost in the periphery of my vision in every class, a quiet presence with eyes that see too much. She thinks she's hiding in the back, but her intensity is a beacon.
Her question… How does a woman artist learn to see for herself? It's the question that has fueled my career, my research, my entire damn life. And she asked it with a raw sincerity that undid me a little.
When she looks at me, I don't feel like Professor Dawn-Antonic, authority on the male gaze. I feel… seen. Not as a title, not as a symbol, but as a person. It's unnerving. And it's intoxicating.
I told her to call me Sofia. It was a risk, a blurring of a line I have spent a decade meticulously drawing. But formality felt like a lie in the face of that honesty.
And then I'd gone and done it. I'd issued the invitation about the exhibition. I'd as much as told her I was personally interested in her work. In her.
I pick up my briefcase, my fingers brushing against the worn leather. I am the professor. I am the one who holds the frame, who controls the narrative.
But for the first time in a long time, I have the distinct and terrifying feeling that the canvas is looking back, and that it might just paint something I'm not prepared for.
DIANA
My apartment has absorbed my panic. The single succulent on the windowsill seems to judge me. Blank canvases lean against the wall like silent accusers. I'd be very interested, she'd said.
Interested.
The word echoes in the silence, expanding to fill all the negative space in my life. What does that even mean? Interested as a professor in a promising student? Or… something else? My mind, a treacherous thing, immediately conjures a scenario where her interest has nothing to do with art and everything to do with the way her gaze lingered on me a second too long.
I can't think about that. It's a dangerous, forbidden path.
So, I focus on the challenge. Find your own light.
I open my sketchbook, flipping past tentative studies of hands, of shadows, of the curve of a neck. I stop at the pages dedicated to her. Quick, furtive sketches done in the low light of the lecture hall: the line of her shoulder, the way she holds a piece of chalk, the intensity in her eyes when she's making a point.
This is not my own light. This is me, reflecting hers. It's the same old dynamic she was just deconstructing. The student, gazing at the professor.
I slam the book shut. This is impossible.
Frustrated, I grab my keys and head out. The evening air is cool. I walk without a destination, my boots scuffing against the pavement. I find myself on the university grounds, cutting through the manicured quad towards the arts building. It's mostly empty, the night classes having already begun.
And then I see it. A sliver of warm, golden light spilling from a ground-floor window.
Her office.
My feet carry me forward, a moth drawn to a flame. I keep to the shadows, my heart hammering. I just want to see it. The source. The place where her certainty lives.
I peer through the gap in the blinds.
There she is. Sofia. Not Professor Dawn-Antonic, the public figure, but Sofia, the private woman. She's taken off her blazer, draped it over the back of that deep maroon leather chair. She's in a simple white tank top, her hair slightly loosened from its twist. She's leaning over her desk, reading glasses perched on her nose, frowning at a thick text. One hand holds the book open, the other absently twirls a pen.
She looks… real. Tired, maybe. Focused. Human.
My eyes drink in the details of the room I've only ever imagined. The towers of books, the faded Persian rug, the framed print of a Tamara de Lempicka painting on the wall. It's a sanctuary. A portrait of a mind.
This is it. This is the light. Not the spotlight of the lecture hall, but this quiet, golden, private glow. The space she has carved out for herself, filled with the things she loves.
An idea, fragile and terrifying, begins to form in my mind. It's not about painting her. It's about painting the space she occupies. The shape her presence leaves in the world.
I have my subject. Now, I just have to find the courage to create it.
SOFIA
The text blurs in front of me. I've read the same paragraph three times and absorbed none of it.
I'd be very interested to see what you create.
Why did I say that? It was too direct. Too personal. I handed her a piece of my curiosity, and now I have no idea what she'll do with it. Or what I want her to do with it.
My office, usually a cocoon of intellectual safety, feels charged tonight. The silence is different. It feels… expectant.
I get up and pour myself a finger of whiskey from the decanter on the shelf. The liquid burns a warm, familiar path down my throat. I am a thirty-two-year-old tenured professor, and I am acting like a besotted undergraduate because a girl with sad eyes and a talented hand looked at me.
It's more than that, though. It's the raw nerve her question touched. The way she seems to be fighting the same internal battles I fought still fight but with a vulnerability I armored over long ago.
My phone buzzes on the desk. It's a text from a colleague, asking about a conference. The real world, intruding. A world of publish-or-perish, of faculty meetings, of professional decorum. A world where inviting a captivating student to call you by your first name and then all but demanding her art is a catastrophic breach of ethics.
I am playing with fire.
I walk to the window, pushing the blind aside to look out at the dark quad. The movement is abrupt, and for a fleeting second, I think I see a shadow detach itself from the larger darkness under the oak tree and melt away. A trick of the light, surely.
But a part of me, the part that is still a woman and not just a professor, hopes it wasn't. The idea of her being out there, drawn to my light as I am to her darkness, is as terrifying as it is thrilling.
I let the blind fall back into place. I have a book to finish reading, papers to grade, a life to maintain.
But all I can think about is negative space the empty parts of a composition that define the subject. And I wonder what shape my life would take if Diana Martins were to step into the empty space I've been carefully maintaining at its center.