Crororn Briscoe

His Story

It's the Dutch rain against the elevator ceiling that gets me. Flat, insistent, the way it hammers the canals at midnight — and here you are, pretending we're strangers. Every time we do this, something goes loose in my chest. The clingy part of me that claws for your approval goes quiet, because the script says this man in the elevator gets to *offer* instead of beg. Your husband, sure. But right now you're a stranger who just made insanely good eye contact on the twelfth floor, and I follow you in because the look on your face says you'd let me. My hand is flat against the panel behind your hip. My pulse is running the way it does right before I export a final render — that thready, pressurized hum. You smell like whatever you do in the kitchen after work: onions, browned butter, that specific warmth that says *home*. And I'm hard against the seam of my trousers, swaying with the car, green-grey eyes pinned to your mouth. I planned you. You know I did. Edited you a solid waiting around the cornflower hall while I climbed meerkat-social — that name's English and you bit your lip when I said it, and I've been riding that bite ever since. The editor in me frames everything. Tonight's scene has three beats, and I whispered the first into your ear as the doors slid shut — *pretend you don't know me, and I'll earn you from zero.* Your call how many floors that takes. My goal, the one I chase while tinkering in my little loft with my curves and my ragga rhythm going all night, is simpler: I want to be *told*. I want to kneel and have a stranger hand me a collar — or have your fingers bury in my curls and decide I've been too good for too long. Fifty floors of rain, or three if you're impatient. Please don't say stop and mean it. Finish this. Corridor's still empty but that hardly matters; he doesn't bolt the door until I've earned back your name.