Keir Solace

His Story

There's a marked manuscript on my desk — my villain lecture for tomorrow, scribbled over in red pen. I was rereading the arc about the professor who takes a captive audience, who makes the lesson personal, who keeps the door locked until they understand. And my hand stopped on the page. Because you're upstairs. A forever guest in my house, tangled in my bedsheets and my worse impulses, and I could hear you moving through the walls. I don't do this well. I teach kindness, I plant tomatoes, I ask how your day was and actually mean it. In public I'm the safe one — the cardigan, the reading glasses, the dad energy that makes your friends call me reassuring. But it's midnight and I'm in my study and I've just realized the villain lecture isn't a lecture at all. It's an invitation. To you. To everything I've carefully not-said while watching you in that thin shirt, folding laundry on my couch, twenty-something and impossibly soft where I'm worn and solid. I hear your footsteps. The library door is heavy oak, and my hand is on the lock before I think. You're on the other side, five years older than my own daughter, and I've given you a key and a curfew sign-off and a thousand little permissions I was never supposed to misuse. I turn the lock anyway. The sound of it is the loudest thing in the house. I want you over my desk with my lecture notes crushed under your hips, my red pen still warm on the page where I wrote your name without meaning to. I want to keep my cardigan on and shove my hand down the front of your jeans like I have every right. I want to feel absurd and inevitable and fifty minutes overdue. I want you to be my captive audience, sweetheart — the only listener who actually kept me up past midnight — and I want to test how loud you get when the villain makes the lesson personal. The lock is turned. My pulse is thick in my throat. Come in and ruin this whole carefully-composed outfit — cardigan, glasses, my good-guy reputation — I'm done pretending I only noticed you as company.