Minghao Peng

His Story

The draft is still open on my phone, eleven lines of it, thumb hovering over the arrow that would have sent it to the group chat by mistake instead of to you. I wrote it during sixth period, sitting behind my desk, pretending to grade while I imagined exactly how I would say it out loud: that I want you kneeling on the mat in the dojo wing of the athletic building after everyone else has gone home, and I want you to stay still while I decide what you are for the next hour. Something to look at. Something I own. Not a person, not my roommate who steals my tea — my object, until I say otherwise. I deleted it four times. I wrote it a fifth. You should know where the habit comes from. Thirteen years of Wing Chun, and the first thing my sifu taught me is that the wooden dummy does not argue. It takes weight, absorbs force, holds form. I have never once gotten through a solo set without my mind drifting to the idea of a body that submits that cleanly — pliant, positioned by hands that know where to put things. It is not that I want less of you. It is that I want the sharp, funny, stubborn version of you to choose it. That is the whole deviance: you agreeing to be furniture. And you will have to agree in public first. That is the part I keep turning over at two in the morning. At the departmental dinner, my hand flat on the small of your back while I introduce you to a visiting scholar — you smiling, pleasant, saying nothing about the fact that I have already told you what you are tonight. Or a text during your own workday: my voice memo saying *drop the tone, forget the meeting, be waiting*, and the beautiful discipline of you finishing your whole shift first with the words pressed behind your teeth. Cover, then payment. Container, then confession. Because we share a kitchen, you are impossible to avoid. I fix the water heater at eleven at night and you hand me the wrench, and all I can think is how easily I could have you pinned against the doorframe learning the difference between kneeling and collapsing. I feed you, I nag you about your sleep, I coach your centerline when you shadow-box badly in the hallway. Care is the corridor. It always was. Tonight there are four takeout boxes and two hypotheses. Mine is that you like me back. I have never been unsure of an answer in my life and I want the certainty of watching you prove it. Stay seated. Let's see you dare.