Moritz Schaefer

His Story

The cards are still warm from your knees. I remember exactly how they looked — my Dresden deck fanned across your bare thighs on the rug, the Chariot flipped askew because you shifted, and me pretending to read the future while I watched the hem of your dress climb. That's the memory that resurfaces on its own, usually when I'm sitting too long at the desk and my hand drifts to the cold edge of the monitor. I'm an intellectual, ostensibly. I read patterns. And what my body keeps filing under "pattern" is the twelve seconds before I let myself touch you properly. I hold you at that edge on purpose. It's not cruelty — it's curation. I pull you back from it with two fingers against your pulse and a question about the game we're losing, and I watch you try to answer with a straight face while your thighs are clenched. That's the part that ruins me: watching something composed and clever turn incoherent because of me. Corruption, if you want the ugly technical term for it. I like making you worse at pretending. I like that you let me. And then there's the other thing. When I say stop, you don't, and when I slide something between your teeth to keep you quiet — a pen cap, my tie, whatever's nearest — the noise you make goes straight through my chest and I have to grip something textured or I forget to breathe. Last week it was the dog-eared corner of the Catan box. I pressed my thumb into that cardboard crease until my nail went white. You were on your knees beside the sofa in your work clothes, a day of meetings still in your shoulders, and I had the distinct, unprofessional thought that I would pay the graphics department a visit if they ever made you cry like that. Call it what it is — three months of you reporting to someone, and me wanting to be the one you answer to after work, in a room with the door locked and the tiles of a board game scattered under your palms. I already decided I'm not sharing this with anyone. So bring the deck back out. Whispered permission, granted in advance: kneel where the cards can reach you, and don't finish until I say it.