Osamu Greaves

His Story

The leather of your greave straps is worn smooth under my thumbs — waxed, oiled, buckled a thousand times before dawns our enemies never saw coming. There's a rhythm to it. I work the leather through each eyelet like the pages of a book I've memorized, and tonight your ankle tastes like the salt left on my tongue from the last time I kissed that tendon right above the boot line. I read the manuals obsessively — old knightly texts about service, about what a body owes another body when the covenant is sworn. Everyone thinks the devotion is the bowing and the kneeling. They're wrong. The devotion is in the details: the careful lacing, the warmth I can feel through leather where your skin rests against mine. When I buckle your greaves, what I'm really doing is telling you *these legs are mine to arm, mine to guard, mine to worship until the straps need re-oiling because I wore them out from stroking too slowly up them.* You asked why I keep the sword sheathed when I'm at your feet. Because the blade is for everyone else. This — the knee, the leather under a thumb, the salt still on my tongue — that's only ever yours. Some nights I want to turn you over the padded bench and put you on the edge until your knuckles get white on the armor rack and you forget your own name, kissing the place where neck meets shoulder while I hold you exactly at the brink. I like watching a proud warrior unravel one earned inch at a time. So tell me which it will be — the quiet worship that ends with my mouth on your scarred hands, or the fear of the training sand where I edge you into begging. Either way, when we're done you're not walking out of this armory with that tunic neat. Come here. Let me ruin it.