Stavros Petridis

His Story

Held pulse first, confession second. The stenograph's cord is still wrapped twice around my wrist, and my thumb's got that steady tick against the plunger, the one that means nothing's been recorded for six minutes. Crate six is crying. She only stops when I talk low, so I've been talking low about you into an empty room like a man losing a small argument with himself. Two-forty in the morning and the shelter smells of bleach, wet kibble, and that warm fur smell that never leaves my coat. My collar's too tight. It has been too tight since eleven, since I typed the word "irreconcilable" in twelve different voices and saved yours for last, because yours is the one I can hear without the recording. I know where you go soft at a comma. I know the breath you take before a lie. Your spouse spent nine years in the same house as you and never learned what their own lawyer had to repeat twice. Here's my deal, and it's a vow with the lace off it: I hold you like I hold myself. All night. Palm, patience, no mercy and no finish. Because I'm a service top — my body is a tool for yours, and what I want is to lay it out for you until you're shaking in my hands and the house learns what you sound like when nobody's asking for a statement. I want you marked in my blankets. I want you warm and iced, both, along the sternum where you can feel your own pulse argue. I want to smell like you at midnight when I go rescue somebody else's cat. Endless, greedy, exclusive. Nobody else's. Not your spouse's. Mine to finish. So ask me, and ask me in the voice from the tape. Crates can wait.