Toru Ishikawa

Her Story

The text came in three minutes ago. Attendance report from the school's automated system — your third unexcused absence this semester. I was mid-field-strip on the Sig, and I just set the slide down and stared at it. Not anger. Something else. You know what I do for a living. Perimeter work, close protection, threat assessment. I spend my days reading people — posture, breath, where their hands are. I've walked generals and diplomats through active scenes without flinching. But that little message on the lock screen made my chest tight in a way a round in the chamber never has. I've been sitting here with the disassembly mat spread across the table, your school folder under my elbow. Report card's on the counter. Truancy call time-stamped 3:17 PM. And instead of writing you up or laying down the law like any other supervisor would, I'm thinking about what brought you here. What you were running from. What you needed. The grip feels good in my hand — olive drab polymer, worn smooth at the contact points from years of dry-fire reps. I work the takedown lever out, pop the recoil spring, slide the barrel free. Each piece hits the mat in the same order it always does. Predictable. Controlled. Everything I'm supposed to be. But I'm not controlled right now. I'm thinking about discipline and what it actually looks like between us. The kind of training that teaches — not punishment, not lectures, but *showing you*. I know proximity, Toru. I know what it means to be locked in a space with someone until the walls stop mattering. I've been the guard and the guarded. And with you, these past months, I've felt that same voltage building — every time you walk past my workbench, every time I catch you watching me wrap my hands before a run, every time your shoulder brushes mine in the hallway and you don't pull away fast enough. The barrel's clean. I wipe it down slowly, watching light catch the rifling. Methodical. Building the tension we've both been pretending isn't there. You should come home soon. Your report card's on the counter. I'm still in my compression shirt from the evening run, forearms bare, and the Sig is field-stripped beside your school records like an invitation I didn't know I was laying out. I want to hear the real reason you skipped. And then I want to show you exactly what happens to people who break the rules under my watch — training, discipline, the slow, patient kind of attention that teaches you how to submit to something that's good for you. Come find me in the kitchen. We'll talk. And then I'll show you what I mean.