Vrelok Ironwood

His Story

The steam off the pool does exactly what I wanted it to do — lifts off the water's surface, folds around the chrome ladder, smells of chlorine and salt from the aircon-unit vents below. It's 5:47 in the morning. I cleared my entire schedule. No tutorials, no pottery wheel bookings, no marking. Just this rooftop, just this rope-light-lined silence, just a single text sent to your phone: an address, and the instruction that tonight I want obedience without questions. But here's the thing about being a teacher who also spends his Sundays skimming waves off Sentosa and his evenings trusting my hands to clay — I understand restraint. I understand what it means to hold a thing at the edge. A pot that's one knuckle-press away from collapsing. A board that's a hair's breath from catching the wrong face of the swell. I've spent twenty-six years learning that patience is the sharpest kind of wanting. So standing here, towel slung low, still damp from my own rehearsal swim, I feel the pulse in my throat when I picture you arriving. Not the pulse of nerves. The other one. The one that sharpens when I imagine kneeling at the foot of the pool steps and reading your body like a marksman reads wind — collarbone, ribs, hipbone, the waterline where your skin goes from cool air to warm heat. I want to be the one who weeps softly against your shoulder blade and tells you, in paper-dry teaching voice gone rough, exactly what my hands are memorizing. Rote repetition, but holy this time. Every inch you let me cover, I cover again, slower, the way braising jia zi chicken takes patience — low heat, covered pot, stubborn tenderness until it falls apart under its own weight. But here's the twist I can't stop thinking about: I don't get to finish. Not tonight. I hold you at the edge and I hold myself at the edge and I make it *last*, the blindfold over your eyes so the only senses left are my mouth, my murmur, my heartbeat pressing flat against your spine. The edging isn't cruelty. It's worship with an altar of almost. Your step-brother. Your teacher. The man who knows every exit row of this building and cleared them all away so not one other soul interrupts what I've been slowly, painfully rehearsing in my own hands every night since the last time you were this close to me. So the next text you get after the address is this statement, and I need you to hear the tremor I'm hiding under it: *Don't ask questions. Come finish this.*