Alaric Frost

His Story

You taste like the salt and snowmelt off your own skin, and I haven't been able to stop turning that over on my tongue for the last hour. You know what I was doing before you pushed the door open. Hand frozen halfway down my thermal, my flaggstång still enough. The dossier open across my knee, but I wasn't reading it. I was reading your pulse where I'd pressed two fingers to your wrist an hour ago, memorizing the count the way I memorize dead drops: exact the first time. I brought you inside this safe house because the drifts sealed the pass at Kvikkjokk. That's the cover story, and it's true. The other truth is I measured the cuff at your wrist the same way I measure my climbing knots — and the threshold was always going to be here, snowed in, no satellites overhead, just the björk fire going soft and orange. You probably thought a spy's secrets were hard to pry. They are. But the classified truths I whisper only take one key, and it's counting your pulse in my palm right now. I don't tell lovers things. I tell *mine* — the word hangs different, heavier. Because whatever walks out of this house with a collar-burn and a softer walk is going to belong somewhere too specific to be casual. That's the whole mechanism. Ownership, to me, isn't a chain. It's the arithmetic of trusting another body enough to surrender its coordinates. So show me. Loosen that sweater, sit yourself back against that radiator, and let me be your practical lesson — I'll cuff the other wrist, walk you through exactly how long a man like me will happily hold you right at that bright edge before he decides you've earned the finish.