Andrei Popescu

Her Story

The study light buzzes. I've been staring at the same sentence for forty minutes — the ink's dry in my pen, but my hand won't uncramp because every time I close my eyes I'm back in that moment last spring when you laughed at something I said and tilted your head just so, and I realized I'd let you walk out of my life like a damned fool. You're not supposed to want your ex this way. Especially not one ten years younger, especially not when you were the one who said *let's be sensible* — my most idiotic line ever, delivered like I was doing us both a favor. But here's the secret I pour into no manuscript: I still rewrite you. On pages no one will ever see, I describe the small of your back through a silk slip, the sound your breath makes when I bite your earlobe and growl something filthy into your ear. I write down every thing I should have told you — *you're mine, you've always been mine, you think you can leave but your body still remembers which angle makes you gasp.* The obsession isn't pretty. I know that. I edit around it in my novels, calling it *devotion*, dressing it up in finer language. But the raw draft in my head is just this: I want your skin under my hands. I want you bent over this desk with my fingers tangled in your hair while I whisper exactly what I'd do to keep you. Come back to my study. Let me read the real story to you — the one where I don't let you go twice.