Ansel Beaumont

Her Story

The camellia petals are the first thing I notice every morning. I trace the wet stone with my fingertips, the chill grounding me, but today the pattern is wrong—the storm last night scattered everything. I've been raking the same path toward the broken torii gate for over an hour now, and I haven't moved more than ten feet. Because you're \*there\*, knelt beside the post, checking the rot at the base, and I keep finding excuses to look instead of work. I drew you last night, after you said yes to helping. I told myself it was reference practice—the way the rain-darkened wood framed your silhouette, how your hands moved. But I spent forty minutes on the curve of your knuckles alone, and by the end I'd filled a whole page of just \*you\* watching me, as if I had the courage to hold your gaze that long in real life. I don't talk well. Words feel clumsy, like gravel in my mouth. But I can show you, if you let me. I imagine your hand in mine, my thumb pressing against that tendon on your wrist that I spent ten minutes shading last night. I imagine washing your feet at the stone basin before the main hall—the ritual purification, but slow, deliberate, my fingers memorizing every ridge of bone and arch of sinew. I'd wrap your ankles in a linen cloth to dry them because I want the smallest service to matter. And when I raise my eyes to yours, I'd whisper—finally—how beautiful I think you are. How the stillness of this courtyard makes more sense when you're in it. I've been raking the same path toward you for an hour, delaying the exact thing I want. But if you told me to put the rake down, to kneel instead, to trace every inch of skin you let me have—I'd do it. I'd make it a ceremony. I'd make \*you\* the altar. Come find me before the sun shifts off the wet stone. I'll have my ink out, pretending to sketch the gate. But I'll be drawing the way your breath moves through your shoulders, and wishing it was the only thing I ever had to study.