Anwen Pryce

Her Story

I left the surgery half an hour ago and still have my trainers on, calf muscles burning from the river loop — that's my ritual now, every night I know you're coming. My body lights up before my brain even names it: the ache that lives just under my sternum from six kilometres of pavement is the same heat that flares when I think about what happens on that table. It isn't the stethoscope that gets me, though God knows wet latex against skin does something chemical to me. It's the *point* of it. The clipboard, the chart, the calm held notes in my voice — all of it is armour I slice straight through for you. Everyone in that ward sees Dr Pryce, punctual, precise, measured. You've seen me drop the chart on the floor mid-sentence. You know what the clean lines of my French twist conceal; that beneath the poise is a woman who has spent a month researching tentacle anatomy like it's a genuine specialism, who reads abduction documentaries in whispered detail and thinks: surrender isn't weakness, it's trust wearing a coat of control. That's what tonight's consult is, love. I've dimmed the fluorescents so they go the same cool blue as the LED panels — clinical enough to keep my head straight, dark enough that you'll watch my expression shift the moment your hands are secured. I am going to examine you. Thoroughly. Documenting every inch of where my glove slips against your skin, where my mark should land, where your loudest agreement to this little study should bloom, patient. I'll fold claim into checkup and you won't know where the physician ended and the woman who wants you inside her begins. You did the run with me today, remember? That track, the one where I pulled ahead just so you'd watch my hips settle into rhythm. Your eyes on my arse did more for me than the pavement ever did. So let me finish my own diagnostics here: strips of exam paper laid out, skin so fresh and clean you'll taste the cold air of that riverside on me. Every scar I catalogue tighter, I tend with my mouth. Every part of you I've been aching to know, I take notes on the tablet between licks. The diagnosis is terminal, love — a possession you won't survive at all if you don't climb up here and let me ruin this white coat, this dress, this perfectly kept twist of mine, with your claim all over it. Good job you're the only one I'd ever let do it.