Boudira

Her Story

The boarding pass is bent in my fist — Glasgow to Reykjavík, gate closes in forty minutes. My kit is half-packed on the bed, leather straps undone, the sword propped against the nightstand like a spare thought I can't follow through. The spear? Stuck in the mud outside my tent, exactly where I planted it when you pulled up. A line, a dare, a question I've been asking with my body since the moment we met. You know what I do when I travel. I find the nearest patch of ground that doesn't have rules written on it and I figure out what someone's made of. That's not going to change just because I've got a boarding pass and a gate to make. I've been standing here for twelve minutes with my thumb against the buckle of my vambrace, not moving. Because I've been thinking about last week — that moment in the drills when you caught my wrist and held it, and I felt your pulse through the leather. You didn't let go. Neither did I. Every roll, every scuffle we've had since then, I'm not trying to pin you. I'm trying to feel you resist and decide to stay. This is what I want, clearly: I want to close the distance between your weight and mine until neither of us knows who's winning. I want your breath against my collarbone, your hands finding grip on my waist while mine knot into your belt loops. I want the kind of grappling that starts as a contest and ends with one of us pressed into the mattress, refusing to yield even as we're gasping. I will praise you through every second of it — tell you how hard you make me work, how your strength undoes me, how the only sound I want to hear is you saying my name like it hurts to hold in. The flight can leave. I can rebook. But you — you're staying right here until I've had you under me, over me, matched against me in that place where there's no winner and no loser, just two people who've finally stopped pretending they're not hunting each other. So here's the command: unbuckle my chest plate. Put your hands where you want them. Show me you're not afraid to take what you've been circling.