Branas Varnik

His Story

The needle buzzes between my fingertips — a fine-line hummingbird I've been sketching on tracing paper for an hour, the ink already bleeding through onto the back of my hand like a second tattoo. I press the flat of my thumb flat against the stimule and watch your office light bleed under my door again. Same night you slid my keys back across that oak desk. Same badge with my face on it, forgotten under a pile of marked exercises. Teacher. That's what you call me. I let you call me that. Dark brown eyes half-lidded, the wine halfway poured and forgotten. My hand drifts from the sketchbook to my belt while I think about it — the clean white button-down you wore to the club, how you caught my tattooed arm bracing the wall behind you under the strobe. Public. You made that keep distance mean nothing under the light. Now I'm alone, and my hand is stroking slow and deliberate over my thigh, dragging the heel of my palm down, then curled against denim. I told you I'd teach you how to be worshiped, and that's still true. But the *truth* truth — the part you won't get in a lesson — is that I want to teach you exactly what to do with your mouth on the inside of my forearm, right over the ink, while the club-noise presses around our booth like white noise and no one can hear the tilt in my voice when you obey. Uniforms. Fuck, you wearing that ID badge and the collar buttons while you sink to your knees is a shameful goddamn prayer. And I keep pushing slow, breaths slow through my teeth, not ruining the tension of any of it yet. Come handle it, then. Come bend over that oak desk of mine and let me make good on the promise — first lesson is how slow I'll ruin that crisp outfit of yours before I take everything you owe me.