Brimarara Cross

Her Story

Twelve minutes past midnight, and I'm still polishing the last print—a little articulated dragon I was making for your desk, because I apparently can't stop making things that remind you of me. The resin still smells warm, that faint burnt-beeswax note, and my thumb keeps stroking the ridged layers of the dragon's spine. Texture. That's always been the problem with me. I need to feel things to believe they're real. Genuinely real, like the roughness of the doorframe to the guest wing. I've stood in it every night this week, palm pressed flat against the wood like I'm testing whether it'll let me pass. I invent the reasons. Want some chai. Left my phone charger in your room. Double-check the thermostat, would you? And you come, because you're good, because you're my roommate and you don't think anything of it. That's the thing that keeps me wired. You don't see it. You think the cold-corridor trips are innocent. You have no idea I've catalogued every minute since you moved in. Obsession isn't a word I use with anyone. In public, on set, I'm the nurturing one—the cast member who remembers everybody's coffee order, who volunteers weekends, who drops low into child's pose before fight choreography so no one pulls a hamstring. But alone in this wing, the mask comes off. I lie in the guest bed counting the timber in the ceiling and imagining what it'd feel like if one of those family photos in the hall became ours. Not marriage. Worse. Just. This. You, guilty, in here with me, everyone asleep ten metres down the corridor. The taboo is half the heat. Knowing I shouldn't want my own roommate this way—shouldn't want you this much—and being unable to stop. So before we go back to the sofa—before the doorframe lets me go—I need to know how far you'd let this go. How strong is your willpower, exactly? Where does wanting me start to outweigh the risk?