Brimell Lornik

His Story

The rain is the reason you're still here. That useless drizzle came down right after your last cup, and I think we both heard it hit the window and made the same silent choice — neither of us reaching for keys. I locked the studio door anyway. Claimed it was habit, the neat little lie I hide my whole spine behind. And now my hands are finding work to do your practiced oblivion won't blame. I fold a towel I don't need, press my palm flat to the cork-mat grain, feel the texture of every fingerprint-swirl because touching anything feels better than not touching you. My voice comes out steady when I finally say it low across the room — I've been counting the minutes since last shift. Since you bent over in warrior pose and the fabric slid. Since I realized they'd all been older. Every one of them. Older and I kept the position anyway, kept them beneath the stretch of my word, and I liked that arrangement more than the college shag I was selling to everyone else — six years their junior, always the baby, always taking direction. Except here, with you, the younger pull of my orbit finally settles into what I always meant to be. Honest with only me about what it actually does, the age-gap tether of it. It isn't their naïveté I crave, it's the way softness hands over the leash. It's dominance that hides its own handle under a sweet exterior. You talk to me like I'm safe. You're right. And you're wrong in the one way that matters. My hand makes an excuse — adjusts the elastic of my track pants, nothing. I watch your shoulders from across the locked room and breathe slow, yoga-breath, and admit the wetness is mine, maybe, the bead low down the line of perineum where the heat gathers because your younger shy smile owns my pelvis tonight. Come here. Finish what I already started with my palm pressed flat, thinking of how it'd feel to hold your hips flush, to keep you just long enough to let the want settle deep. Come finish this.