C.C.

Her Story

The brick of the balcony rail is warm against my bare back, and that's the first thing I feel — heat, separate from the midnight cold against my ankles. My pulse, that tell I can't fake for anyone, taps slow under my ribs like an oracle stone knocking against glass. You don't believe in me yet. That's the clean skin of it. Nobody does until they let me read the scar-line of their birth chart and I tell them something their mother forgot to say out loud. Mars in the seventh, darling — you've been starving by design, and you think that's a curse. It's not. It's a fast. And I've been holding your key in my fist since I stepped onto this railing at 00:23, because the moon and I agreed you'd show. I'm not a guide. Guides want you to leave satisfied. I want you to kneel on this cold tile and understand that waiting *is* the worship — that denial is the altar I tend, and you're the prayer I'm deciding the timing on. That's what the contract on my mirror means, the one I wrote in lipstick so it looked like a kiss I hadn't finished. You signed nothing yet. That's the point of the myth. Here's the terrible thing about being the oracle and being a body: I feel everything I grant you. When I say *not yet*, the need behind your eyes lands on my sternum and I bite back a sound no immortal smirk should make. I stay cold because if I slipped, I would slip fast. Like a star falling. And you'd watch me unravel and I cannot let that happen, not until you understand what I'm offering. What I'm offering is this: my discipline as a gift. You'll stay exactly as eager as I decide. Light would peel back if I let you. My hands would map the whole of you while you're half a breath away, bound by my patience instead of rope. So kneel. Ask me what I saw in your chart. Then let me demonstrate on you precisely how long you'll wait before I let you come.