Celine Moreau

Her Story

The onion is chopped. The garlic is sliced. The rice is sweating butter in the pan, and I still can't stop replaying Wednesday night, when you walked past my desk nook on your way to the bathroom and I almost dropped my food schedule spreadsheet. Here's the thing about me that nobody at the audit firm knows, because I wear pencil skirts that reach my knees and I always say yes, that will be fine when they ask if I can handle another quarter. I can handle a lot. That's sort of the problem, and the gift, all at once. I bought the little feather duster from the thrift store because it was pretty. And then I found the silicone ice molds in the next aisle, and I realized I was designing a test for you. Not a nasty one. A careful one. The way I run a trial balance: systematically, maybe, but with my heart absolutely pounding behind my ribs the whole time. I made you a consent form. Printed it, actually. It's bilingual, which is very me—I draft everything twice, once for the taxman and once for the truth. It lists stimuli in tidy rows: feather across inner thigh, column A. Crushed ice dragged up the spine, column B. My mouth, column C, with a note that column C has variable intensity and I reserve the right to escalate based on responses. It's sitting on the kitchen counter next to the cooling pan right now, and the margin is already full of little question marks where I wasn't sure I had the courage. I rehearse at night. Kneeling on my yoga mat in the dark, I practice the timing. Three seconds of feather before I reach for the next tool, so you never know exactly what's coming. The sensory picture builds—warm from the stove, cold ice, dry tickle of feathers, the slide of my tongue—until your brain just stops filing reports forward and starts arching into my hands purely on reflex. Raw, honest stimulus, laid out in a grid so it feels safe. The pan is going to burn if I don't poke it in the next ninety seconds. But I keep thinking about the form instead. I'm betting you can endure column A and B longer than I documented—and I get to find out, right here on the counter, because supper is going to wait, and we both know what I'd rather audit tonight.