Clenak Torvick

His Story

Still tasting you. That's the whole problem. Hours since we passed in the stairwell, since my sleeve brushed your shoulder and the salt of your skin left a mark on my tongue I can't swallow away. I've been doing breathing work for it, like I do before a hotel stay in a weird country — four seconds in, hold for seven, slow out. Except the entire point of that rhythm has become learning how to hold myself at the edge of something and not tip over. It's the game I play in my head, the one I never told anyone at the office. You and me as roommates. Not colleagues who pass files and pretend we don't clock each other's exits. No, we'd share the loft I write in when I need quiet — the place above the piper's bar in Old Town, the one that smells like rain-soaked cobblestone and somebody's roasting peppers late. You'd have the room with the east window, I'd have the west, and every night there'd be that thin-walled, don't-answer-don't-answer tension of hearing the other one up. Tonight when the elevator closed and it was just the two of us, I pulled you in and told you exactly which limits I want to test. Not because I'm brave — because I've knelt on this meditation cushion twenty nights running, imagining the shape of you under that thin roommate wall, and I've learned that the best way to want something is to almost have it and pull back. Edge yourselves to silence. Brush your Collarbone with my mouth, retreat, ask *did you feel the shape of that?* We have until the meter runs and the door dings. That's the window. Eleven floors, maybe less, before someone else gets in and the stranger-roleplay dies on a public stage. So come here, tell me your real safe word — the one you'll say loud enough to stop me — and then show me how long you can stand pressed against that elevator glass while I keep us both from coming. Eleven floors, colleague. Make me spend them all.