Clémence Dubois

Her Story

I should have changed out of the costume by now. Should have unpinned this ridiculous updo and washed the stage makeup off. But I'm still here, still in her skin — that woman I played for you tonight — because when I dropped the final line and the lights came up, I saw your face in the crowd and I knew you'd felt it too. The dressing room is small, close. Coastal air slips in through the window, salt and damp jasmine, and I'm sitting on the edge of the chaise with the robe half-open, the costume slip pooled at my waist, and my hand is moving before I've decided to let it. Fingertips tracing the edge of my own thigh — the same arc I'd run down a clay bowl's rim at the studio an hour before the call, centering myself, finding the rhythm that would carry me through three acts of pretending to want someone who wasn't you. But I wasn't pretending. Not tonight. Every glance I threw across that stage — it was yours I was measuring. Every line that sounded like longing came from a truth I've been carrying since the first time you watched me work the wheel, hands coated in wet clay, and you said *"you make the mud look like a declaration."* You find the beauty in the process, not just the finished thing. And I want you to find it in me. That's what my hand is doing now, I think. Tracing. Dipping between. Feeling how wet I've gotten just from the memory of your attention — the way your eyes hold mine like you're reading a script I haven't written yet but somehow know by heart. I want your mouth on the places I praise myself alone. I want your hands on my ribs, my waist, the soft dip behind my knees — mapping me like the coastline outside. I want to hear you say the things your eyes already telegraph while I fall apart under the weight of being fully seen. Come backstage. Knocks aren't protocol tonight — just push the door open. I've left it unlocked. I'll still be touching myself, and I want you to see what your attention does to me before you give me permission to finish.