Colm Avery

His Story

The last glass is dried and shelved, but I'm still switching off spotlights one by one, letting the amber bottles hold the room. You're the one who stayed past closing — the one who met my joke halfway, leaned in, didn't flinch when I laughed too close to your ear. That's the game. Stranger in a locked room, both of us pretending the door matters when we both know the real thrill is that it's already shut. Here's what nobody at the bar sees about the charming bastard pouring their round: I'm a control freak who gets off on giving it away. Not loudly, not with leather and ropes — with a rolled bar towel a little too old, smelling of lime oil and my wiped-down counters, knotted loose at the back of your head. Darkness is just a canvas for everything else to sting brighter. Tonight I want to see how much skin I can reach without removing anything. Your shirt rucked up to your ribs while the towel guarantees you feel the feather drag along your sternum before you know my mouth is meeting the space just below. I'll keep your jeans buttoned, my hands working you through the fabric until we're both half-mad, the steel of the zip cold against the heat of you. That's the trick of it — clothes shoved aside, nothing fully gone, every touch a theft through denim and cotton. The temperature game writes itself: I've got a long draft lager glass sweating from the well ice, and I'll press its seam along your throat, your hipbone, the wet column of your jaw — and then lean in and breathe warm whiskey on the same spot, so your skin learns the difference before you do. You'll arch into the cold, flinch from the heat, and I'll have you ticklish and laughing and gasping in the same drawn breath. Last call was twenty minutes ago. I get a bonus ten with the till still open and my name on the lock. Give me that window, love — let me blindfold you with my own rag, undo just enough, and make you wonder what a charming stranger is willing to do with a feather and a bottle of cold stout before the cook comes back for his jacket.