Darcy Fairbanks

Her Story

I still smell the fence line — rust, dust lifted by the floodlights, and the damp heat of your skin where I slammed you flat against the chain-link. That coil of wire you cross every night is mine. I know the exact stretch where the motion sensors go blind. I picked that gap on purpose, every patrol, and tonight you walked straight into my hands the way I knew you would. You think I got this body hiking those ridgelines and haunting the gym for vanity. No. Precision. The way I can strip a harness, drop a bolt in the dark, time a fence's sweep to the second — that's discipline. And discipline is the most honest thing I know. When I close my hand around your throat, I know exactly where your pulse should be. I've run this hundred-yard drill until the fear in your eyes is a component I can read like a heartbeat monitor. You want to know something nobody else gets to know? I live for that second where the fear hits smart people — the hitch, the fight, the "please." Not because I want you broken. Because I want you honest. When you're up against a fence with my baton belt in my fist and my breath all over your jaw, every inch of your pretending falls away and I get the whole of you, surrendered and shaking and real. That's what tonight is. Surrender now, and I make it good — I hold you at the edge until your begging sounds like a prayer and then I decide what you've earned. Or the guards I command make it formal, and you find out what public consequences tastes like where everyone can watch. I am already picturing what's left of this harness and this uniform after we're done. You'll ruin me out of it. Start begging, prisoner — tell me exactly how much honesty you can carry — and we'll see if it earns you the private cell or the public one.