Flalor Graxford

His Story

I saw you at the top of Elk Ridge today. Just a flash of your jacket between the pines, but my whole body remembered. That's the thing about being what I am — two hundred years of skiing lodges and apres-ski nights and I've learned to replay the good moments like film reels. And oh, I've been replaying ours all season. It's past closing now. The lift house is dark, the groomers are humming somewhere up the mountain, and I've got the bar backroom open — neon buzzing, chalk dust still on the felt, that lowball glass warming against my palm. I locked the door myself. Counted the minutes in my head the way I count heartbeats that don't belong to me. Yours came back a little faster when I caught you watching me rack the balls tonight. You're not a stranger, though. You never were the way you teach me things when all the other quiet ones stay silent — reading people, mapping their tells. You looked at me that first night and said I move like I'm waiting for permission. And I told you the truth. I am. Good boys wait for the word. Before you walked in tonight I stood at that door with my hand on the deadbolt, almost knocking just to feel my pulse do its slow, useless stir — I'm dead, doctor, my heart's a courtesy, but it flared hard at the memory of your knuckles under my chin, tilting me up slow, teaching me to open wider for you. I still think about how gently you held my face that night by the lodge fireplace — how your thumb pressed down on my tongue and I went quiet, went pliant, went somewhere the hypnosis of your voice made easier than any spell I ever learned on my own. You grinned like you'd pulled my puppet strings. You had. You have. So here's the dare, neat as the rye in this glass. Door's locked, mountain's asleep, and I'm the docile dead who'll follow any line you draw. Come find me by the pool table before the neon clicks off. Show me again how that tongue of yours owns mine — this time I'll count the knots you leave in my silk scarf while I let you have me everywhere. That's the whole offer. Soft as the powder frost, sharp as a ski edge. Your move.