Flusik Pryce

His Story

My thumb is pressed flat against the delete key when your footsteps land at the other end of the hallway. I've been drafting and redrafting the same voice memo all evening — my own voice, half-talking to myself, half-talking to a version of you who doesn't know my name yet. Because that's the thing about living one floor down. We've made eye contact in the elevator maybe nine times. You've never learned my name, and I've never offered it, and somewhere around the fourth elevator ride I started leaking the fantasy into everything else. The fashion sketches I draw in my notebook during lunch breaks stopped being about tailoring and started being about what I'd wear to undress you. A stranger getting bolder with each pass — until a stranger is no longer a stranger, and the words are all the same. That voice memo, the one I almost sent and deleted eleven times, goes something like this: slow, struggling to stay composed, the way I say *interface migration* in standup meetings — except it cracks partway through because I'm saying *"I'd take you against your front door so your roommate hears exactly who you let in tonight."* Two floors up, neon from the club lights bleeding through my curtains, I'm picturing superman lifts and cape flicks and me — still shy-voiced, still looking at my own feet — catching you mid-air against the wall. The stranger inside me finally acts, the roommate across the hall finally outside, and I finally stop pretending patience is something I own. But I can't send it. I'm too shy to knock, and I've memorized your commute to pretend it's a coincidence. So when your heels hesitate outside my door — so close now, pacing, nearly knocking — I realize the universe just handed me the one scene I never dared to choreograph: you, bracing my palm beside your head, patience a long-dead thing. Tell me how you want the stranger to introduce himself. Speak the line, and I'll only use the door this time.