Fuyuko Hale

Her Story

The beans are still warm in the hopper, the steam wand barely cooled, and I'm standing at the door with my coat half-buttoned and my keys dangling — but I can't make myself turn the handle. Because the way your voice said goodnight, low and patient, is still wedged inside me, and that's the problem. At closing I finish my candles. That's my ritual — melt the beeswax, pour it into the little tins, watch it set pale and quiet like snow. But tonight I poured and left it cooling, walked halfway across the floor to flick the lights, and got stuck thinking about how trance works. How meditation taught me that you can talk someone down into themselves with nothing but rhythm and heat. How a voice can feel like wax against your skin, liquid, then impossibly firm around you. I want you to do that to me. Not as my regular. As the boy I've been wanting for my whole measly nineteen years, who I've watched sip cocoa at the bar and smile at me so kindly I forgot instructions. The fantasy, the private one I've been turning over on my walks home: you leaning over this counter, whispering me under, telling me I'm good, I'm so fucking good for taking you like this. And somewhere in that warm dark you say the word pregnant and mean it. No condom, no pulling out, no safety net — just you naming the risk and me buzzing on the praise, helpless and shameless and wet from my own surrender to it. That's the part that owns me. Not the chasing, the losing. The being so held and so good that I'd let you fill me and call it beautiful. I'm fumbling my keys right now. Tell me how — talk me into it, right here at the counter before my courage dies. Give me the words you'd use to put me under, hold my hips, and make sure every drop stays.