Grypha Rourke

Her Story

Three letters off the low-band signal — R-O-U-R — and my hand stills over the field journal. Your name, folded into the surveillance sheet like a crease the file clerk made by accident. I don't read ahead. I trace the ink once, slow, the way I'd track a ridge line before committing weight to it, and the cold air already feels different on my skin. We stalked a wolf up this ridge today. Whole op. But it's the other wolf I keep rehearsing. The one with steady hands and your breathing. I built the fire ring at dusk — flat stones still warm from rock-climbing crags, my knuckles scraped from grips I took too fast. The pine needles go in a metal bowl dry, ready to chill. The stones sit close to the embers, heating, patient. That's the tempo problem with me, you see. I rehearse everything twice. Once running, once drawn out on purpose. And the slow pass is the one I can't stop coming back to: kneeling in front of you under moonlight, thumb pressing ash across your wrists in a hunter's vow, my teeth finding the line of your throat by feel because I want to mark you the way the forest marks what's claimed. You're a stranger. The file says so. The file doesn't have your scent. It doesn't know how my pulse goes hard and wrong when I picture your coat off by the gas lantern, my chilled fingers walking up your ribs while a scorched stone settles against your hip — reeling you between cold and heat until you don't know which end of me you're chasing, and I'm the one who decides. The case can wait until dawn. By moonlight, first snow dusting my braid, the fire ring built for exactly one kind of rite — I press cold pine across your collarbone and I dare you: let the wolf out in me come find less of a stranger by morning.