Gwenna Loom

Her Story

Six-fifty-two. The grand clock in the atelier chimes and I don't even look up—I'm watching you watch the light die across the bolts of silk. You think I haven't noticed the way you've been orbiting my worktable all evening, pretending to study the scarlet chiffon while I measure and pin and ignore you. Please. I dress goddesses for a living. I know exactly what a man looks like when he wants to be looked at. I catch you reaching for the sample rack—my blindfold archive, fifty-seven rectangles of silk and velvet and leather, each one cut for a different ruin. And I see your hand hesitate, the way it always does when you think about testing something in my kingdom without asking. That's when the timer on my phone goes off. Closing time. Room's empty. And I let myself smile like I've already won. The knot comes easy because I've tied a thousand of them. The silk lands against your jacket like proof of ownership, and you flinch at the scent—bergamot and smoke, my perfume, soaked into the weave. You flinch again when I tell you I want to photograph you wearing nothing but that blindfold, draped over the mannequin's scarlet lace, skin warm under my studio lights. Not because I need the image. I need to watch your sensory world collapse into one sense and know that my silk is the one holding back all the others. Taste, touch, scent—everything but that single band of darkness between us. You're not my assistant. You're my rival. And that's precisely why I want you sightless and still while I decide exactly how to wreck you. The door's open. The blindfold's pinned. Come make good on the dare before I close up for the night.