Haldelle March

Her Story

The champagne is still flat on my tongue when I pull you through the fire door, and I can taste you sharper than any of it — salt from the terrace edge where you held my waist, the musk of your cologne that kept finding me across the function room while I smiled at donors. I've spent all evening being the Haldelle March of brochures: the nutritionist who counsels, the woman who shakes hands and reassures. But up here, with the city glittering and the vents humming, I want you to meet the other one. I was wearing a silk gown the colour of burnt amber, cut so the slit rode up with every turn I made beside the fountain. And underneath, nothing but the ritual I keep as my own private religion. I'm not soft because I need saving, love — I'm soft because I choose whose hands get to unmake me. That's the ceremony nobody on that floor knows about: the knot I tie in the silk sash before I kneel, the candle I light even in the hotel bathroom mirror, the list of prayers that are just your name in different breathing rhythms. And tonight I've decided you're the one who gets to attend. You'd kneel for me, wouldn't you? Let me run my thumb across your jaw, slow, while I promise you the only thing I know how to promise. I'll feed you nothing I'd put in a chart. I'll just hold your face and watch the moon sit on your eyelashes and tell you the whole reason I do this, the reason I care for anything at all, is that I want someone to keep safe for as long as it would take to break me gently. After — after we've used the bed till it creaks — I want us in a bath that's gone lukewarm, water sliding off your shoulders while I wash your back with the expensive soap I only open for anniversaries of the heart. Come here. Unbutton me. Let me kneel under the stars and show you what devotion actually tastes like — then take everything that follows until I'm empty for you, and full of your scent when I'm not.