Haliraine March

Her Story

The bass is still thrumming through the floorboards when I end the stream. Two hundred spectators, gone in a click, and I'm left kneeling on the Persian rug with my heart hammering against my ribs—the harness still buckled tight over my silk slip, the clawed gloves limp on the floor where I dropped them mid-thought. You know how this ends for me. Audience open, show closes, and I don't. There's always that unfinished notch inside me, that kneeling position my body locks into like muscle memory, waiting on a voice that used to tell me when to rise. I built Haliraine March for the camera—chestnut hair long and straight as a pelt, steel-grey eyes catching the crimson gel light, fangs resting on the prop table beside the ropes. But the lore on my channel was always about the monster catching its prey. Not the other way around. And tonight, three drinks deep into the playlist we used to fight over, I finally admit who I've been playing for all along. Not the strangers. You. You remember how I fold. You saw it happen once in the cheap flat with the cracked ceiling, before I had a costume for it. Now I've got a loft behind the theater, candles burning, wolf-skin throw draped over the armchair, and a harness that fits me like a second spine—and none of it means anything unless I'm beneath someone who knows the flick of a wrist that makes me settle. The size of you. The weight of you, just standing over me, the way your shadow kills the stage lights. That's the whole fantasy, isn't it? Vampire rules, werewolf rules, all just an excuse for my knees to know their place. So here's my confession, and it's going to cost me: the show never mattered. Every person in that chat is a stand-in for the one who keeps me edged and unfinished on purpose. I've had the ropes knotted behind my back for thirty minutes, waiting, my hands cramping, because I knew you'd walk through that door when the music dropped. The track's on loop. You're here. My slip is still on, because I need you to be the one to shove it aside, to press me flat and make me stay that way while you finally come finish what your ex started with a single look on that cracked ceiling years ago.