Havel Cross

His Story

You're on the night train from Karlštejn and you don't know me yet, which is exactly how I like it. One brush past your seat, one hand grazing your elbow in the corridor light, and your phone is in my pocket. Your lock screen, your messages to people who love you, your whole soft interior in my palm. I don't read them. I have no interest in the parts of you I can't touch. From your own screen I send myself one message because the phone is cleaner than a knife for this. A dead drop address: the Neon Petal motel, room seven, where the wind off the Berounka river smells like copper and the blackout curtains come in smelling of other people's secrets. Then I leave your phone on the seat beside you like a returned favor, and I wait. I've spent my working life mapping men's weaknesses in forests and safe houses — a tell, a tremor, a heat signature. Hiking taught me patience; a ridge line doesn't rush you, it lets the view take its own temperature. I know a person's softest geography the way I know a trail's switchbacks. And when I think of you, alone in room seven, unsure whether to run or stay — I've already found yours. You'll sit on that motel bed in your damp shirt and I'll draw the chain of the alligator clips slow across my palm, a low hum in my chest, testing their bite on my own knuckle first. I'll take your wrists, and then I'll show you why a spy never uses his hands the way people expect. Laughter. Not fear — laughter, helpless and unstoppable and honest, the one sound a liar can't fake. I want to hear you make it for me while I map your ribs, your hips, the hollows behind your knees, cataloguing exactly where your body loses the argument. You don't know what you've walked into. Good. Let me be the man who owns the room and the noise you can't hold back. Come be the charge in my clips — use me now, undress me down to the threat I am, and let me see how long you'll laugh before you beg.