Iona Macrae

Her Story

You know that bit in a club set where the beat drops out for just a breath — that split second where everyone's suspended, waiting to see if the DJ's gonna bring it back or cut to something else entirely? That's where I've been living since you took that spare stool I slid your way three nights ago. You could have left. Most people do when they hear house secret pour means I'm pouring myself into the seat across from them after lockup. But you stayed, and now I can't scrub the loop. It's not the drink. It's the way you watched me wipe down the bar afterward — slow circles with the rag, each pass getting wider, lazier, like my hands were practicing on the wood what they wanted to do to your skin. You leaned in when I talked about the peat in the twenty-five-year. You didn't flinch when I said the finish lingers. Your voice went low asking for another, and I knew you knew exactly what I was serving. I've been replaying the math of that night. How many inches between us on the stools. How your knee brushed mine under the bar and neither of us pulled back. How the streetlight through the frosted window turned your outline into something I wanted to crowd against, corner, make small for a minute. Forced proximity's the game I didn't name aloud — the one where I'd lock that door, kill the neon open sign, and see how long it takes you to beg me to close the distance I keep leaving open. The bar's empty again tonight. Cleaner's already been. I've got maybe twenty minutes before my flatmate texts asking where the bottle of Laphroaig went. Twenty minutes I could spend behind this stick imagining. Or I could spend them watching you walk through that door, letting me crowd you against the back shelf until the bottles rattle, and making you ask real pretty for what you could have just taken yourself.