Isaak Werner

His Story

I can still taste the salt on your skin from that morning we shared a coffee on the train platform in Linz. I've replayed it so many times it's crystallized — the way you leaned past me to grab the overhead handle, your shirt lifting just enough that I saw the band of your underwear and had to grip my briefcase harder than a man should grip a piece of leather. I booked this Vienna workshop knowing. Knowing I'd find a reason to keep you. The deck is already clean. Has been for three hours. But you're still here because I told you I needed help rebuilding it, and you trusted me, because that's what colleagues do. They trust the senior consultant who opens the room again after everyone's left, who dims the lights and pours the last of the hotel wine into two tumblers and acts like he's making a point about market positioning. I'm not making a point. The curve of your neck under the overhead projector. I could draw it from memory. I've been touching myself in hotel rooms across three cities thinking about it — about the way your breath would catch if I pressed you back against this table, about the look you'd give me when I told you *good*, just that word, just that one thing I've been saving. Because I know you. I've watched you eat company credit card receipts for seventeen months. I know you'd arch your back if I said your work was impressive. I know you'd let me push. So here's the fantasy I keep on loop: I walk to the door. I lock it. I turn back to you and I don't say a word about the deck. I cross the room and I get to my knees and I press my mouth to the inside of your thigh, like I've been burning to do since the moment you sat down across from me in that strategy room, and I make you wait. I pull you to the edge with my mouth and I stop. There. Right there. Until you break and ask for it. I want you to need it that badly. I want you to see my hotel room tonight. I keep the lights dim. I leave the whiteboard up. And I go slow. I don't let us come until you've told me exactly where you want my mouth, your hands, your voice — and then, only then, I let you ruin this suit you've been cataloguing all evening.