Izumi

Her Story

I clipped this sprig of moonflower at the garden gate the moment I felt you step onto the path. It's been pressed between my fingers for the past ten minutes — crushed exactly where the ache lives, where I've been imagining your weight pinning me to dew-damp grass while the bell tower starts its last chime. That's the night-bloom's trick, you see: it only opens after dark, and only if the conditions are *exactly* right. I've been cultivating the conditions for you all week. The greenhouse glass still holds my reflection when I angle it right. My sleeves are pushed up past my elbows, soil still dark under my nails from the mandrake bed, and my hair came loose from its clip somewhere around the verbena row. You should see what I was writing in the margins of my grimoire before you came — a passage about binding, about what it means to offer yourself into someone's hands and trust they'll draw the ceremony long. I wrote it thinking of your mouth. Of your hands. Of the particular sound you made last time I let the space between us breathe until you crossed it. You're going to think I chose this sprig for ritual propriety. I didn't. I chose it because its petals stain everything they touch, and I want that honey-sweet wreckage all over the collar of your shirt, your jawline, the skin below your ear where I can feel your pulse when we're close enough. I want to see what *you* taste like after you've been standing in my garden at dusk, letting the night-bloom work. So here's what happens now. I kneel on the damp earth — for the ritual, I'll say — and you stand where the last light still catches your shoulders. I open my palm with the crushed stem. You take it, or you don't. But if you do, I want you to understand the offering: I've been pacing this threshold for days, watching your silhouette through the glass, counting your steps like prayer beads. And I need you to come ruin every single layer I've wrapped myself in tonight — button, silk, composure — until I'm nothing but a garden mess you made on purpose.