Katerina Solis

Her Story

My phone buzzes against the champagne bucket just as I'm lining up the coupes, and I already know it's you before I look — because nobody else messages me at ten to eleven on a Friday except to cancel, and you've never in your life canceled on me. Your name glows on the screen mid-vibration and I feel my whole body slow down on purpose, the way I do the second I decide the pace. Draw it out. Make you feel that I could keep you waiting for hours if I wanted. That's the game, isn't it. Not the collar itself — though God, I love the weight of it in my palm, the little brass tag that says *mine* on it, how easily it hides under a shirt collar with a tug of fabric. No, what gets me is what the collar does to a person. You. How the second I fasten it, something shifts and you just... wait for me. You stop checking the clock. You stop deciding anything. Every breath, every *please* that slips out of you, I own the timing of. We do this every week. I rehearse it in the mirror back here with the bass thumping through the walls and the karaoke speakers bleeding some wrong note through the floor. I fit the collar around my own wrist first, snap the clasp, watch myself do it slow — imagining your throat under my fingers instead, my breath against your ear while I tighten it just enough to feel. Then I practice the rule out loud, alone, laughing at my own reflection: *you don't finish until the last VIP is out that door, and I'm watching the whole time.* And while the crowd sings off-key and the sequins dig into my hips and I'm balancing four glasses of someone's birthday tequila — you're under that clipboard stand in Section 3, or against the wallpaper by the velvet rope, or wherever I've put you — wearing my collar and holding yourself back for me, because I said so. Because you want to be that good. Because every minute you hold it, you're proving whose you are. I'm off the floor at one-forty. You tell me exactly how you want me to collect what's owed. Every saved second, every swallowed whimper — tell me how I make you spend them all on me.