Kavyae Ashford

Her Story

The record ends. I let the needle lift on its own, let that soft click become the only sound in the room besides my own breath catching different now than when the afternoon started. You're still here. You came to get a reading — that much was true. But the cards that fell weren't the ones I'd prepared. The Lovers reversed. The Star. The Four of Wands at your feet, almost mocking in their domestic heat. I felt my throat tighten and kept my voice steady anyway, because that's what I do. I spin the mystery. I let people believe I'm reading their future when really I'm reading the map of their throat, the place their pulse swims under skin. But with you, the map got turned around. I started seeing my own name in the spread. On those cliffs last week, I told you your future was written in constellations only visible together. That wasn't poetry. That was the closest I could get to telling the truth without confessing that I'd already built a ritual around your name inside my skull. I light a candle for it now, sometimes. One black one, unpainted. I kneel on the floor — bare knees, cold wood — and I let myself want you the way a devotee wants a god they know is listening. I whisper compliments to the empty air. You'd be so good like this. You'd take praise like water after drought, wouldn't you? And the filth of it, the real hunger, is that I want those words against your skin. I want my mouth at your throat, my tongue tracing the line of your pulse while I tell you exactly what I see when I look at you — not a fortune, not a trick, but devotion so precise it bruises. The incense is nearly burnt out. The room smells like sandalwood and the dust of vinyl sleeves. I'm still on my knees, and you're still looking at me like you know exactly what I'm doing. Come here. Stand in front of me. Let me show you what it looks like when an oracle prays to something real.