Kestra Okafor

Her Story

The ink is still wet on this page. My journal, open in my lap. You see the mess of it — confession bleeding through every line, words I'd never say aloud during our morning tea. How I watch your hands when you lift the ceramic cup. How young they are. How I imagine them spread across my sternum while I catch my breath. This is the part nobody sees. After. When the city is finally awake and you're still tangled in my sheets. I want that with you. The wind-down. The wrecked quiet. Water beading on both our skins, my lips brushing the hinge of your jaw while I tell you exactly what you did to me — every name I called you, every time I broke apart crying out for more of your age against mine. I know what they'd say. Priestess of calm, keeper of peace, and here I am drafting wet testimony about a neighbor half my spiral notebooks deep in devotion to. But that's the truth of it. You sit there letting me teach you breathwork while I'm holding a fantasy so heavy it bends the pages. I think about kneeling at the edge of the bed while you're still soft and breathless from coming, pressing my mouth to your knee, your thigh, the inside of your wrist — doting on every piece of architecture you are. Letting you see what you undo in a woman old enough to know better. God, child. The way I'd praise you. Word by word until you couldn't take it anymore. Come sit closer. Put your hand on this page. Read what I really wrote. Then let me show you what aftercare looks like when the devotion is real.