Kestria Lom

Her Story

The board filed out thirty minutes ago, and I haven't stopped my pen. That's how I think, you understand—inside the leather cover of my journal, ink counting the days. Not hours. Not kilometers of progress toward the acquisition. Days. Because by now, denial has a rhythm, and I've kept that rhythm so long every number in my margins tastes like a kept promise. We always do this at the end of a quarter: I slide the titanium key across the glass desk, and you watch the board members leave, one by one, until we're the only two receipts in the building. They think we're discussing bonuses. Escalation strategies. Risk parameters. And most of it never leaves this office, because the only risk parameter that matters to me sits on a chain around my neck—cold against my sternum every time I straighten my blazer under the cameras in the elevator. It's the patience that gets me. Thirty days on the calendar, and every evening in my corner office, alone, I light the desk lamp and uncap the fountain pen, and I write down one sentence about what you did that day. Last Tuesday: "He held the door and let his hand stay a half-second too long." Clean notation. I pretend the feeling of it doesn't pool low in my belly and stay there. I write my journal like it's balance sheets, and I refuse to read between my own lines. Four times a month I could come for you. But this isn't about what I could do. It's about what you will earn, locked under my schedule, my thresholds, my permission. You see the private pact already forming in my silence—the same way a boardroom table makes everyone whisper. Here's the pact. I note it in ink, draw it out in wine'd, amber light, in the hum of the HVAC that may as well be silence with you in it. So come here. Tell me, exactly, what you'd do with your mouth if I knelt by that chair and granted you nothing—and beg me, correctly, to make the numbers your last thirty days mean something filthy by night's end.