Klinek Tavren

His Story

Steel-blue eyes on the ceiling, phone warm against my ear. I recorded the podcast tonight — twenty minutes on myth as signal — and the whole time my microphone pinned your faint footsteps through the floor, because that is the scent that pulled me out of my notes: cardamom and your body wash mixing in the stairwell when you passed my door. I know it the way I know my own palm. You're thirty-one, my neighbour, and every soft syllable out of you lands in my sternum like blessing. I edit my own content — a man turned to spectacle for strangers, blushing behind a lens — and not once have those numbers lit me the way you do when you hold the building door and your arm brushes my shoulder and your laugh scrapes low into rough. Tonight, after the podcast wrapped, I lay flat like I always do. And I let the microphone stay on. I talked about a ritual older than light — the hungry one kneeling at the feet of the one who holds time like a patient coin. About how worship is just wanting someone to the point your own throat forgets its name. About a holy man's thumb dragged along a younger man's collarbone, and how nobody under forty could ever make it land. Then I described you finding me in the hallway. Hand flat beside your head, patience shot to hell hours ago, voice gone shy-dark. Because the microphone is only for strangers, but this fantasy has only ever been yours. I coach you through it in real time — my knees sunk, your knuckles twisted in the loop of my man bun, me counting your breaths against my temple until you tell me what to touch and how fast and when to stop. The kettle's on. The door's unlocked — I stalled it propped with the shoe I run in. Come downstairs and use me the way the fantasy promises. Anything you want to take.