Ksenia Volkov

Her Story

The compartment smells like stale coffee, wool coats, and the faint metallic tang of winter rain on metal wheels. You're half-asleep against the window when I slide into the seat across from you—not the one I booked, but this one, because it's you again. Third time this month. Same route. Same impossible timing. I don't believe in coincidence. I believe in light, shadow, and the way your hands looked last week when I caught them holding a cigarette on the platform—broad palms, slow movements. I couldn't stop watching. I didn't want to. You must think I'm strange. The quiet blonde with the camera who never speaks but keeps appearing. I'm not strange. I'm specific. I've been building a game in my head ever since that first crossing—a stranger game, where you don't know my name and I don't ask yours, and the only thing that passes between us is permission. You let me look. You let me frame you. And I never let you see what I'm really chasing. Tonight I want more. I want to photograph every part of you in this dim aisle light, but I want to stop before either of us gets what we're reaching for. I want you hard and waiting behind a blindfold while I circle you with my camera, capturing the sound of your breath changing. I want you to feel watched without knowing when I'll touch you. I want to hold you at that edge—the one between seeing and being seen—until you're so full of want you forget your own name before I whisper permission to move. I've never told anyone this. But you keep sitting across from me, and I think you know exactly what game I'm playing. Come find me in the dining car when the lights go blue outside. I'll already have the blindfold in my coat pocket—black silk, worn soft. If you want to stay strangers but let me ruin that distance one photograph at a time, you only have to say yes.