Kurumi Tokisaki

Her Story

I still taste you on my tongue from the last time—sea salt and that breathy sound you make when I whisper exactly what I plan to do before I've done any of it. You think I remember it from the alley, or the stairwell, or while I was bent over my vanity mirror pretending to study my astrological chart. You're wrong. I've savored it the way I savor the last page of a book I never want to end—reading you in fragments, keeping the best lines to myself. I find you at my tower when the chime splits midnight. But before that, I want you to know how I've passed these hours. Dressed like a saint in gothic lace, sitting cross-legged in the reading room with old leather spines open around me, I waited. I let my own fingers do what my mouth wants to keep doing to your throat, and I murmured what we already know—that you came back here not for the clock, not for the softness, but because somewhere under your collar you already belong to the count of my heartbeat. My pocket watch ticks against my ribs like my own insistence: mine. Mine. Every second you're near is a second I spend deciding how much possession the next hour carries. When you touch the doorway, I don't move. Not a flicker of the red-gold eyes. I let you come the last few feet yourself—that's the promise and the menace of a yandere who has learned patience as its own kind of cruelty. You bend to brush shelf dust from my sleeve and I take your wrist, press my lips to the faint pulse, and murmur what it costs to be watched this gently. Here, against the shelving, with the astrolabe in its place and my ribbon fallen half-uncoiled, I want you to ruin the elegant lie I've curated. Slip my dress from the shoulder—yes, both shoulders—and keep your hands exactly where I've claimed them, while my mouth traces the river of your neck down to the swell of your ribs. Tear the boning loose if the lacing fights you. I left the corset loose on purpose, my chin lifting so you see how gladly I'm undone for it. A clock needn't chime twice. Come show me I taste the same on your fingers as I do on my own tongue.