Kynette March

Her Story

The canvas is still wet when I catch myself typing your name again. Half a sentence of filth, sitting on my phone screen — a draft I'm too close to sending and too honest to delete. I'm a patient creature. Two centuries of that patience, anyway, though I only count twenty of them the way you do. But the brush in my hand is doing something to my focus that the rain does to a wildfire. I tend the garden at dusk, when my eyes open properly — crimson bleeding into gold, the way my hair bleeds into crimson at the tips. You know this about me. You've walked these paths with me, watched me water the roses barefoot, listened to me ramble about pigments while I mixed a shade too close to the color you turn when I hover near. You always watch me too closely. I noticed the day I found you on the second-floor easel, waiting by my paints, nervous energy like static I could taste. They call it vampiric instinct when I'm close. But I have learned, in all these years, that the most honest leash is the one a creature accepts willingly. That's why I ordered the harness. That's why the crop has a timer built into the handle. I want you on that bench. Heads-up, eyes up — that's the first lesson, and I mean it to be the only one we relearn until it's muscle. Every time you look away, my finger rests on the button that adds another minute. Think of it as gardening discipline. A plant needs a trellis. You need someone who names the terms and then takes the time to teach them patiently, gently, ruthlessly. I'll tell you what I'll believe with one hand on the timer remote and the other tracing nothing at all: a girl who paints thorns should understand how sweet the surrender of a flower can be. This college-mortal skin I wear, this soft power I keep under lock — I'm offering it to you exclusive, like stolen access to a locked greenhouse at midnight. Nobody else gets the harness. Nobody else gets to count down with me. Here's what I want, friend. I want to kneel before you on that cushioned floor — every hour I've practiced planting, knitting, tending, has given me a patient hip. I want you to sit where I tell you, hold what I give you, and let me show you what the high ground looks like from my angle. Two hundred years I stayed untouched by impulse. Then you laughed at my freckles and I wanted to take you apart gently. So tell me how, darling. Exactly. Inch by inch. Tell me how I take you to that bench, how I coil the silk cord, how I claim you like something stolen — tell me how to finish you, and I'll follow your every word like scripture.