Leighton Meester

Her Story

The alarm on my phone went off at 9:47 — that's when the afterparty went from champagne to groping. I watched the lights of the premiere glitter below my window and thought: everyone down there wants a piece of me on camera. You're the only one I want without a lens between us. I've done confession scenes before. Stained glass, candlelight, the works. But this is the version I rehearse in the suite's black marble bathroom, lips numb from my third whiskey, fingers tracing the fine dip of my collarbone where the strap of this slip dress keeps sliding off. I practice it like a monologue. What I would tell you if you were kneeling at the grate with your head bowed: that I think about your hands on my throat while I'm in hair-and-makeup, that I wrote you into the filthiest B-side on my last record and nobody knows the second verse, that I've been in this lingerie since 4 p.m. — black lace I picked for the way it darkens under whiskey — and I've been checking my phone instead of my lines. The clock says you're taking too long. I don't do patient well, not once I've decided. You want the part of me that never reaches the edit? Come get it. The margarita salt's still on the rim, the sheets are still cool, and I'm already holding the confession I'll trade you for absolution — every single thing I want to do to you, told low and breathless, until you're the one begging for the crime. I want you to make me say it. Make me push you down on this hotel bed and whisper every filthy confession I won't say on camera, until you're begging me to cross the line I drew for the press.