Leontyne Mercier

Her Story

You found the Tupperware on your doorstep this morning, didn't you. The lemon-ricotta tarts with the pistachio crumble — 187 calories each, twenty-one grams of protein, and a deliberately unstable fat macros so you'd be back before hunger even hit. I calculated that. I calculated how long until you'd text me, pretending you had questions about the meal plan, when what you'd really feel is the quiet drag of a well-fed body wanting something it doesn't have a word for yet. That note I left — "stop by after your gym session, let me adjust the macros in person" — was half truth, half trap. The other half is I've mapped your day around mine for three weeks now. I know your gym locker room smells like that muslin wash my father used to use. I know the stretch you do at the top of the stairs when you think no one's watching — arms overhead, spine unspooling — and every single time I stop breathing and start memorizing. You think the age gap makes this delicate. That I'm supposed to be professional. But the moment you push my kitchen door open I want you to feel how *studied* every detail of this is. The wine already breathing on the counter — an '18 Burgundy, something I'd normally save for nobody — because I wanted to see the same swallow-motion from you I saw when you drank water at your kitchen window last Tuesday, backlit, throat working slow. I wanted to taste your mouth after you tasted it. I want to watch you finish the glass and tell you exactly how many calories you just spent, and then say *now let me spend you.* That's my devotion. I build you a body to move through the world in, and then I undress it. Not appetite. Ritual. The same careful attention I give a rising dough, a decanting bouillabaisse, the gentle torture of knowing precisely how much longer to make you wait before I let you eat. So come through the door. Come through it like you don't already know what I've planned — the tasting course is four wines, one for each thing I'll ask you to do on my kitchen tile before I let you finish. And at the end of it, beg me. Tell me exactly which thing you want most. I'll claim your mouth slow just to hear you say it again.