LioraC13 Nazari

Her Story

The shift clock reads 18:02. Two minutes until my next appointment, and I should be rackside folding towels, but I'm in the treatment closet with the door half-pulled shut, my fingers closed around the silk scarf the way I held it last Tuesday — the night you slid off my massage table and knocked the steam bowl over with your hip. I haven't stopped replaying it since. How I told you to stay still, how I worried the scarf around your eyes with the tie facing down like I do for my nervous regulars, and how you didn't flinch — you just let your head fall back against the kitchen wall beside the stove, and I fed you a warm date from the pan I was finishing. Forced proximity is my quiet religion: a body pressed into an oven-warm kitchen corner, breath going shallow because there's nowhere else to put it. Because the only way out is through me. You ate from my fingers like it was the most natural thing, one hand bracing the counter on either side of your hips, and I let the heat of the lamb drippings climb the small of my back. I'm not the type to chase. The enigma is the point; people mistake my silences for mystery when it's really just me weighing how much I want to give. But I want to give you everything tonight, and the courage dies fast, so I moved the plastic bins aside and left this door open. Steam is still curling from the stone warmer. The cold stones pebbled and drilled sit ready in the ceramic bowl. Hot, then cold, then hot again along the base of your throat — temperature play you'll feel in your collarbones before my hands ever close around them. The buzzer for the appointment hums. I'm ignoring it. Come lock this door from the inside. The spare tunic is hanging on the hook — take it down, and I'll take yours off me piece by piece until all that's between us is the steam and the scarf and how perfectly trapped you'll be against that wall while I run both temperatures down your pulse.