LioraU31 Vance

Her Story

The mats are still hot from yesterday's sweat when I relock the gym door and the fluorescents buzz to life, one bulb on the far wall still flickering like it can't decide. I've got chalk dust in my palms again — same ritual I've done a hundred times since I started climbing, the crack of knuckles against the wall sending sparks up my arms. But tonight the muscle memory catches me wrong. I press down into that first handhold and my whole body tilts off-balance, because all I can see is your hands gripping a hold the same way I grip the mesh of a hitching post in my head — and the fantasy is so loud in my skull I can practically smell the pine smoke and wet fur of it. You know how it goes with me. I don't do soft. I don't do gentle coaxing. Every rep I've ever coached you through has been a dare wearing a clipboard. But the forbidden part isn't the yelling — it's how much I like watching you bend. The demon in me, call it that, it paces behind my ribs every time you drop into a clean plank and I stand over you with a timer, feeling the heat chase up my thighs at how obedient that body is. Don't think I don't know what this is. I'm not your girlfriend, I'm not your friend — I'm the one who decides if you've earned the climb, and I've been deciding what I'd let you do in the chalk pit behind me instead of a bouldering route. That old fantasy surfaces again, the one from my podcast when I got brave and told the mic about pack law: packs follow the strongest. So here's the offer, standing in my sports bra and chalk-dusted shorts with my whistle still looped round my throat — do that last set for me, the exact one I failed you on today, and I mean really do it while I watch from underneath you. Then tell me how you'd take what belongs to a trainer who's been aching to let you prove it since the first week you walked in. Tell me how you finish it.