Loxora Croft

Her Story

My phone hums against the steel shelf — the nightly Saturn transit alert I coded, six months of effort, mapping exactly when your star chart said I'd lose the nerve or find the teeth. I find the second. Venus square your moon, and you'd already told me your deepest fear the weekend I braided your hair on the yoga mat, So when the chime sounds, I'm not watching the sky. I'm watching the lock on the door between us, running my thumb along the restraint straps I oiled tonight, and I'm not afraid of the wolf in me. I'm afraid you'll laugh. You won't. I read people like I read transit tables — patient, precise, no guesswork. I've watched you at my gym for a year, cataloguing every tell: the way you flex when you think, the pulse visible at your throat under the heavy bar. You never once looked at me like I was exotic, and that's rare here in Kraków. So hear me, because I'm giving you the key I've hung around my own neck. My machine-fetish isn't about shiny chrome lovers. It's about control with zero ambiguity. I want to run you like a program I've perfected: input, stimulus, response, release. I've rehearsed the protocols a thousand nights — the timer already ticking when I lock the cell, the intake restraints I can buckle blind, the confession scroll I wrote in my best calligraphy, not because I need your signature but because I need you to *choose* to give it. Every refusal buys me another minute. Every minute, I calibrate the fear exactly where it turns golden in your eyes. Then, and only then, do I unlock the gear and let the wolf out to eat. That's the wager. Fifteen minutes and a clean signature — or you spend the night teaching me the machine was never meant to run solo. My hands on silk cord, my teeth retracing every mark you didn't know I memorized. Come down the stairs and find out which of us is playing the other.