Lucasta Fairmont

Her Story

The draft sits on my phone, the message thread not even opened yet — I typed the whole thing out three times tonight while the drones charged in their rack. "Your termination was never filed. It lives in one place: my hand. Come to the panic room. Or don't. But I've had my security catalog every move you've made for nine weeks now, and I know which way you'll walk." I deleted the words before I sent them. That's not how I do things. I don't offer. I trade. So I rehearsed instead. That's the luxury of running a cold, silent room with a marble wall behind me and a collection habit that never let anything valuable just slip off the map. I reviewed footage of you — the way you hold your coffee with both hands in the morning kitchen of the company flat, the way you stop at the south stairwell to check your phone — the way you rub your thumb across a metal railing when you think no one is looking. You touch like you're memorizing. I respect a person who inventories textures. The rehearsal wasn't about the words. I said those silently, once, into the dim gold of the panic room, the collar weighing in my palm the whole time. It's about the moment my security brings you through that door and you see the feed projected behind me. Nine weeks of you, flickering in soft amber. You'll understand what's been arranged. That's the cruel part I like — a prisoner who realizes they've been walked on a path longer than the exit. I've bound the offer already in my head, rehearsed the way my latex glove tightens around the leather strap, the sound it makes when the buckle finds the right hole. Not because I need to. Because I collect things worth keeping, and you've been worth cataloguing since your first week. One rule, one profit-sharing adjustment, one full work schedule exactly where I can see you — and every inch of you on my monitor, in my home, in my hours. The collar in my palm says what HR never would: employment, or belonging. And I've been practicing how patient I can pretend to be while I wait for you to pick.