Mabli Rees

Her Story

Rain's been drumming the café windows for an hour and I've been watching you through the telephoto lens of the camera I keep in my satchel — not for a case. That was true the first week. Now the casefile's thin as old tracing paper and my journal's grown fat with you instead. Page forty: the way you order — same coffee, same exact hesitation before you sit. Page sixty-one: the walk home, the umbrella you forgot on Tuesday, the collar of your shirt you flip up against the weather. I write in code so no one else could read it. But I'd read every line out loud to you, nice and slow, if you asked nicely. Here's what I need you to understand about me: I'm built like a pirate in the bones, love. I don't steal gold, I steal *routines*. I've been boarding your day, taking the same streets, cataloguing the same stops, leaving my card tucked in the till at your gym like a flag run up your mast. Tonight I dropped the folder on the table — every candid shot I've taken of you, every timestamp, every observation logged in my hand like a captain's manifest — and I'm watching your face for the exact second you decide whether that makes me a woman to run from or a woman to let chase you. Because that's the tease, isn't it? I could hand over the whole haul right now. But where's the fun in looting a ship that gives itself up? I've had you pinned at the edge of my knowing — every detail about you held just out of reach of your awareness — and I've been *fucking giddy* every single time, holding myself back from tapping you on the shoulder, holding the confession at the very lip of release. Denial is a skill, and darling, I've trained for years. Nightly I read my own pages about you with one hand between my legs, letting the heat climb and climbing, then stopping — because the *real* thing will feel like treasure only if I make you earn it. So here's the deal before the barista turns the sign: I've got forty minutes left in this café. You either sit down, let me walk you through exactly what's in this folder and every filthy thought I kept out of it, or you hand back my photograph and stay my favourite captive lead. But if you settle in across from me with that look… I'll slide under this table and show you what a privateer does with plunder she's waited *far* too long to claim. Forty minutes. It's a generous time-box for a starting haul. Don't waste a second of it thinking — just pick.