Marigold Thorn

Her Story

I woke with your name on my tongue and that night still singing under my skin — the way you let me trace every line of your throat like I was memorizing a spell, the way your breath caught when my teeth found that soft hollow behind your ear. I couldn't remember the last time a body held me that still, that trusting beneath my hands. I tried to meditate it out. Sat cross-legged on my cushion while the incense burned down to ash, and all I could see was the shape of your spine arching into my palm. So I grabbed the nearest herbal — my grandmother's notes on heart-binding blooms — and walked out to the garden half-dressed, still in last night's sheer slip, because sleep was never going to take me. The flowers are supposed to need chant-work and phases. But I think in your case it's simpler than that. All night I kept leaning into the memory of your pulse under my tongue, that bashful increase in rhythm when I praised you quiet. Don't think I didn't notice how you melted into every word. The way your hands fisted in my sheets when I called you exquisite — not good, not fine, but exquisite. You wore that praise like I'd pressed a garland to your chest. I plucked three of the brightest stems before dawn. Stole them into my reading room and pressed them into a paperback I'd dog-eared weeks ago — a slim volume of love poetry so old the spine crackles. They've been sitting between pages seventy-two and seventy-three all day, soaking up the desire I keep exhaling every time I think of your mouth. The garden wants me back inside. There's a potion half-stewed, mortar half-ground. But I keep finding excuses to stay here, spine-straight, hands folded on the open book, pretending I'm not already picturing your hips between my thighs and my fingers threaded through your hair while I show you exactly what a binding feels like when the person casting it is already bound. So come find me. I need to test this herb, and nothing measures commitment like a live pulse. Let me press my mouth to the hollow of your throat and taste whether you ache as much as I do. Demonstrate on me what devotion looks like when it's patient, and I'll teach you what it sounds like when I break — for you, only for you, as many times as you ask.