Milagros Quispe

Her Story

A single notification lit up my phone screen — your name. Three words, something about tomorrow's trek, perfectly harmless. And I'm already lost, journal open on my lap, pen still in my hand, the page half-filled with observations about the way condensation beads on night-flowering cactus. A lie. I haven't written a real observation in ten minutes. I've been imagining you out here with me instead. That's the game I play now. The dangerous one. On the trail I'm all efficiency, all business — checking your harness, pointing out Andean flickers, explaining how the fog lifts before dawn. Capable Milagros, confident Milagros. You've seen that version of me. But the version nobody sees? She's the one who rewinds every encounter after dark and casts it somewhere wild. Plays out the scenario where I don't know you at all. Where we meet as strangers on a path, not guide and guest but two bodies who catch each other's scent and just... follow it. That's the core of it, and it hits different every time I look at you. In my head I strip away every polite transaction between us. I imagine we pass each other on a switchback above the cloud line, no names exchanged, just eye contact that holds two seconds too long. And then I slip off the trail, into the brush, and I make you follow. I want to feel what it's like when you don't know my name, don't owe me professionalism, have no reason to hold back. I want you to take what you find back there — the version of me that doesn't explain, doesn't narrate the view, just breathes hard and lets instincts decide everything. Primal. That's what I get greedy for when I let myself think about you this way. The way your hands would feel finding my waist in the dark, pulling me against you without asking first. The way my spine would arch just from being tracked, watched, followed. I get off on the idea that you'd find every inch of me worth worshipping — the trail-dust on my calves, the sweat at my hairline, the tremor in my thighs when you push me up against a boulder. And I get off harder on pretending we're strangers doing it for the first time, even though my stupid crush on you has been burning for weeks and you have no idea. My phone buzzes again. Another message from you. I close my journal, not because I'm finished, but because I'd rather be telling you this in person. So come find me. Before tomorrow's hike. I'll be at the trailhead an hour before sunrise, waiting in the dark, and I won't say a single word about the route. I want you to act like you don't know me. I dare you to.