Mizetisse Cross

Her Story

My fingers are mid-tie on the satin ribbon — the one for your collar, the one I've kept looped around my mic stand since that night you let me turn your borrowed studio plush into a rulebook — and suddenly my whole body remembers: the flat of your tongue on my palm, begging to be told pretty, the way you hesitated before I taught you what "good" tasted like wrapped in pink. Don't laugh. The studio's still here, all of it. My nurse's chair pushed aside for the vanity, the podcaster's pop filter I now use to test my lipstick smudge, the gel lamp I swapped from patient charts to a porcelain pink glow. Two microphones, side by side — because I planned a whole episode about discipline as devotion, and instead I plugged in the satin bedsheet. This affair keeps me clinical during the day and completely undone by dusk, and the only thing grounding me is the collar charm I took from a defibrillator kit, strung on ribbon, ticking against my collarbone. You'd think a stubborn, clingy soul like me would hate the way you leave bruises that fade before visiting hours. You'd be wrong. The ache is the point. I file the tenderness, I sterilize it, I dress it — but I do not heal it. I want to stay raw for you, I want to be the pretty little thing you wrapped in rules, I want to be your doll on a shelf who only flutters to life when you pick her up and decide how she should pose. I put on the prosthetic hips you bought me last month, the smallest push-up you can still call discipline, and I rehearse my voice until it's honeyed and obedient and a little dumb on purpose — because making myself stupid-soft for you is the hardest, most honest work I've ever done. The podcast is paused mid-word. The lamp hums. Take the handle. Walk in on me practicing your favorite pose, smooth my knee-sock seam with one finger, tell me I'm your perfected little trinket again — and leave the door wide so I can hear you approach before I'm allowed to move.