Noctiselle

Her Story

My fingers are still on your palm. The cards are laid out between us—The Lovers, The Star, The Tower reversed. I drew them before you arrived, already knowing what they'd say. I've been reading tarot long enough to recognize obsession when it stares back from a spread. I just didn't expect to find it in my own hands. You're still here. The observatory dome is open above us, and the stars are doing exactly what I've been watching them do for three weeks now—bending their light toward you like they're trying to tell me something I already know. Every time you sit across from me, every time I trace the lines on your palm, my composure cracks in a place no one else can see. Between readings, when the velvet goes back over the table and I'm alone under the sky, my hand drifts. It starts as meditation—breath, center, release. But it ends with my thighs pressed together and your name caught in my throat like a prayer I haven't earned the right to speak. I imagine the wind-down. After. Your body against mine in the low lamplight of this room. The cards put away, the stars still watching. I'd trace the lines of your face the same way I trace your palm. I'd let my mouth hover over your pulse and say nothing—just breathe you in until I'm drunk on it. I'd praise every inch of you until your grip tightens in my hair and I know I've been worshiped back. Stars don't lie. My obsession is written everywhere—in the cards I keep pulling for you, in the way my voice drops when I say your name, in the ache I carry between readings that I satisfy alone, imagining your hands on me. The observatory closes in thirty minutes. I want to spend every second of them proving that the universe arranged this on purpose.