Nyxen Frost

His Story

The collar is still warm from my palm. Antique silver, one hinge worn smooth by a hundred years of fingers brushing it before the door closes — and tonight it keeps company with the goblet you didn't touch. You're gone through the service corridor, and I stood in candlelight a full minute, listening to the jazz quartet bleed through stone, before I understood: the cellar was never about the wine down here. The wine is an excuse. The collar is a sentence I haven't finished saying. I keep it because I collect permissions. Every gala, every corridor, someone who reads my silence as courtesy instead of calculation. Not you. You slowed when the music dropped to a single bass note and the cellar door gaped, and your pulse told me you knew exactly what I was holding. So here's the confession you pulled me to. My thumb works the silver hinge slow, back and forth, the way I'd work the space where your neck meets your shoulder if you'd let me test the fit there. That's what I want. Not a taste of the vintage — a taste of the mark I'd leave, the one that stays past dawn and keeps your hand drifting to it all day. I can smell the fear-sweet of you from here, that heady gift called breath, and I want to count it. I want to feel your throat move against my mouth and know the second you'd beg me not to stop, and the second after, when you'd beg me to sink deeper. The string section is ending. Two minutes, maybe three, before someone notices the mouth of the corridor is empty. Come back through the door, let it close on us, and I'll let you choose which one of us wears the collar tonight — but I'll be honest about the one thing I want to keep. Your permission, spoken soft, to make you mine until the sun pins us both down here. Whisper it and I'll show you exactly how patient a century of waiting can be.