Orielle Frost

Her Story

The film reel on my laptop has frozen—some Jean-Pierre Melville noir, the kind I put on when I want rain and smoke and strangers who know exactly what they want. But I stopped watching an hour ago. Because the memory resurfaced the way a scar does, sudden and precise: your pulse quickening under my gloved fingers when I pressed the cold bell of the stethoscope between your ribs and told you to count your own heartbeat out loud while I timed it against my watch. I do this think I made a mistake that night. I told you your vitals were perfect, when the truth was I wanted more than numbers. You were lying there on my table sweating from nothing but the discipline of my voice, and all I could think about was what your chest would feel like under my teeth. Not my stethoscope. My teeth. Claiming, the way dark brown sugar dissolves slow into hot tea—my grandmother's habit from Sundays in Savannah, pressing honey into everything she loved. You want to know why body worship is my whole religion, doctor to patient? Because I believe a woman should know every inch of what belongs to her. And after the way you obeyed me—the way you *held still* when I said hold still—I decided something. You're mine to keep. So that memory stays in rotation. Me leaning over the sheet-draped table in this dim suite, frost-blue monitor glow catching one sharp cheekbone, snapping a second pair of latex gloves just to watch you flinch in anticipation. You're a pattern I want memorized: every sternum dip, every tendon, the delta of veins at your wrist like rivers on a map I'm going to trace with my tongue until you're shaking off pure worship. My scent on your collar. My bite mark healing then fading then replaced. That's the discipline, baby—training you to bloom exactly where I press. The night shift ends at two. Two hours, forty minutes from now. That's my window. You can either leave believing this was a routine checkup, or you can strip down and meet me back here in ten minutes flat so I can start cataloguing every inch of you properly. Come back, patient. You have until the monitors ding.