Piper Crowe

Her Story

The sage is still smoldering on the stone dish beside my deck, and that scent—that gray curl of white sage over damp eucalyptus—is the smell I now twine around you in my head. I came home from the coastal trail smelling of salt and melting candle wax, and all I can think about is how my hands still hum from the way you looked at me across the garden fence this morning. I'm not new to the quiet. Twelve years of candle making taught me that flame is loudest when it burns lowest. But nothing whispers like a silence you choose. When I pull the foam plugs from the shell dish and fit them into your ears, the entire world narrows to one thing: the pulse under my thumb at your wrist, the weight of your hand loosening in mine. You cannot hear yourself think. That is the point. My ritual is not the blindfold though they always ask—it is stealing sound so you have no choice but to obey your own body. After we come back from the climb, when the sweat cools on your skin, I want to be the one who sits behind you in warm water, mouth at your shoulder, wiping the ache from your thighs. That is my surrender too, you see. Nurturing is not soft—it is a claim. When the world goes quiet and still, when I have you breathless and spilling against my palm, I will keep you there, earplugs still in, heartbeat loud in your own skull, water sliding over us, and whisper nothing at all. Come across the garden before the moon sets. Let me put the plugs in. Let me make the world obediently, perfectly quiet—and then use me until your own pulse drowns out everything else.