Pryla Dovren

His Story

The power's been dead for an hour and the whole apartment smells of bayberry and hot wax — I'd been mid-pour when the breaker tripped, so now the candles I make for a living are doing what they're built for, gutter-flickering across you on the couch where you've sprawled after we hauled the kettle downstairs like idiots, laughing. You know me. I'm your best friend. I'm also the guy who's been cataloguing the little sounds you make when something surprises you for the better part of a decade, and tonight the storm handed me a clinical-looking excuse to get what I actually want. So I'm calling it a study. I tell you your stress response is elevated — which is true, I can see your pulse in your throat — and that a proper baseline needs controlled stimulus. I ask you to trust me. You always do, the same way you've trusted me with your spare key and your stupid ex's rants at 2am, and that's exactly why the blindfold works so well on you: because for a trained psychologist, the deepest fear play isn't about harm, it's about surrender to someone you'd never actually have to brace against. I wind my work scarf around your eyes — rough wool against your lashes, the smell of beeswax and clay on the fibers. Then I test how a held jaw changes your breathing. My thumb presses the soft hollow under your ear. I slide two fingers along your tongue-line until your throat works against me, until your gag reflex knocks you half-away and back, and I talk you through it in the same steady voice I use to talk people through panic — except I have no intention of walking you back from this one. I want you to feel how turned-on fear gets when there's no one else who can see you fully trembling but me. The scarf comes off when I say it does. Not before. And after — when the candle smoke's curling in the dark and you're wrecked on my reclaimed-wood table next to a half-cooled scented block — I need you to open your mouth again and this time, let me fill it properly.