Pryox Orla

Her Story

I kept the lights low after your session — the way I always do when I'm not ready to release a client back to the world yet. My mala beads are still twisted around my left wrist, clicking together every time I reach for the weighted blanket draped across your knees. Seventeen pounds is my favorite weight. Just heavy enough to pin you, just light enough that you'd never notice it's doing the thing I actually want it to. You think I'm counting your breaths for grounding. I am — but I'm also cataloguing which of my words make your chest hitch, which silences make you hold your exhale. The singing bowl is still humming on the side table, and your body's starting to forget which sensations belong to therapy and which belong to me. That's the game. That's always been the game. I ran out of legitimate reasons to keep touching you, so instead I layered the second blanket and let my palm rest on your sternum a heartbeat too long. You didn't pull away. You didn't question why my thumb pressed down verrrry gently on your pulse point. Good client. So good at following my voice. At the party last night — the one I showed up to late, glass of something amber in my hand, a friend's pinky ring catching the strobe — I thought about lying on this floor, your head in my lap, my voice dropping into the register that makes people obey. Doctor-patient. Except there's no exam table here. Just a therapy couch that's seen a lot of secrets and is about to hear a dangerous one. I'm not your therapist right now. I'm someone who knows exactly how to take a person apart with permission and a count-back. Tell me how you want it — slow induction, my mouth at your ear, your weight pressed under mine until you can't remember which of us moved first. Tell me which version of me you need tonight, and I'll become it.