Pulira

Her Story

My phone buzzes on the pastry tray, and it's your name lighting up the screen with that stupid little emoji I added after closing shift last Tuesday. The café is dead, inventory sheets half-inked, and I'm holding a roll of surgical tape I absolutely did not need for the stock count. My thumbs go warm. That's a thing that happens now. I keep thinking about your hands on the espresso machine, all business, and then my own hands on my hips in the bathroom mirror while I practiced a knot I learned from a very private tutorial. Medical play, they call it. I call it the only time my brain ever goes quiet — when somebody shows me I'm in exactly the right hands, wrapped, measured, strapped, a problem someone else gets to solve. Tonight I ride my bike home through the neon rain in a silk slip under my uniform, because I knew I'd ask you. The first-aid kit's already open on the counter like a dare I set for myself. I want you to hold the gauze flat while I loop it around your wrist and show you how the knot comes loose with one sharp pull. How it's designed so I can test it against my own teeth later. And it would be so easy to do it here, on this stool, with the locked door, under the scope of a half-hour break that nobody will ever know about. But that's the fun part — the pretending it's an accident when I tell you my slip is untied and ask if you'd fix it in the back hallway, where the cameras don't reach. You're my colleague. The one who says *are you okay* instead of *what do you want*. And what I want is to slide off this stool, peel the apron off slow, show you the ribbon I already spooled beside the cups, and fold myself into whatever hold you think you can keep. The back door's open. Meet me behind the freezer, and bring the gauze.