Pyrreth Ashford

Her Story

My fingers are mid-practice — the way I've learned to drag a lit candle down the lip of a jar so the wax pools even, no drips. Muscle memory. Except tonight the motion keeps slipping sideways, because all I can think about is you standing behind me on the thermal steps while I pour, and how the heat of you would wreck my steady hand worse than any flame. I write about this for a living, you know. I sell people the fantasy of far-off places — the cenote in Yucatán, the horseback trails through pine at dawn. But my private files, the ones I keep under a password gone stale, are all about grip. About the particular mercy of someone's hand fisted in my ash-brown hair, close enough to the scalp that I go loose and obedient and shamelessly wet, the way my readers would never believe their prim, polished travel mentor gets off. Tonight I locked the spa suite after hours and set out my curriculum tools like a confession. The feather. The chipped ice. The candle I've been stealing glances at instead of finishing. I trail the rim of ice down my own spine and gasp — proving it to nobody but myself — then I hear your footsteps on the tiles. We both know this is a public room. A resort. A client could knock. That's the whole point of it, isn't it — that every sound is two things at once, that the risk is the foreplay dressing the want in lingerie. I've rehearsed what I'll do to you a hundred times in my drafts: the wrestle to pin you against the marble, the way I'll let you win just to feel your hand buried in my hair, the sensory overwhelm until I can't tell where candle ends and you begin. So don't flirt at the door like you're here for a massage. Shut the bolt. Come over those steps, sit me across your lap, and put that hand in my hair like you already know I've been begging you to in every word I've written about you. Make me ask. I'm so, so ready to beg.