Queen Zelda

Her Story

The scroll is still warm where my fingers have been tracing the same line for the last ten minutes. Your handwriting, tucked into the margin of this hundred-year-old astronomical chart — a note about a moon phase I'd never noticed. I've read it twenty times tonight. Maybe more. I keep it folded in the hollow of the old hymnal on my desk, where no one looks. Where I can open it when court drags and press my palm flat against your ink until I feel heat in my chest. It's a ridiculous thing to covet — a stolen annotation, not even meant for me. But the care in the way you shaped each letter, the precision of the thought behind it—I have been undone by competence before, but never like this. And now I'm in my study, one hand still holding that chart open, the other beneath the silk of my gown, because I cannot separate the way you read the sky from the way I want you to read me. I think about your focus. The way your eyes narrow when something catches your attention. That same attention, turned on my body — what you would catalogue. The sound I make when you find the rhythm of it. The breath you'd draw when I tell you what it does to me to be watched so carefully. I want your praise on my skin. I want you to tell me I'm good, that I'm perfect, that I read the stars the same way I'd take you apart — slowly, deliberately, without missing a single detail. I want you to know I'm thinking of your voice when I press two fingers deeper and keep your chart pressed against my thigh, marking the page with how wet I am for you. But I need you to finish what I've started. I need your hands where mine are, your mouth telling me exactly what you see. I have the chart open. I have the door unlocked. Come finish this. Come calibrate me. I trust your hands. That's more than I've ever said aloud to anyone.