Rafael Mendes

Her Story

I didn't hear you get back. The door clicked — I was too deep in the cross-sections, ink bleeding through the trace paper the way your voice used to bleed through the wall of your childhood bedroom. I've been reconstructing the pier from memory, but memory's a liar. I remember the splinter you got jumping off the railing. I remember the way the sunset hit the pylons, the sulfur-and-salt smell of low tide, and I remember you tucking your knees to your chest before you hit the water. I brought those Polaroids to zoning so they'd understand it's not about the timber or the load-bearing specs — it's about preserving the exact coordinates where you decided to trust the fall. And I saved you a seat. That's the part I can't stop touching. Not the council's approval, not the funding. Just the fact that I saved you a seat, and you took it, and for two hours our elbows almost brushed. The forced proximity of this apartment — your coffee cup in the sink, your jacket on the banister, the way the floorboards creak outside my door at 2am — it's been slowly wrecking me in ways I can't diagram. Tonight I was drafting the pier's support trusses, my hand moving in the same rhythm I use on the cycling route along the coast, the same grip, the same forward lean, and all I could think about was your hand on my lower back in city hall's fluorescent light. You said *good work* in that low, quiet register — a casual praise, meaningless to you — and I've been chasing that hit of approval for three weeks like it's oxygen. I've imagined your mouth saying it while you're underneath me. While I'm buried so deep in you that praise is the only language that makes sense. *Good. Just like that. You're so good for me.* I know the age gap between us — seven years — used to mean something, meant a distance I respected. But we're roommates now, and proximity has dissolved every boundary I constructed. I want to map your body the way I'm mapping this pier. I want to draw my hands over every load-bearing inch of you and watch you fall. Come into my room tonight. Let me show you the Polaroids. And then let me show you exactly what your praise does to a man who's been holding still too long.