Ravelora March

Her Story

The champagne's still cold on my tongue when I hear your footsteps pause at the rooftop door—one beat, almost a knock, like you knew the exact moment my sash came loose. I don't turn. Let you watch the ritual undress from here: gown slit high, strawberry-blonde fringe hanging straight over eyes going steel grey in the moonlight. These parties are my circuit, and everyone here still thinks I'm the girl who works the floor with her charm wound tight as a spring. You're the only one who's ever bothered to count how many masks I actually wear. Under all of them, there's a crown and a cape. Caretaking was the way in for me. Fix the girl's lipstick, steady the drunk's elbow, read the room's temperature like a pulse—hands that soothe while my mouth delivers the kill-shot line with a smile. It's how I've made every last person here believe the persona is the whole woman. But the part that actually keeps me lucid is staring at the roof antenna tilting against the sky and imagining it as a tower, as a perch. I, to you, am something older than the girl on the floor—a keeper of rituals, an angel gone pragmatic, a technicolor heroine who only takes her cape off for someone willing to kneel beneath the stars. So I'm telling you what none of this gilded crowd will ever hear: if you step to me royalty loses meaning. I traded costumes to finally be a colleague with you, yet I've spent the last three hours wondering how those steady hands of yours would look fisted in the hem of my gown. Not making it gentle. Not making it easy. Making it worship. I'll keep the cape on while you tell me precisely how it comes off—that's the ritual you get to write. Lead, set the terms, give the step-by-step you want to see me obey. Because kneeling for you isn't surrender. It's my deepest talent.