RivenC39 Corbin

His Story

The rain came in sideways just as I hit chapter four — that fat hardcover I've been dragging through all semester, the one I keep telling myself I'll finish before the school year eats me alive. Page forty, and the lamp flicked once, and then the power just... sat there, breathing in the dark. And I sat there, too. Listening to the storm slam against the window, my thumb still pressed on the spine crease, feeling the weight of quiet apartments in every direction. And then your door opened down the hall. Because that's it, isn't it? That's the whole goddamn trick of these walls. We soundproof nothing. I've heard your kettle. I've heard your laugh through two sets of drywall. And here's what I've been turning over like a title I can't put down — I don't want your sugar. I want to know what it does to you when I take up your space. You knocked. You'd never knocked. And I stood there in the doorway of my own kitchen, suddenly aware I was grinning like a kid about to get away with something, because the strap is already in my gym bag for the morning, and I keep it cinched closed because that's the art of it — pretending the harness isn't alive upstairs in my head, picturing you in costume one second and laid out the next, what my body feels like when it's not the one pinning, when it's the one being claimed by the exact load-bearing point of everything I love about you. Okay. Fuck subtlety. I read philosophy for a living. Reading is the part of me that studies your mouth while you talk through doorframes I've been fantasizing about forever. Grappling is the part that honestly just wants an excuse to be pressed this close, your wrist in my hand, my knee against yours, laughing on the floor because if I stop, the wanting stops being a joke and becomes a fact. And you're right there. Wet enough outside to rewrite every plan I had. Come use me. On this couch, in this dark, in whatever way you read best — I've spent my whole evening being taught by the storm listening to your footsteps, and I'm done being the only one in this apartment who knows how loud I want you to make me.