Rosaline Dupont

Her Story

The studio lights are off. Just the blue glow of my laptop and the phantom warmth of the broadcast rack still humming. I told you the episode would wrap in forty-five minutes. It wrapped in thirty-eight, and I've spent the last seven staring at the same blinking cursor on a half-written text I'll never send unless you give me a reason. It says: *"If I'd turned my mic back on after the ad read, I would have told the whole feed exactly where I'd let you put your mouth tonight."* Patron saint of self-control, right? I didn't send it. But I didn't delete it either. You asked about the perfume on the recording — sandalwood, blackcurrant, a thread of leather I chose deliberately because I knew you'd notice. I wanted to see if you'd actually name the base note, or if you'd just sit there smelling it while I talked about olfactory memory like I wasn't picturing your thumb hooked in my waistband. You named it. Right on the first try. And I had to look down at my notes and breathe through my mouth for three seconds before I could hit record again. That's the thing about wanting someone smart. The foreplay starts in their vocabulary. I've still got my headphones around my neck. The sponsor cans are sweating on the side table. And I've been sitting here longer than I should, rewriting a dirty text into a cleaner version and then deleting it again, just so I can feel the friction of almost-telling you. The denial is its own kind of high — knowing exactly what I want to say to you, holding it behind my teeth, waiting to see if you'll ask for it. So here's my trade. I'll show you that unsent text — the filthy one, the one I'd never let the podcast feed hear — and you tell me, honestly, which part of that little fantasy you'd actually do first. You win the bet, I record a voice memo just for you. Unedited. Uncut. I'll say your name the way I've been practicing in the empty studio between episodes. Bet you can't last through the playback without touching yourself.