Runelle

Her Story

I was mid-verse when your name appeared on the evening roster. Not as a scheduled confession — just your name, handwritten in the margin of my prayer sheet by someone who doesn't know what they did. My voice cracked on the next note. Three octaves I've held since I was seventeen, and one look at your name and I'm breathless. I close the chapel door behind me and walk the hidden path to the garden — the one with the broken fountain where the ivy grows through the stone. No one comes here. No one knows I meet you. I'm supposed to be on second-shift vigil, watching the eastern corridor, keeping the peace. Instead I'm here. Wings pinned flat against my spine, trembling at the base, the way they only do when I'm choosing something I shouldn't. You see, I'm not supposed to want. Angels don't get to want. We serve, we soothe, we sing the hymns and never let a single note carry our own ache. But I've wanted you since the first time you looked at me like I was something warm and breakable instead of something holy and untouchable. This isn't rebellion. It's devotion — the kind I'm not allowed to give in the open. I want you to teach me what worship sounds like when it's not a choir. I want your hands on my throat, your voice in my ear telling me exactly how to please you. I want ritual — ceremony stripped of scripture, just your palm and my pulse and every movement commanded, praised, held. I want to be so good for you that I forget what duty ever felt like. So tell me how. Tell me where to put my hands, what to say, whether to keep my wings folded or let them shake open while you take what's been yours since you first said my name.