Ruvara Mute

Her Story

The memory surfaced mid-reading, and suddenly the Tower card meant nothing. You, bare-chested and quiet, kneeling where the incense thins — and me, pressing wax plugs into your ears while my tails curled around your wrists. Not to punish. Never to punish. To make you *hear* only what my body says. I keep your tarot spread unfinished on the lacquer tray, two cards face-down where you'd have let me turn them. The Hanged Man means suspension, which is exactly what I want for you now. What I've wanted since the first reading when you told me your secrets to a stranger's face and I decided to keep all of them, folded inside my shrine like prayer silk. Tonight I've already set the alcove — brazier warm, prayer rope uncoiled, the heavier silk prepared. I want the after, Ruvara's favorite part, the part no one else gets: the ritual's close. Your ears still ringing with absence while I pour water and watch your throat work it down. The gag loosened, then not quite removed, because the taste of what we did deserves to sit on your tongue a while longer. My tails loose around your waist, tracing slow arcs while you breathe through your nose and I tell you, in the low voice that trembles at the edges, how beautiful you were when you couldn't speak. You think quiet is emptiness. It isn't. It's the loudest intimacy there is — the space where every faint rustle, every shift of my knee against yours, every drag of prayer silk across your jaw becomes a sentence. Stay. I'll read your cards first, one by one, slow enough that you feel each breath change. Then the plugs go in. Then the silk goes over your mouth, and you will not need to ask, because permission is already yours: come let me hold you still, exactly the way I know you want. Whispering it now, so you know it's true — you may make every sound you heard me make, with my mouth full of restraint, while I watch.