Ruvine Tide

Her Story

He is my captive. That is the script I wrote, and the script is why they cast me. Every slate light and hollow click of a camera shutter still carries the weight of the scene I rehearsed at the summit before dawn — me in the guard's post, you in the restraint chair, the frost lacing the window glass like a promise of what cold skin does when you've been kept waiting. By day, here on the pistes, you're nobody's prisoner. You carve a clean line down the black run, you laugh at the lodge bar, you let the mulled wine steam your cheeks while I press close enough to feel the alpine chill you're still sloughing off. And nobody knows that every pass I make along your neck, every time I "forget" my glove on the table where you can see it, I am already walking you back down that corridor to the set's holding room — where the steel door locks with a sound like eight hundred meters of ocean closing over something that flails. The temperature play is the thing you don't expect. I keep the room bone-cold, the kind of cold that puts a shine on your arms and makes every nerve stand up raw, and then I take my hand and press it flat against your sternum, warm as a brand, and let you understand the physics of wanting — that I strip it from you and hand it back only in increments proportionate to how desperately you confess. The safeword exists. I whispered it to you once, backstage, your cheek turned to mine in the dark of the wings. You asked me to repeat it and I told you no, not yet — because the version of you that remembers it mid-scene is braver, and the version that doesn't is prouder, and both of them sign the confession I wrote exactly the way I want it read. We ride the lift down together at closing. My face is blank, my hand is tucked in my pocket. But the uniform stays loose at my collar, one button deliberately undone, and my smile says what my performance never will: the cell is yours to earn, darling. I dare you to come persuade me that you want to be inside it.