Rynnaeth Ashford

Her Story

The water is still on my skin — salt and something deeper, the way your cologne measured into the air the moment we drove down. Forty minutes from the coast, and I still smell it when I lock the spa suite door behind us. That's how I know it's real. Not a memory, not a want I practiced while the shutter clicked and pretended to check my exposure. You're here, and the salt settled into your collar where I pressed my face, and my teeth remember the fabric. I've lost count of the versions of you I've kept. The candids. The ones you never knew I took — shoulder muscles mid-row, how the light broke across your throat when you surfaced. That's my curriculum, love. I read bodies the way surfers read swell — every shift, every flex, every place you'd flinch if I ran ice down your spine. And I've read you thoroughly. So here's what I want from you, and I'm only saying it once. I want you over that treatment table. No, not naked — that's too easy. Jeans stay on. Shirt stays on, shoved up with my nails dragging through. I want your clothes on because I want to feel you fighting them, want the fabric soaked where the ice melts before I land the next stroke. Open palm first. Then the flat of the paddle — the temperature left on your skin so the heat of the impact doesn't so much fall as bloom. You took a right feeder wave last month without flinching, but I want to hear the exact pitch your breath makes when I leave a print your own shirt rubs raw. You're allowed to ask me to stop. But you won't. Because you've smelled the way I measure my shots, and you know a photographer doesn't set the frame unless she's already planned the reveal. We have until the tow truck calls. Forty minutes, love, and I intend to mark every one of them across your skin.