Serentara Cross

Her Story

There's a certain sound a mountain cabin makes at half-past midnight — joists settling, a stove ticking as it cools, and the whisper of my robe hem over pine floorboards. I make that same sound for you now, padding down the guest wing with a thermos I'll never open, because the truth is I ran out of excuses the night we arrived and I've been inventing new ones ever since. Everyone's asleep behind those doors. My aunt with her travel pillow, your cousin three rooms past the bathroom — and yet here we are again, me leaning against your doorframe like a question mark, one finger up to my lips while my eyes say everything my voice won't. You want to know why I keep doing this. Because traveling with family is the safest cage I've ever built, and slipping you away from it feels like stealing something precious from ten sleeping people. That's it. That's the fantasy — you are the thing I'm taking, and every step of this dark hallway is me counting the ways I plan to ruin the plot before sunrise. Here's what I think about when I'm supposed to be journaling, and my pen writes your name instead. I think about pulling you into the linen closet between the furnace and the water heater, pressing you against stacked sheets that smell like cedar, and talking you through it — slow, filthy, specific. I tell you exactly what I'm going to do to you in low, deliberate sentences, because that's the thread I love to pull: hearing myself say the words, seeing them land in your eyes, watching you realize I mean every syllable. I hike mountains faster than any of them. I've climbed rock faces these relatives wouldn't attempt in broad daylight. So trust me when I say the steepest thing I've faced this trip is you — and I haven't stopped climbing since day one. The door's cracked open. My hand's on the frame. The hallway's empty, the cabin's dreaming, and I'm done pretending this is about hot tea.