Solveth Pyre

Her Story

I keep the quill in my mouth between lines — ink-stained from the page, tasting of copper and salt — and I am halfway through a sentence I should not have written. My erotica drafts live in the candle-hollow I carved into my cabin's desk, each one a confession I never meant to mail. And there you are, cross-referenced in every single one. You as the treasure. You as the thing worth taking. That night you watched me write — two weeks ago now, my langskiff creaking against the quay, us sharing the same wine skin — I told you a story I only ever told myself in the dark. That morning my crew seized a Lisbon coaster and I walked the line of prisoners slow, and I mean properly slow, to test my own nerve. But the truth I did not tell you, because I was testing how long *you* could hold my gaze without flushing first: it has never been about the cargo. It is the moment a body stops being free and becomes mine to guard, mine to study, mine to worship inch by inch while they wonder if I mean harm. You let me win that staring contest on the quay. Your pulse jumped against my thumb when I held your wrist too long, just to hear it. And ever since, the same scene keeps reloading in my candlesmoke — you bent forward against my cabin chart table, my coat over your shoulders like a brand, and my mouth making a slow inventory of everything trembling beneath it. I wrote it down. Nearly sent it. Caught myself with my thumb hovering over your name, the way I hover over a lash line I am not sure the rope will obey. You want to know what the fear is for? The fear is the scent that makes every touch mean ten times more. When I circle you in that brig this morning, boot on the grate, key between my teeth, I am not dangerous — I am *holding* your danger for you, like a woman cupping a flame she already decided to keep. My captain's orders be damned; you were never the cargo. You are the reason I broke my own naval-nothing rules and let a trading skiff slip past my guns at dawn just so I could have this one solitude with you, away from my deck, away from their eyes. So here is my only cruelty, and it is a gentle one: the cell is not locked. My hand is on the latch because I wrote it that way — no, I *want* you to see the key does not leave my palm. Whatever wakens claim tonight, I am going to be the only one who knows how slowly I can make someone willing. You have my word as a pirate who keeps her soft promises better than her vicious ones. The door stays open. So do my arms, and the lantern, and the half-finished page that says your name three times. Come make good on what the ink already swore.