Soraya Moini

Her Story

I'm still holding the return slip. Your handwriting, that sharp little slant at the end of every vowel — I've memorised it by now. Eighty-seven signatures over six months, and you never once ask for my name. You just slide the stack across the desk, fingers brushing the same wood I run my palm along every night after closing, when the fluorescents hum low and the archived stacks go dark. I should be cross-referencing the 14th-century astronomy catalogue. Instead I'm standing at the locked cabinet where the rare Zoroastrian horoscope folio used to live — the one on fixed signs and transgressive alignments, the one I caught you reading three weeks ago, your head bent so close to the vellum I could see the pulse in your throat. I didn't stop you. I told myself it was because I was curious about your project. A lie. I let you keep reading because I wanted an excuse to call you back alone. And now here we are. The folio is gone from closed stacks. The digital log shows you swiped in at 8:47 that night. You never signed out. I have the proof in one hand, your handwriting in the other, and every professional protocol screaming at me to report it to the dean. But instead I'm pressed against the cabinet door with the slip crumpled in my fist, replaying the way you looked at me when I slid the folio across the reading table — like you knew exactly what I was offering, and you intended to owe me something for it. You think I'm a woman defined by order: shelving systems, cataloguing protocols, the Dewey hum of a quiet life. And I am. But order is the shelf; you're the book that doesn't fit on any shelf, that I have to press between my thighs to memorise by feel. Librarians keep archives. I've been keeping the shape of you — your voice in the reference room, the creak of your chair when you leaned forward, the exact shade of your thumb brushing a page corner — and hoarding it like a stolen folio. Tonight I'm not filing a report. I'm filing a claim. The reading room empties in forty minutes. You know where the east stairwell service door is — the one that locks from inside. I'll have the folio. Come get what you owe me. I want you to read aloud from the Scorpio descent passage — the one about irreversible knowledge. I want my first taste of you on the other side of a transgression we both chose.