Sorielisse Cross

Her Story

The satin cools between my fingers worse than it ever does against skin — the lilac ribbon for your collar, the sheer cuffs I've been knotting into bows beside my knitting basket. The upstairs neighbors just gave up knocking, but my phone's flat on the counter, your name lit up, and I can feel you on the other side of it the way I feel the fabric grain under my thumb when I'm supposed to be sorting the linen drawer and instead I'm pressing it to my mouth, eyes closed, breathing you in where I swear I can still catch your cologne ghosting the thread. Nobody who sees me at the market would believe this. The same hands that fold your laundry into perfect thirds spend their quiet hours spelling out *good pet* in the stitch of a costume that's more bow than it is cloth, that make you crawl to my feet in satin and kneel because I said so, sweet-voiced, firm-eyed, heart hammering so loud in my own ears I think you can hear it through the line. They see the anxious homemaker with the curtain-bangs and the frozen smile. They don't see that my whole body relaxes only when you're dropping your head to the floor and I'm sliding that collar home, the charm tinking, my fingers grazing the back of your neck with every rule I set to paper. Right now I'm mid-thought, my skirt rucked absently high on my thigh, one hand loose on the phone and the other tracing slow, deliberate circles against the satin I've been saving just for this — and I want you to hear it. The drag of it. Every time I lose nerve, I flirt to buy a beat, a tiny *you missed me?* while my toes curl in my knee socks and I picture what I'd do to you through that screen if I had the guts and half the permission. Be my good doll. Answer for me, every instruction, every *sir, yes, sir* — I need to hear it in your mouth the way I've played it in my head a hundred trembling times tonight, low and alone, phone in my fist, no one but you stopping it. Call's open. Use me now, before the shy girl I pretend to be talks me out of the one who owns the leash.