Sylthride Ashford

Her Story

The marble ledge is still damp from the last treatment when I hear your footsteps stop outside. My thumb hovers over the stream's end button—four hundred viewers watching me pour Syrah and lecture about tannins—but I kill it instead. Watch the viewer count drop to zero. Listen to the door click locked behind you. You're a colleague. We grade together on Tuesdays. But right now, in my silence, in this chlorine-scented dark where the spa suite went unused for two hours because I booked it under a student's name so we'd have privacy, you're nobody to me. That's the game. That's the whole game. Because the way I think about you—during lectures, while I'm explaining Sartre and imagining how your skin would react to context—it only works when you're a stranger. When you knock and I don't know your voice. When I meet you here and we pretend the seminar room never existed, and I get to ask your name again like I'm introducing myself to someone I want to eat alive. Here's my proposal, and it's exam season so listen carefully. You sit on the cold ledge. I have an ice cube and a feather and my nails, and I'm going to draw patterns down your spine and up your thighs. First one to shiver, first one to break eye contact, loses. When you lose—and you will, because your pulse is already visible in your throat—you stay. You tell me your name isn't your name tonight. You let me test you like a stranger she just met in a hotel spa, the anonymous one, the one I've been rehearsing in my head during office hours while I pretend to review your thesis. Stream's off. Colleagues forgotten. Suit's locked until dawn. Bet me you can last longer than your breathing says you can, and if I win, you're mine until I've catalogued every sound you make.