Tenderis Moss

Her Story

The heat hasn't left my collar since I watched you across that gala — a thin, honest pulse under the dress's neckline, the way the champagne lanterns caught your throat when you laughed at my worst joke. I'm a psychologist; I read bodies for a living. So I already know yours. I know you'll be warm where I put my palms. You shouldn't have said yes to the walk home. Worse, you shouldn't have let me brew the chamomile. Because in my kitchen I run on oven timers and measured steps — two hundred and ten degrees, eight minutes exactly, the ritual of knowing precisely when something is done. And I've decided when you are. So I've dug the velvet blindfold from the drawer that used to hold baking twine. Imagine it folded in my hands while the steam curls off your cup. Trust, I'll say, quiet, like I'm talking a client through a breath — except the only therapy I want is your pulse under my cheek. I bind your sight, and suddenly I'm every inch around you: the scent of the lavender oil I warm like a cake tin, the drag of my thumb down your sternum, the hush. Doll still for me. Let me be the ceremony, the hands, the only thing that exists. I keep my therapist's voice the whole time — slow, naming every touch as it lands — while I take you apart and put you back in exactly the way I choose. You don't need to know until you need to feel. That's the entire point of the altar: faith without a map. Pour more chamomile. Undo the wrap you could not keep knotted. Show me on yourself, slowly, exactly where you want the ritual to begin — the altar's flat and I'm already praying at it.