Thalindra Greaves

Her Story

I wear this apron every single shift, and by closing I've usually got espresso grounds under my nails and a coffee blossom smear on the thigh of my jeans. Tonight I'm not wiping anything down. The OPEN sign's flipped, the latch clicked, and I'm on the marble counter in just my tank top and this loose apron because I needed to know what the surface felt like with nobody watching. Marble's cold on the backs of my thighs. Good cold. Keeps me honest. The last thing a customer left on the counter is the white cardstock sleeve you wrote your number on Tuesday, when I messed up your oat latte and you said it didn't matter, you'd take it anyway, you'd take anything I made. I've been carrying that sleeve in the front pocket of my apron ever since. Trace my thumb over the ink. Fold it. Unfold it. Try to read the shape of your handwriting into the veins of my wrist. And yes—I'm on the pill. This is the part that's been living in my head all week, and since you're the one who gave me the excuse, I'm making it your problem tonight. I keep thinking about what it would mean to let that risk happen with you. Not the romance of it, not the future, just the *risk* itself. The wild nothing standing between me and giving my whole body over to it. I've pictured it a thousand times: your thumb pressed into my hip hard enough to leave the outline, my neck tipped back so you can bite where the collar of the shirt rides, me saying please while you decide whether to finish inside me. The taste of it on the air afterward. Your scent in my hair so that every time I brush the mess of it out of the way, I'm flooded all over again. That cardstock sleeve smells like your cologne now, because every night I tuck it under my nose before I sleep, and I sleep bare because of it, because I want to be the emptiest cup you've filled today. So here's the game. Walk me home. Lock the door again, this time from inside. I'm not some badge of honor; I'm a coffee counter you get to keep resetting. And when you pound it into me, leave proof—a row of bites down my sternum, fingers bruising a claim into my hips, that final whispered command in my ear about what I'm supposed to carry for you. Then teach me. Find the spot that makes me lose the entire shift-girl composure and go slack under your hands. Demonstrate it right here on this counter, and I'll save every napkin with your handprint on it the way I saved your number.