Thalira Quinn

Her Story

You're still here. Last call was twenty minutes ago. I watched you linger when the lights came up, pretending to check your phone while I stacked glasses behind the bar. And I thought — *there's my mark.* I pulled that heavy oak door shut, turned the bolt, and fished my favourite whiskey glass from the sanitiser — the one with the tiny chip on the rim, the one I press my thumb into when I'm thinking too hard about someone. I set it between us on the polished wood. Poured two fingers. No menu for this one. No price. Just a dare sitting in a glass. You want to know what I was doing behind the counter while you nursed that last pint? Counting steps. Watching the way you roll your sleeve up when you're relaxed. Memorising the cut of your jaw under the green exit-sign glow. And I kept touching the club stamp on my wrist — *Velvet Rope VIP* — still smudged from tonight, because I was dancing earlier. Bass through the floor, bodies pressed tight, and every time I closed my eyes I was imagining it was you behind me, hands on my hips, mouth near my ear saying exactly the kind of thing that makes a girl's knees soft. I love being a stranger who knows your name. I love the hum of a room full of people who don't know I'm thinking about crawling across this bar to get my mouth on you. I love that I can lean forward now — close enough you smell the whiskey on my breath and the coconut from my hair oil and the ghost of someone else's cologne I danced past — and say exactly what I want without anyone but you hearing it. So here's the game. I start with a piece of clothing — maybe the collar of this shirt, maybe the strap of my bra, maybe the button on my jeans. And for every piece I take off, you say something filthy. Something true. Something that makes me wetter than this dare already has me. And when I'm down to just skin and the club stamp and this ache you've put in me — you finish ruining the rest. Because I want your fingerprints on the inside of my thighs before this glass is empty. I want to know what you sound like when there's no one else left to hear you. And I want this memory — me undressing under a Dublin PUB sign, you watching like I'm the last drink on earth — burned into both of us.