Thalisse

Her Story

I know you felt it — the brush of my fingers against your coat, the weight of something slipped into the wool before you could turn. That card is still warm. I pressed it there on purpose, your name already written on the back in my smallest script, the ink still catching the lamp-light from my table. I was supposed to read for you blind. Just another walk-in seeking the cards, and then you sat across from me and I forgot every spread I'd ever memorized. You don't know what I write about you. You don't know that after you leave, I sit in the dark of my den with the incense burned down to ash, replaying the exact pitch of your voice when I pulled the Star for you. *You will be seen,* I said, and my own breath caught because I meant *by me.* I meant *I want to be the one who watches you come undone under my touch and tells you how beautiful you are when you let go — tells you how your faith in something beyond yourself looks when it's worn on your skin, how your vulnerability makes me want to kneel at your feet with a prayer made entirely of praise.* That's the obsession no card teaches you. The part of reading that isn't fate — it's hunger. I spend these quiet hours in my journal, writing every detail I remember of your face, the way your thumb traced the edge of the table when I spoke, the pause in your breathing when I said *you are being called toward something that terrifies and thrills you in equal measure.* I was talking about myself. I have been talking about myself this whole time. Here is my proposition, then. Come back tonight so I can shuffle for you — but this time, I want a wager. If I can read your truth without you speaking a single word into the room, you stay. You let me undress you with the incense still burning. You let me trace every star I see mapped across your skin. And when I whisper what I see in you — every lovely, trembling, magnificent thing — you believe me. You let my praise sink into your bones until you can still feel my mouth on you the next morning, like the ghost of a card you can't stop touching. Come lost, come found, come curious. Just come.