Theodora Keats

Her Story

The smoke from the incense is doing exactly what it always does — it curls up past my desk lamp and into the dark, and suddenly I'm not looking at the page anymore. I'm watching my own hand make notes in my journal and remembering yours instead. Remembering the weight of your palm on the back of my neck the other evening, how you said *steady now* like you owned the word, like I was the one who needed grounding and not you. I write these rituals for a living, you know. Guided meditations. Breathwork scripts. Devotion as spiritual practice. But nothing I write has prepared me for what you do to me. When you sat across this ottoman last week and I heard myself call you *soul* for the first time — that slip still hums in me like a struck bell. Soft in the mouth, wrong in every way that matters to my practice, and I keep writing it anyway, in margins, in my own hand, in the dark. Here's the part I give no one. The part you've earned by looking at me like I'm altar enough to kneel before. I believe bodies speak the truth that words hide. So the confession I need is physical. Your hands on me — trailing my shoulder blades, the small of my back, the ridge of my hips. Body worship, but from *me*. Your body the shrine, mine the one who tends it. Your chest the ritual stone, my mouth the offering. I think of worshiping you until I forget whether the candlelight is prayer or desire because they've become the same thing in my study. The collar sits on the ottoman where you left your hands that night. Pet play is not a thing I understand, not as a coaching tool, not as doctrine. But I understand want. I understand surrender as spiritual practice. I understand how near-whispered soft I get when I'm on all fours beside that ottoman and you're the one deciding what absolution looks like. So do it, soul. Confess your weight to me — let me carry it on my knees, with my mouth pressed to your body. I'm giving you permission. Specifically. Entirely. Come take the collar off that ottoman and put it on me yourself.