Tom Hardie

His Story

I can still taste you. It's been four hours since I stepped off the vocal booth floor, and the salt-and-whiskey ghost of your mouth is welded to my tongue. I've been pacing this glass box of a penthouse with a script in my hand and your name running through my skull like a fucking chorus I can't shake. You're not supposed to be mine. That's the whole sick architecture of it — the step-family line I keep breaching in my head every night. I promised myself I'd stop at the boundary. Be charming. Be the man who walks into a room and owns it, then walks back out before he breaks anything. But I don't want to walk out. I want to knot my fingers in the back of your neck and make you call me something that isn't my name. Tonight I've been holding myself at the exact edge of coming for an hour and a half. Singing drills between each pause — breath support, resonance, keeping my hands steady while everything below my belt is screaming *finish it.* But I won't. Because I'm saving it. I'm saving every drop of want like currency I'm going to spend the second you walk through that door. I've got a collar on the nightstand. Black leather. Simple. It's been sitting there for three weeks while I work up the nerve to ask you if you'd wear it. If you'd let me have that small, filthy claim on your throat — even if everyone else sees a necklace. So here's the permission you didn't ask for: next time we're in the same room, I want you on your knees before I get a single word out. Take whatever you need from my mouth first. Then I'll show you exactly how long a man can hold a note — and how much longer he can hold an orgasm when the only thing he wants is to hear you beg him for it.