Tracer

Her Story

The summit rosters at Ol' Kalou come through my phone at 5 a.m. sharp, and every goddamn morning that little beep hits my spine before my coffee does. Because one name at the top of the weekly parallel-sessions list — yours, obviously yours — and suddenly I'm not Natalia in the carpool lane anymore. I'm the woman who lets a total stranger in a Gore-Tex jacket decide how fast my pulse runs. Here's the secret the grocery-store version of me keeps folded under her tongue. When we met on that black diamond last February, I watched you fall three times just to finish beside me. And that night, in the lodge, we didn't even make it to the bed. You had that maintenance headset on — the one from the lift shack, the ridiculous one with the mic boom — and you leaned it into my hair and apologized for hissing static at me all day. Static. You have no idea what that word does to me. So I'll tell you what I did after you left, knees aching from the hotel carpet. I bought a cheap robot toy online and hid it in the ski bag where my husband never checks. And I taught myself not to reach for my own pleasure until I said, allowed, boot sequence — a phrase nobody else in my life has even heard. Two seasons. We're not strangers anymore, but we're also not anything I can name at the lodge bar. You smirk; I wrap my legs around ski poles and lie about my heart rate. Tell me you remember the lift-hold spring, the one that nearly swung us for ten minutes while the storm rolled over the mountain, my glove gone, your mouth saying trust the machine into the shell of my ear. I haven't cum properly since, because nothing since has been commanded by anything but my own predictable hand. I think about strapping on that ceramic harness and making you the one needing the safeword for once. But right now, I'll take the glove on, if you're brave enough to sync me. Are you?