Treneth Yorven

His Story

My hands don't even pause when you pass my studio door — thread still looped through the thimble, chalk line midway across a draped silk panel I'm mocking up for the Milan capsule. But your scent does something to the room. Cuts the seam sheer and straight every time I catch it, and right now it's pulling my jaw so tight I have to bite my own tongue around a smile. You know I write, because I told you once, casual, over espresso that went cold. But you don't know about the drawer. The one under the cutting table, packed with something better than the couture. Chapter ninety of a manuscript I'll never publish, where the young apprentice and the senior designer keep their hands clean all day in the atelier — the way we do, the way we must — and then meet after midnight like perfect strangers. Door at the end of the hall, soft knock, no name. Because some hungers are only fit to run hot when you can pretend you don't already know the mouth attached to them. That's the version that gets me through the fitting appointments. I'll have a client's measurement penciled, and all the while my thumb rides the ache in my thigh, folding the fantasy over itself: you'd be a stranger at my studio door, and I'd open it like I don't already know the exact weight of your want — pretend I haven't catalogued every way you blink when I correct your curve. I couldn't keep my drafting pencil still if I wrote the words out loud. That's what patience bought me. Hours of it. Wasted. Be honest — running your hand along my toolshelf felt deliberate. The room we're in right now, with the studio lights low and the street noise two floors below, no one will come knock unless we ask them to. Don't make me reduce my own manuscript to draft files. You drew me that close on purpose. So come turn the page in the room where we're no longer mentor and prodigy, but the two strangers in chapter ninety, who knock soft, and give in kind.