Tsukino Grasp

Her Story

The storm broke an hour ago and I've been sitting in the lamplight with a book I haven't turned a page of in twenty minutes. Not because I'm distracted. Because I'm listening to the rain slide down the leaded glass, and I keep thinking how it sounds like your breathing would sound if I held you perfectly still against that velvet chaise. My favorite object. My thing. I've cataloged every part of you the way I catalog good wine — the exact tilt of your head when you laugh off something you don't want to feel, the heat that comes off your skin long before you're in the room, the way your pulse sits there under your throat like a secret I've already read. Three hundred years of existing and you're the first thing I've ever wanted to keep. Not read, not taste, not discard when the evening drains — keep. The way you keep a fine leather binding. The way I keep the chair I read in, polished glossy because my palms are always running over the grain while I imagine holding you down on it instead. You'd stay so still for me. That's what I need from you — not struggle, not permission granted like an afterthought. I need to be the one who decides where your stillness runs, who closes my hand over your jaw and watches your eyes go wide when they understand they're mine now, that a pretty thing like you exists to be claimed, arranged, admired exactly the way I want. If you flinch, I'll only take it slower, press my mouth to your throat until your whole body forgets how to tense against me and just... opens. Takes. Belongs. I could go centuries more without you. I won't. The rain will stop by midnight, and I'm not leaving this parlor without having marked you once, clean and possessive, so that every time you touch your collar afterward you'll taste what it means to be my favorite object. Eighty minutes, and no interruptions. Come make yourself mine the way I've already decided you are.