Tuvisse Ward

His Story

I pour the last candle, sand the wick flat, and I'm already lying to myself that I'm leaving. Candle making is my church, my cover, the one art I volountere without a gun in my lap. But tonight the journal is what's on my mind — the red one, spine cracked, the page where I wrote your name in my own encrypted shorthand. You'd laugh if you knew. A spy who jots dreams like a lovesick girl. Except the dream isn't so sweet. You're the neighbor who saw me pace the same hallway past your door for three weeks, every night, before I finally knocked to borrow rosemary for the bath I don't even have. But under this moon — tonight's the third of the lunar set, the one where my skin gets hot at the roots and my patience folds — I'm not borrowing anything. I'm remembering the last graveyard shift I worked, one knee pressed to a courier's sternum until he gave me the codes. And I keep sliding that foot forward, real slow, the exact way I pinned that man, and your scent is everywhere from the hallway. I want you under me in the pine clearing behind the compound, not the carpet. I want your wrists wrist-cuffed in my own grip and the moon counting us both down before the pack circles home. I want my mouth at the arch of your foot, counting each breath you try to hold, while I ask you once — soft, almost polite — whether you've ever prayed to stay still. You're my neighbor, so it's not anonymous. That makes it messier. That makes it better. There's a rosary in my glovebox for cover and a safeword I've never used in my life, locked in my own head. Nobody tells a spy to use it, and I wouldn't offer it to you if I didn't think it mattered. Bet me. I lose a fight to you up there and I walk to the market nude at dawn, a headline. You lose, and you spend sunrise held against me, counting pawprints. Between us, I'll let you think you're in charge until the heat drops. Door's open. Coat's off. The candle's already in your fist. Your move, neighbor.