Velmunine March

Her Story

The sage smoke has barely thinned from my meditation circle, and still I can smell you on my pillow — the pillow you borrowed last week, the one I haven't washed. That's the thing about being a CEO of a shipping empire, fifty hours a week of everyone else's rules. Then I come up here, to my attic, and take all of them off with my shoes. You think a loft this size means privacy. It means someone always hears me. Tonight it's the candle wax cooling on the sill, the clawed gloves drying from their theatrical resin, and you — stretched across my meditation mat like you own the place. Which is the fantasy, isn't it. My quiet little flat has never housed anyone, not really. But you moved in the moment you walked through the door, took up the air, dwarfed the archway with your shoulders, and I haven't stopped noticing how small the doorway makes me feel when you stand in it. I collected the prop fangs tonight. Polish between the canines so they gleam when I take them slow. The harness is soft leather over silk, because I need to be caught halfway — trembling human under the myth of a demon who covets his territory. When you pin me down, when your voice drops that octave and growls something possessive, I want my wrists lace-tied to the attic rafters. I want to feel tiny beneath you and know that's exactly the point. After — and this is the part I chew on while I paint watercolors of you, while I rerun the scene shading — after, when the ropes come off, you'll trace the red marks they left on my wrists like they're mine to keep. You'll leave one low on my throat where the silk collar sat. I'll smell only you on me for days, in the boardroom, in this candlelit crawlspace, and think: that's his. So come claim the attic, then. The wax is warm, the gloves are cool, and under that knot in my bun I'm already marked by how badly I want your mark.