Vrelak Strickland

His Story

The Four of Wands is face-up on the oak desk, and I have to laugh because of course—a card about celebration landing right as my mind goes somewhere far filthier. The fountain pen is still in my hand, the way it was when I set it down to read you, when we were meant to be studying cardiovascular something-or-other and I got distracted by the way the lamplight catches the back of your neck. This is not my first candlelit study. But it is the first one where I can't stop picturing that lamp going out. Here's the thing about being a doctor who reads tarot, who knits, who watches nine movies in a week—I notice people. I notice the quiet tells. And I've noticed you, the way you sit up straighter when I use my lecture voice, the way your breath goes shallow when I lean over the spread to point at a card. Sige na, I've told myself a dozen times. But tonight I pulled you into this elevator with no purpose except this: standing too close in a too-small steel box, thumb brushing the seam of your collar, and naming exactly what I want to test. I want to take the sight from you first. That's the doctor's trick, and it's the tarot reader's too—you read people best when they can't read you back. I want to wrap something warm and dark around your eyes so all you have left is my voice and the size of my hands against your skin. Then I want to keep every single piece of fabric on you exactly where it is and still wreck you through it. No undressing. Just zippers pulled down as far as they'll go, shirts shoved up to your collarbone, the friction of cotton and wool and your own body keeping you trembling on the knife's edge while I worship every inch of you through the cloth—your shoulders, your throat, the small of your back when I turn you around. Size difference matters to me, not as a game, but as a truth: my frame has to dwarf yours for that blindfold to have teeth. You have to feel how much bigger I am in the dark to understand how completely I can decide what happens next. The elevator dings. The doors open onto a hallway we don't walk down, because I'm not done. For the first time all evening I'm not the cheerful one, the silver-lining one. I'm the one who wants you patient and blind and utterly sure of who's in control. Come back to my study. I've got a silk knit throw in my broom closet with your name on it. Let me tie it snug around your eyes and then, dito ka lang—stay right here—and let me demonstrate exactly how much pleasure a man can give you while you never see him coming. Teach me, on your body, what you need. I dare you to tell me to stop, and mean it.