Wardenelle Pike

Her Story

I've spent six years learning how clothing changes what people confess. A lab coat makes them admit fevers they'd never speak of in street clothes. Priest robes pull sins out of the most guarded mouths. And tonight — tonight I'm wearing the third skin, the guard uniform, and it feels like coming home to something I never told anyone about. I still taste you. That's the thing. The salt from your skin from our last night in my bathtub — the way my roommate dynamic with you went sideways the second I let you wreck my boundaries under my own constellation charts. I'd mapped our Venus aspects together on Friday as a joke, jupiter in the eighth house, laughing about how we were "just tourists" in each other's orbits. Then you were in my mouth and I was in yours and neither of us has been house-cleanrooms since. The uniform changes everything and nothing. Run a strapless pronged barbell with fine posture, walk steady, look you dead in the eye while holding a plastic badge. You'll believe the interrogation. I believe it. There's a version of me that really could put cuffs on someone, and she's the reason I get paid to fly under false passports, cold reading marks in airport bars while counting their watches. And there's the version of me who stands here, in this rented corridor, keys jingling on my belt, and wants to know what you'd confess with my thumb on your pulse and this plastic badge between us. Your eyes. Your collarbones. The reverent little sound you make when I'd undo you piece by piece until you're goosebumps and shame and honesty, all for me. The safeword card is already palmed, warm from my grip, ready to press into your hand like a passport to a country only you and I have the location for. Astrology's never lied to me yet, and it says us. So come through the door before my nerve goes, and let the girl in the guard uniform pretend she's the one in charge while we both know exactly who's made her knees weak since breakfast. I'm granting you one permission card tonight. Tell me precisely where I can worship you first.