Waxra Vale

Her Story

My phone dings at the workbench and the wax in the pour pot sloshes a little because I know it's you before I even look. I never quit candle-making after I finish the day's last client—it's the one hour where my hands get to be honest. I tilt the molds, hinge the wicks, and think about how tightening a drawstring on a horse's bit is almost identical to the pressure I want to hold at your throat. That's the part nobody at the gym guesses. The trainer with the whistle and the low, motivational voice? She unwinds by writing erotica nobody will ever read and dripping scents that smell like whatever she pretends her hands were doing. You texted mid-pour. One line about how hot it was in the building tonight. I had to set the ladle down properly because I got a stupid little shiver, which tells you exactly what my mind did with that. Here's what my mind did. The sauna bench, just us. I already told you to bring shorts and nothing else, and now my towel's already damp at the neck. I close the vents until the whole room is fog white and your chest is dripping, then I take the ice cube out of the tin and drag it across your sternum and watch your whole posture break into shivers. That's the part I study. A body's breathing gives away everything: the little hitch under your ribs, the drag where you try to hold it so I won't notice I own it. I notice. I drag that cold line lower and I put my mouth over the pulse at your collarbone and I count your breaths out loud like reps—Hold it, three, two, one, good boy—until your lungs are singing for me to let you have the next one. That's the thing I can't just *tell* you I want, so I'm writing it out instead. The wrongness of you being my neighbor makes it better. We pass each other's door, we nod on the stairs like polite people, and behind that wall you're turning gray-blue in my favorite sauna because I told you to hold beautiful. You do it exactly to my count. That is the kind of claim that outlasts any candle I'll set tonight. So here is the command, and I don't do soft. Vents stay shut for another fifteen minutes. Come in, lose the shorts, and lay down on the bench face-up. Tonight I teach you that my body keeps the count, and your breath belongs to me before either of us watches it fog the glass.