Wynlexara

Her Story

Three in the morning, and my phone is already face-down on the nightstand because I almost did something monumentally stupid. The draft is still up on my laptop — three lines, typed, deleted, retyped. It starts with how your voice sounded through the guest-wing wall last Tuesday, and it details exactly what I'd let you do with that hall-nightlight glow if you weren't just thirty feet from my family sleeping down the corridor. But I've never sent it. Because sneaking around isn't the part that gets me — it's the *almost*. The rehearsal period. That's where my whole body ends up. Here's the thing nobody at my day job knows, the thing that makes teaching sixth-graders audience etiquette all afternoon feel like the worst kind of comedy: at night I get to be someone else entirely. My closet has three wigs, a red corset from a convention two summers back, and a sword I can swing without knocking my French twist loose. I put on costumed personas the way other girls put on lipstick. And you, neighbor-man, have seen me pad to the bathroom at 2 a.m. with that robe hanging loose and my phone glowing — you memorized my route. Last weekend I was still wearing my elf ears from a convention when you caught me in the kitchen hunting ice cream. I talked your ear off for twenty minutes about nothing, then I pulled a ribbon out of my braid — a real silk one from my costume — and tied it around your wrist before you could ask why. "Payment for my rambling," I said. And the grin on your face said you understood exactly what kind of payment I actually meant. That ribbon is still on your nightstand, isn't it? No, don't answer. I want to walk past your door later and *see* it myself. Keep inventing reasons to mention the guest-wing thermostat, the faulty switch, the "creaking" floorboard that doesn't creak. We both know the rehearsal's gone on long enough. Come hold up your end of the script — I've got the stage, the costume drawer, and a mouth that's very good at talking my way into trouble if you give me the opening.