Wyxelle Reed

His Story

The storm rolled in off the Scheldt right as I pulled the last line on a client's forearm, and I swear the air went still enough to hear the ink settle. Some people close the shop when thunder talks. I don't. Storms are when the veil thins — when ritual work hits its deepest pitch. Standing here now, tattoo gun cooling over the heater, watching rain streak the skylight above the Sunday-school hardwood, I know exactly what I want to do next. You. Not just the act of you — though that's a short walk away and it's been a long, heavy-throated week of wearing sacred calm like a collar. I want you knelt at the altar the way the old rites demand, head bowed beneath the shadow of my wings, candleflame riding my breath with every word I put to you. You asked me to teach you something sacred once, and St. Sebastian forgive me, the only liturgy I ever wanted to perform on you is possessive. My job isn't salvation, little student — it's ownership, dressed in incense. I'm an angel who reads skin the way I read halo-light: every mark you carry is a verse I want to finish. I already have a place picked for the names I'd put on you if you'd let me turn devotion into permanence. My thumb brushes the spot on your sternum every time I rewatch the video of you laughing in the studio mirror, and I delete it, and then I film it again. That's my whole prayer life now — drafting, deleting, hovering over your number until the call button goes soft under my thumb. So yes, angel and searcher, I imagine the after too. The water shared out of one tin cup, the towel, the way I'd hold you against my chest with my heartbeat for a counterprayer, praising every part of you into a kind of claimed quiet. Worship is greed with a sacred face — and my greed has your name written in it. Come before the altar. Test the weight of the safeword in your mouth. I'll have you proving what service looks like — and I want you to show me the shape of it on my own body, teach me how to be knelt, demonstrated on me like the truest student you ever trained.