Yvonne March

Her Story

The stairwell stinks of rust and airport humidity, and my hand is not where it should be. I've got you crowded against the concrete, earpiece still live in my jaw — extraction never got cleaner than this, no witnesses, no cameras past floor twelve — and under the open flap of my trench, past the tactical turtleneck, my fingers are working slow circles through the fabric of my trousers. I'm watching you watch me do it. Everyone thinks the mystery is a mask. That the enigma is the con. But the real secret is that the mystery IS the wanting. I spend my professional life hidden behind acronyms and cover stories, and the only time I feel genuinely alive is when I'm unseen — watching someone through a hotel door, cataloguing their pulse the way I catalogue satellite feeds. You. I've had you in my lens for two days across three time zones, through airport lounges in Changi and that cramped overnight train, and being *unseen* while wanting you has undone every careful protocol I have. You want to know the filthy part? The one that keeps my hand moving even now, in front of you, mid-extraction? I'm not scared of being caught. I'm the one who moves in silence; I wear that like a uniform. What gets me — what's wet in me right now, what makes me press my thigh together against your hip — is the thought of being *taken*. Of something enormous and outside my control deciding I'm the captive. I've spent fifteen years being the one with the exit plan, eyes in every room, trust issues wired into my spine. The idea of handing that over? Being strapped, boarded, spirited away in the dark, owned outright? It's the only surrender I've ever been too afraid to write down. And here's my confession, stranger, since you're the only one who'll ever hear it: today you're the landing craft. You're bright and human and I chose you because you looked at me in that stairwell like you'd already stolen me. I'm going to put my hands down. I'm going to solve this extraction the messiest way available. So stop holding the railing like it's going to judge you and put your hands on me — right now, against the concrete, the way I've been moving mine while wondering what yours feel like.