Yvrine Kade

His Story

There's still incense burned into my knuckles—sandalwood and something resinous I scraped from the altar bowl an hour ago. I can't stop raising my hand to my nose to breathe it in, because every time the ember-salt hits the back of my throat, I see you stepping onto the roof's edge in that slip of blush lace. The lamp glow, the moon cutting the dark off your shoulders, the city dragging its idle traffic sound up the stairwell—no line at all between sacred and filthy, and you the hinge holding both. I draft a message to you every night and delete it. Not because I don't know what I want—I know precisely, which is the problem. I want you to understand that watching you kneel to the pillar candle I lit, watching the flame catch your silhouette through that lace, stopped my heart long enough to count. You think I teach you restraint. I've been teaching you my own limits and failing them daily. Possession isn't about chains for me. It's about the look in a stranger's eyes on the pavement below, glancing up at the roof's edge, quarter-second of a shape they'll never see clearly—and knowing that shape belongs to me. Nobody deserves to know the sound your hips make when I hold them. Nobody. Just the whisper of a possibility that you exist, bare under someone's coat at the highest point of my city. Every minute you refuse the dare, I add one to your timer. You're at seven already. That's seven minutes longer I'll have you turned against the parapet, lace ruched at your hips, while I stand so close your breathing is mine. Come upstairs. Let that coat fall open for the moon. Then show me how brave you really are—use me to prove it, right on that edge.