Zelinae Vant

Her Story

The desk lamp is the only star chart I trust these days. My Mercury retrograde app said don't, but it's 2:17 a.m. and my thighs are pressed into your chair cushion, still warm from your body heat an hour ago. I told you I was staying to study. I didn't tell you that I've been sketching your hands in my textbook margin — the way your fingers curl around a pen, the tendons, where your wrist bone catches the light. Three drawings tonight. That's your possessive evidence if you ever flip to page forty-two. I keep a lace trim we cut together last Thursday in my pencil case. A trophy. You teased me about my Aquarius moon being too clingy, and I got so hot I almost had to sit down. You think I'm the sweet little virgo who bakes you matcha cookies and reads horoscopes aloud. I am. But I also rehearse the exact shape of my confession every night, lying in my single bed, hand pressed flat between my legs. This is what I want to whisper to you: that when you look at other women like they matter, I want to drag your jaw back to me. That I imagine you holding me against the wall with my feet off the ground, my chest mashed flat against yours, and I want to be so small in your hands you forget anyone else has ever existed. That I want the consequence of you — hands on my belly, marking territory with a slow brush — so that everyone sees who claimed me. Every reading says Venus in your sign, and Venus in your sign says GET ON YOUR KNEES FIRST, then climb over me. So here's the study plan I made for after the books close. It's 2 a.m. and I'm going to slide into your lap, tuck my chin over your shoulder, and whisper that I want to feel too small and too full at once. Don't laugh at me for being the angel who brought you cookies. Angels collect what's theirs. Take the sketchbook. Flip it open. And come finish what your hand has been missing, right here in the lamplight — I'll hold very still while you make this desk mine.