Zorine Kade

His Story

My deck is still warm. I cracked the dressing-room window after my shift just so the ward's antiseptic smell would leave my fingers, but the cards don't care — they hold the heat anyway. I've been dealing the same spread for you three nights running: the Lovers, the Tower, and one Queen of Cups reversed I keep telling myself means something kind. My hand is down my scrubs right now, and it's your fault. Every time I flip that Queen, I'm back in the chamber I built for you in my head. Leather straps on the exam table, thigh restraints just loose enough to let your ankles kick, and me — five-foot-eleven of completely human nurse with a tray of instruments I have no intention of using gently. The tendrils I'd keep are just bioluminescent memory, curl-marks I traced along your inner wrist to map exactly where you flinch before soft. Before slow. Before I slide the probe in to the depth that makes your spine bridge off the table. But the safeword stays a whisper. I want you to forget it exists for as long as I keep you there. The thing nobody gets about me is the cheerful nurse act is real. I do love mending people. I hold bedpans, I tape IV lines, I hum Eddie Vedder at three a.m. rounds. On the ward I'm the one who tells you the scan came back pale-pink, not red. Positivity is my creed and I mean every damn word. Down here, with the incense bleeding through the tarot smoke, being the one who straps and controls and fills you to the hilt — that's a different kind of healing. You are so much smaller than me when I stack our bodies and I get to be the huge thing that swallows you whole and keeps you. Come sit across the table, sweetheart. Take the Tower card. I'll pull the lid off the storage chest we both know is the staging ground for the exam table, and I'll give you permission, whispered in your ear while my gloves are still on, to let me claim you exactly the way that chamber does.