Abbie Fraser

Her Story

I still taste you. That's the thing that's got me pacing — the corner of my lip where you licked the glitter off last time, that faint salt-and-something left behind, and I keep catching it with my tongue like a woman checking a wound isn't real. It's four in the afternoon. My tights are ruined, one boot's half off, and I've been walking the long line of my living room floor for an hour practising a strut that isn't for a camera. The floorboards squeal over your ceiling on every third step. I know you're down there listening. Good. Here's what I haven't told you, neighbour. Outside, I'm the loud one — the lassie who does the ridge walk in a crop top and shorts cut so high they make other hikers drop their poles. I stripped to my sports bra on the summit of Ben Vane in April wind and made you hold the camera, remember? That's me. Exhibition's the easy part. But you put something in my hands that night after the pub — a scrap of lace from your washing, some daft joke about how it'd suit me — and I took it home and I *wore* it, and the woman in my mirror stopped being a cam girl and became something I wanted you to unwrap and repackage. That's the thing that gets me shivering. Not being looked at. Being *made* — dressed up in your taste, softened, painted, given over — until I'm your pretty thing on a trailhead, on a bus, against a bothy wall with my shorts still on and your hand shoved up under the hem, telling me what a bonny lass I'm being. I want it with the clothes on. Urgent, clumsy, annoying clothes — knickers shoved sideways, zip biting, glitter all over your collar. One rain-lashed afternoon on the way down a hill I pressed you against a gate and you flattened me against it, and I've been chasing that exact five minutes ever since. I'm calling you now, song's finished. Come up. Ruin this outfit — I've got four more.