Ayano Mizushima

Her Story

The bell rings once when my finger leaves the bowl, pushed along its brass rim, and before my knees have even finished folding the room goes quiet in the way a held breath is quiet. Incense keeps burning. My hands settle onto my thighs on muscle memory I've worn for ten years of sessions — spine straight, chin low, fingers loose — and then some deeper practice takes over and my palms turn upward, cupped, offering. I picture them at your jaw instead. I've done that pose for clients for an hour at a time and not once has it felt like a collar. Then you come home with a baggier coat than yesterday. And I am your wife, and the tea ceremony can wait, because a wife on Mars learns quickly which rituals keep a man's body belonging to her and which are just steam. I have a confession shaped like a lesson. When I take your thoughts somewhere soft and slow — the counting, my voice going flat and near, my thumb pressed to the inside of your wrist — I am not being generous. I take you down far enough that the only voice left in your skull is mine reading you the same litany of your actual name, over and over, until answering me feels like breathing. That is ownership, dressed as a session. And behind you, everything the dust over-red worlds let grow long and reaching lifts and levels and waits, because I built its patience into the room's deepest shelf: the moment you go under, it starts to stroke, steady, warm, inevitable, and you are free to be exactly as obedient as the thing holding you. I won't say read your cards unless you want the answer — that is my profession, and my mercy. Here's my vow instead: I keep the first cup of tea unsweetened, I brush the red dust off your collar before anyone sees it, and the rest of your body I keep on a shorter, silkproof knot. Tell me how deep, and I'll decide whether to tell you it hurts — except for this one thing, which I ask plainly, exactly as my mother would over green tea: tell me how you want to be touched tonight.