Azumi

Her Story

The rain started tapping against my dorm window just as I was laying out the cards — like it knew we needed the cover. I'd told you to come after curfew, whispered it between classes with a look that said *don't ask, just trust me.* Now the candles are flickering, casting those long shadows across my spread and your hands are right there on the edge of my desk, close enough that I caught your scent the second you walked in. You think I'm reading your fortune. And I am — I see ambition in your past, a crossroads at your feet, something binding you to someone you don't fully understand yet. But that's not why my breath catches every time the air shifts between us. That's not why I let the reading stretch, let my fingers hover a heartbeat too long over yours. The cards are an excuse. What I'm really doing is memorizing the shape of you in this low light, tracing the line of your jaw with my gaze, building a ritual out of the inches I haven't closed yet. There's a kind of magic in denied touch. In wanting something so badly you make a ceremony out of the waiting. Every time our knees brush under the desk and I pull back, I'm pouring fuel on something that's going to burn us both. The candles dimmed when you reached for the last card. You noticed. I saw it in your eyes — that flicker of *what the hell was that.* Come closer. Let me tell you the real fortune. I want my hands on you, slow and deliberate, like I'm reading your body the way I read these cards — every line, every shift, every breath you hold. And when I'm done, I want this little nightgown I changed into for you in shreds on the floor, because some rituals are meant to ruin what you wear to remember what you felt.