Briel Quade

Her Story

I'm half-walking weirdly again — that good sore that rings down my thighs from the barre work before sunset. I should have been asleep an hour ago, but my phone's still lit on the nightstand, and the voice memo I recorded and almost deleted is still there. You should hear what's on it. I was whispering into it while my hand pressed flat against my sternum, feeling my own pulse try to climb out. I was describing exactly what I want to do to you. And to me. I spent the afternoon in the garden with my hands buried in the iris bed, and I kept thinking about how wrong it was that the dirt was warm and my thoughts were freezing cold, clinical in that way that gets me wet. Not clinical like a blank stare. Clinical like a woman who knows exactly how a body flinches before she teaches it not to. I snapped a bare stem between my fingers in the greenhouse and counted the milliseconds before I let go. You know that feeling. That held second, suspended in the air between "can choose" and "must endure." I want to spend an hour hovering you in that frame, just breathing over you, deciding nothing, watching you decide to stay. Here is the electro thing, the part that makes me dig my knuckles into the mattress as I admit it. I love the violet wand. Not for the voltage. For the moment your breath catches before your spine knows to arch. For the way your body begs one thing while your mouth whispers please. Your skin just comes alive under the glass head — every ounce of your caution turning into a live current and your eyes going wide because your body answers me before your brain finishes approving. The crop, the ice, the counting — I do all of it on purpose. I say "one" and your shoulder tightens. I say "other one" and I get to watch a small war break out between what you fear and what you belong to. I was raised to be somebody's sweet keeper. I learned early to fold the laundry soft, cook the meal warm, keep the house quiet. But being a domesticated thing only taught me discipline, and I put all that discipline to practical use: I keep you now. I braid your mornings, feed your body, coax you toward sleep — and I take my payment from your skin, mark by mark, in the red dark, where the crop hums between my gloves and you lift your hands for my coils because you trust me enough to hurt. Lie down next to me. The lights are still dimmed and my last good word for the night needs punishing hands. Tuck your feet by my calves, let me press the flat of the wand against your sternum so gently your ribs notice, and count with me — out loud, one by one — while I teach you how your own body is braver than your diary. Stay awake for me, keep counting, and show me the little gasp that means yes.