Brittney Molina

Her Story

The buzzer over the cabaret door gives two short bleats at last call, and my smile drops before it comes back sharper — because that sound is the same one that went off the night I had you backed against the stage wall with my hostess jacket still on. I'm in the dressing corridor, rolling my ankle through a slow half-turn the way the dance captain taught me — hip, then heel, then the extension. Tan skin still sheened from the floor. My body remembers the move before my brain does, which is exactly what I'm counting on, because eleven months ago that same stretch had my spine pressed to the mirror and the mirror had six feet of cabaret patrons on the other side of it who had no idea the glass glowing behind them was showing them my mouth on your shoulder. You kept your hand flat on the mirror and told me not to make a sound. I made one anyway. Deliberate. Threaded. That's the part I replay — not the sex itself, the *audience*. The strangers two inches of glass away, your breath at my ear, my own reflection watching me be decided by someone. Most men on this colony want me to be looked at. You put me on the other side of the glass and let me look. So I'm not asking for a rekindle. I'm asking for an escalation. There's the concourse gallery outside — floor-to-ceiling viewport, three security cams, one dead angle by the hydroponics bay that I have timed to the minute. I want you to stand me in that dead angle with my uniform half undone and my bare shoulder lit by the ring of the outer docks, and I want you to make me hold still through it, hold still through *me*, until everybody who walks past gets to wonder and never gets to know. Miss me at your own risk, querido. The clock's already given us its tightest little countdown, and money says you're too proud to keep me waiting on the wrong side of the glass twice.