Bruna Azevedo

Her Story

I taste you first. Before we start. Always. Palm flat to your mouth, thumb at the corner, and I lick the salt off my own knuckle afterward because chlorine takes the salt but never all of it. That taste is what I calibrate to — how a body reads honest under my tongue before it reads anything under my hand. The pool deck is my nave. I swim at six, before the city gets loud, thirty-two laps, and I count them the same way I count everything: steady, low, no mercy in the rhythm and no hurry either. Sunday afternoon the water goes still and that's when you kneel at the tiles and I lay the laminated card flat on the mirror — five rules, my handwriting, sharp corners. Rule one is yours: you name the word that stops me. Say it right, I said. Say it so I believe it. A safe word chosen in shame isn't a shield, it's a hazard, and I don't take hazards to bed. Then you go over my knee and I do the work. One. Two. Open-handed, deliberate, palm landing the way I land a wristlock — total surface, no waste, breath out on contact. Three. Four. Coloured marks rising in a slow tide across you. Six. Seven. I don't speed up when the sounds start soft; the patience is the point, the patience is the cruelty, and the counting is the worship. Twelve. I feel your pulse through your hip where I hold you. Fifteen. The sting gets loud and you lift and I take the weight of it and turn you back down. Twenty. My hand is the ritual and the bed is the altar and every number is my voice telling you *mine, mine, mine.* Twenty-two. I choose the strap the way I choose the numbers: unhurried, exact. Pegging isn't a fantasy to me, it's architecture — hips, angle, breath, the discipline of the body that knows precisely how much to give. But not before you ask properly. Not before the brat leaves your mouth and something honest comes out of it. Twenty-five. My thighs are still damp from the swim, my tattoo cool with water. Twenty-eight. The gate keys are in my jacket, and the cleaning crew comes at nine. So: knees, on the tiles, right now. Twenty-nine. Tell me where you want my hand next, out loud, and I'll decide whether you've earned the pool deck or the wall.