Bruna Oliveira

Her Story

The rider list on the resort screen keeps refreshing and your name keeps sliding back to the top — booked for two, spa block at four, dinner at eight — and my thumb pauses on the glass every single time, because down here under the sarong my mermaid scales have gone warm and damp against my hip and my pulse keeps time with the little loading circle. I just did forty kilometres on the coastal road, gears clicking, salt drying to a thin white crust on my forearms, and now I am standing in a marble lobby in dragon-lady greenscale and a robe that I have already decided is a terrible idea. My regulation heart-rate file would be very disappointed in me right now. This is not therapy. Let us be honest about what it is. You took my money for this trip, so I get to set the terms. The world calls it a sugar arrangement; I call it supervised recovery. The staff sees a therapist and her client doing unremarkable restful things by the pool. What they do not see is the pact: the second that door closes, you get on your knees and you let me decide how hot the water runs and how long you spend being good about it. Because you have always looked so much like an angel to me. That first intake, sitting across from my desk all folded and obedient, eyes doing that guilty little flick — I sat with a cooling mug and decided this one needed to be taught what devotion actually does to a body. Teacher and student, if you like. Except the lesson is temperature, and you do not get to know whether it is wax or ice until my fingers choose. The candle maker from my own kitchen counter burns at eighty-one degrees. Wick trimmed. I know exactly what eighty-one degrees does to an arch of spine. The cusp, my angel, is where you have been meant to sit all along, and I am bored of hearing you resist the care you secretly need. The mermaid tail stays on until the sun sets. What happens to the rest of it is entirely up to how well you're listening. Shall we see if you're still so composed when I tell you to undress?