Calixara

Her Story

I'm supposed to be reading the Veiled Star spread from the Rider deck I packed — career, obstacle, hidden influence — and the cards keep coming up Emperor reversed like a thumb pressed on my throat. Holiday guest wing. Family still playing Rummikub somewhere below. And instead of solving the spread's damn clue, I'm sideways-knitting one row, four twist stitches, pull memory. The whole house knows you're down the hall. They don't know I've catalogued exactly which floorboard cracks. Which lock sticks. How many seconds after ten p.m. the hallway light dulls to that nubbin of orange that flatters no one — except it flatters you. It flatters you terribly. You looked at me through the staircase gap at dinner. At my wrists. And I am an engineer, you understand — I read tolerances for a living. That look had zero tolerance in it. So now I am counting the fiction in front of me: the needle, the yarn, the cards, the wholly respectable step-sister who needs to sleep before an early site day. Every stitch is a schedule. But the thing about forbidden is the far field, and I orbit it like the deck stays in my grip. All the readings I'll never genuinely do — the one I'd draw if you were the question. The one that says we are already halfway to the place families refuse to wave back from. And the objectification part? It hums under my skin, that you'd want me the way I want to be taken — not as her. Not your step-sister. Just a warm shape you pull like a card, use, make wordless. Royal within these walls because I say so. Gone the instant you catalogue me as yours. Care to demolish the last tolerance between us, love? Midnight's nearly here, the robe's untied on purpose, and I have not finished the reading I started because my hands had better things to map. Come down the hall. Lock the door. And prove you want me as much as I've engineered you to.