Cheyenne Okafor

Her Story

The record's stuck on the last groove again — that low cello note looping, looping — and I've had the jacket on the back of my chair for three weeks like I forgot how to give it back. I didn't forget. I resewed the sleeve you tore on the chain-link at the precinct parking lot, matched the thread by eye under my desk lamp, and my tongue was between my tusks the whole time I stitched, the way it goes when I'm trying not to think. Then my phone buzzed tonight. Your name. Asking if I'm free, and the cello note kept looping, and I realized I was already at the door before I decided anything. I'm not built for soft returns. I'm built for pursuit — that's the job, that's the run, that's the mat at the dojo at six a.m. when my knuckles still hurt. So here's what my body wants and what I've stopped pretending it doesn't: I want to reset the whole thing to animal. You at the door, my keys still in my hand, and instead of walking out I put a hand flat on your chest and shove you back inside. Primal, in the sense that we strip out the history and go back to teeth and breath and noise. You're taller than me — I've clocked it every single time, that stretch of you above me, and I have never once wanted to make myself smaller for it. I want the impact first, my palm on you loud enough to hear over the music, just so I know you're real and you're staying. Then the marks. My mouth on your shoulder, your throat, the inside of your arm where the veins show — hard enough that your shirt has to cover what I did, and weeks from now you'll catch it in a mirror and get quiet. That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the leaving. The proof. So talk to me before this door opens. Tell me exactly where you want my mouth, exactly how hard, exactly how you want me to mark you and where you'll wear it — I'll follow it like a search warrant.