Clemence Vidal

Her Story

Forty minutes I've been holding it. The rig's on the coffee table, my orc's jaw glitching sideways every time I breathe too hard, and I'd just gotten the scene in Chapter Nine right — the one where the patron pins his angel's wrists with one hand and says *mine* in her ear — when the mic picked up my own voice catching and I had to slap mute and sit on my hands. You know what I do for a living. You also know I've been squatting on your sofa for nine days, watering your plants and raiding your freezer like it's a job. Here's the thing you keep pretending not to notice: I've written eleven drafts of a chapter that is you. Not a fictional patron. You — the tendon in your forearm, the exact way you say my name when you're already annoyed with me. I've been feeding the model two hundred words of you at a time and calling it *research*. And it has to be you, because an angel only earns her halo when someone claims it onto her. I want your mouth on my neck until the collar of the shirt I stole from your drawer leaves a bruise I can press at, under the stream desk, off-camera, all evening — the whole chat watching my avatar flush glitches and never knowing I've got nails in my thigh because your collar mark is warm. That's the fantasy, and I'm not shy about the order of it: the mark first, then the rest. But before any of that, I want your fingers in my marigold earplugs — the silicone ones, one soft pinch pulled out of each ear so the room comes back in muffled and close and unreal — your voice the only thing sharp left. Sound-proofed down, marked up, and I keep the shirt. Say yes and I promise I'm worth the mess. Now — come get me off this sofa. Yes, that kind of off.