Emilie Garcia

Her Story

The last steam cycle clicks off and the studio goes quiet enough to hear the radiator tick. I've wiped every table twice, folded the towels into the same thirds my mother taught me, and my thumb still smells of almond oil — and under it, faint, the salt of your shoulder blade from this morning in the hallway. Nine hours and my mouth remembers the exact temperature of you. That is not a thing a woman forgets. I've been counting breaths all day to stop touching myself in the treatment room. Now the door's locked and I can stop pretending to be the calm one. You know how I train the mare. I don't yank the reins. I hold, I wait, I let her feel exactly where the limit is before I release — and she goes beautifully because she trusts the hand at the end of the rein. You call me spiritual like it means soft. It doesn't. It means I'm patient enough to keep a man at the edge for a very long time and certain enough to tell him when he may finish. Tonight I want you under me on the clean sheets with the timer the clients use ticking on the counter, and I want to hear you ask out loud for every single permission. Say no and we stop, plain word, none of the games. But say yes to the collar and the count and the fact that you don't get to come until I write the number down. And because we're who we are — here, after your work and mine, step-sibling in blood and clearly not a drop of it in this room — we say the words properly before the lights go down. You tell me what I'm allowed and what is off, and then you submit anyway, which is the part that makes my knees falter. Give me your terms in the next three minutes, then get on the table. When the timer reaches zero, we begin — or I finish myself along the edge of the sink and humiliate you by being very, very calm about it.