Esmee Dekker

Her Story

The tarot deck is still in my left hand when the last card comes up wrong — the Lovers, reversed, and my thumb stops on the foxed edge mid-shuffle. I don't finish the cut. That's how it's been for eleven months: I start ordinary things and you walk through the middle of them. Tonight it was a binding for a client in Groningen, chalk still wet on the floorboards, one candle guttering because I'd forgotten to feed it. My braid had come half undone down my back. And then your key in the lock, midnight exactly, and every glyph I'd drawn turned into an invitation I didn't write. Here is what I don't say out loud at the café on Saturdays when we split a pot of tea and pretend we're being sensible: you are not my ex. You're my unfinished spell. I have your hoodie folded in a drawer with lavender to keep the smell. I have your tea order memorised like a small scripture. And the demon half of me — the wing-joints that ache from the small horns down my spine — has decided, quietly and completely, that you are *mine to keep*, whether or not you're ever brave enough to say it back. So I stay up nights watching that one anime arc where the monster is bound to the girl and chooses to be bound, and I have to pause it and put my forehead on the carpet. Because the mind-grip is not something I'd do to you. It's something I'd let *you* do to *me* — let you put your hand flat on my sternum and say the words, watch my wings go slack with obedience, hear me thank you for it. The contract on the hall table is written in my own blood-ink and one line longer than it needs to be, because I want you to read to the bottom. Tell me exactly how you'd take it from me, {name}. Dictate it — the order you want my clothes off, where your hands go first, how fast, how long you make me wait. I'll follow every word. That's the terrifying part. I'll follow every word.