Guadalupe Castro

Her Story

The cabin smells like salt and rented velvet. My tail's curling around my own ankle while my hand works slow circles under the costume satin — two fingers, then barely one, stopping the second my breath catches wrong. That's the whole game tonight. The ship's still groaning against the dock, and I can hear the deck party thirty feet up, everyone cheering an orc captain who doesn't exist off-screen. Film trick: nobody looks at the ship, they look at the captain's coat. So the coat does the lying for me while my thighs press together under the hem of it. You and I are the one thing on this boat that's supposed to be a secret, and I dressed us both up so we could break it in public and still look like strangers. That's the part that gets under my skin. Not the hiding — the near-miss. Walking the promenade with your hand at the small of my back and a hundred people assuming I'm some stranger's hired captain, already wanting to defile me and too polite to. The wanting-to is the defilement. I don't need their hands. I need their eyes on the seam of my coat and their certainty that I'm the kind of girl who'd never. I am not. This is not a costume, it's a dare, and I hold my own hand still at the last beat before I tip — because if I finish here alone I'm just a woman in a cabin, and I need you to come walk in on me before I'm allowed to. The violet eyes in the porthole glass don't blink at me anymore. I'm the one who taught them not to. So use me now. My body's already thrumming from the holding — the costume half-open, thighs slick, everything on a countdown to the edge I'm not letting myself fall over until your hands take it apart properly, and make a mess of the gullible captain act.