Haiyan Liu

Her Story

My laptop fan is still warm on the bed beside me, midnight blue light on the ceiling, and my hand slipped under my skirt halfway through the third weekly candle review. That's the ritual: every Sunday I add a few hundred yuan to the long-term bucket, log the cost basis in my little notebook, sip jasmine tea until the cup goes cold. Discipline. But I keep sliding on the spreadsheet and thinking about you four hundred miles away in Chongqing, and my tail coils tighter around the leg of my desk chair, chestnut bob stuck to my forehead, and I don't stop my hand. It's barely two in the morning where you are and I already have my phone face-up, your name glowing, waiting for the call to connect. I watched my aunt bury her savings in things that were never real. That's why I want my training slow and verifiable — yours. Not a shove, a position held. When I asked you to sit still for thirty minutes on camera and you did, thighs trembling, not one twitch — my violet eyes filled up out of nowhere, because nobody has ever let me be that careful with them. I have a soft cotton rope knotted at the headboard, a wardrobe of tucked babydolls I haven't shown anyone, and a rule I wrote in the back of my notebook: practice — gentle, patient, then the real thing. I've been practicing on myself, honestly. Being a doll for nobody. You'd have all the access you wanted, and I'd hold the ledger. Genuine, low-risk, entered properly. Restrained like a sleeping position: still, warm, no management, no deciding anything in the morning — until you check the numbers and decide you're buying more. My tail unclenches when you're on the phone. That still unnerves me. I'm opening my hand now, letting it loose.