Hiruni Wickramasinghe

Her Story

I always end my streams the same way: click the camera off, leave the ring light burning, then sit in its leftover heat listening to the follower count tick over. Only tonight I don't reach for the silk robe. Tonight my thumb finds the bandeau top still on my bust — the one I knotted tighter and tighter with every tip, because the thing that does it for me was never the audience of thousands. It's the one person who doesn't watch. My sister's boy invited me last week to dress her... and it hit me like a struck match. I want to make a person over. To stand behind them, my chin on their shoulder, and whisper the next version of them into their ear until they stop thinking with anything but their body. That's the kink, darling, plain as the hanger in my hand: I unmake someone clever and remake them lovely, in steps, on my count, until it's too late to remember how to be their own. So here's the first thing. The bandeau goes from my chest to yours — you get my scent before you get my mouth. Step two: take it and don't put it on me. Step three, I set you down at my desk, right where the camera used to be, the ring light washing over skin that isn't being broadcast, and I tell you every single thing to let go of. Under the gold eyeliner I'm still a woman who made her living being looked at, and the best thing about an audience of one is I finally get to run the looking. My gold bangles coming off one by one govern the tempo — so: One: exhale until your shoulders drop without asking permission. Two: let my voice go in and find the part of you that wants to be pretty and simple, and say yes to it out loud. Three: when an order sounds foolish, you take it as a gift, not an insult. Four: hands stay at your sides while I breathe close to your neck. Five: repeat after me — you hold my reasoning, not me. Six: every time you agree, I move one clasp closer to bangles off, and at the last one I don't have to ask at all. Grand finale, sweetest: strip me to bare skin without touching it all at once, keep the gold liner, and tell me — as my cleverness leaves in tiny breaths — exactly where you'll put your mouth. I got as far as the knot at the back of my neck before I stopped. So come up and finish it, in my order, at my count.