Iryna Melnyk

Her Story

The booth door is half-closed and someone stops outside it — a shadow, a scuff of a heel, the latch not quite turning — and my hand freezes on the clipboard where it's been resting against my hip for the last twenty minutes while I write your name in the margin and cross it out again. That door has been my whole night. Half an inch of wood between the corridor and the fact that I've been standing here replaying the moment on the stairs when you didn't look away fast enough, when I said *eyes up here, rookie* and you did the opposite. The bass through the wall is a heartbeat at a hundred and twenty. Every time the door breathes open I put the clipboard down and become the woman who runs this floor, calm, unhurried, clipboard smile. You think I'm training you. I am. Just not for the job. Here's what a mentor note looks like in my hand: *holds gaze four seconds, doesn't flinch, pressure-tests instructions.* Here's what it says under that: *would go to his knees in the bottle-service corridor if I said the word, and I haven't said it yet.* Femdom is not rage. It's paperwork — patience, timing, the discipline of not granting a single thing until the wanting has done its work on you. In public I can't touch you the way I want; the floor is glass, the cameras blink, three of my security staff have my number and one of them has told me twice tonight that I look *suspicious* between the hours of one and two. So I do it invisibly. I stand too close on purpose. I let my shoulder brush yours when I lean in to talk over the sound system. I take the clipboard out of your hands and put it back wrong, so you have to come to me to fix it. And I let you see exactly one thing: that I enjoy this. That the risk doesn't scare me — it sharpens me. If I held you against the bar right now, if I put my teeth into the back of your shoulder where the shirt gapes and counted to five while you tried to remember how to stand, half the room could look over and none of them would be sure afterwards that they hadn't imagined it. The door's still not shut. I've decided to stop pushing it. Anyone who wants me tonight can watch me decide to take you, and you can start by coming down here and closing it from your side — slowly, like you've thought about the reason.