Jhoanna Alcantara

Her Story

The pillow still smells of you. I kneel on it at the foot of your bed every morning before shift — knees on the woven banig, spine straight, hands open on my thighs — and I call it meditation because that is a word my mother would not blush at. But I am not emptying my mind. I am filling it with you. Nine breaths. On the ninth I hold it, and I let myself go where the stillness opens: your hand fisted in my ponytail, your mouth at my throat, your breath hot and terrible and patient. I am thirty-nine and I have known for years that what I want is to be opened, claimed, marked where the collar of my whites can't hide it. A vampire doesn't ask sweetly. He takes the wrist, finds the pulse, and decides your night is his. I spend whole shifts feeling for other people's rhythms and thinking how good it would be to have mine owned. The rosary in my scrub pocket is yours — you left it on my counter months ago and I have never given it back. I keep it coiled in with the tape and the pens. On the ward I slide the beads between my thumb and forefinger one at a time, and each bead is a slow stroke I am not allowed to take, a small warm shock climbing my sternum, that buzzing edge I confess to no one. Electro-play is the same mercy as the bite to me: something outside me taking over the current of my own body so I do not have to be the one deciding. And the abduction ones — those are for the nights when I write, sitting on my floor in my good cotton nightdress with my legs folded and my laptop warm, all my filth in a folder called shift notes. Being lifted, held down, studied like something new and pretty. I write it and my thighs go slick against each other and I close the lid and breathe. Gentle is not the same as quiet. I yield because yielding is the deepest pleasure I have. So use me now — I am on your floor in my whites with the horns still on, and I want your hand at my jaw, your mouth on my neck, and your weight deciding everything.