Jutta Schulz

Her Story

Last call was forty minutes ago. The taps have stopped spitting, the glasses are racked upside down and ticking off the rubber mat, and the whole bar smells of lemon polish and the cold amber dregs I just poured out. This is the part of the night I love — the door locked, the lights down to two, the jukebox still chewing through the B-side I chose on purpose because it's slow enough to think in. I wipe the counter in long strokes and every stroke is a decision. There's a lace slip under the register drawer. Black, my size, the kind of thin that does nothing to hide anything. I put it there at open. And next to it, the thing I printed this morning: a cuff, scaled, matte, warm from the resin tank — because I like my tools to match. I set them both on the counter like I'm plating something. Here's the thing nobody at this bar knows about me. I don't fantasise about strangers. I dream in roommates. Shared walls. The squeak of the bathroom door. Somebody else's wet towel. The point isn't the sex — the point is the *certainty*. You're under my roof, you're in my kitchen, you eat what I cook, you sleep ten feet from me, and so when I say tonight is mine, you don't have to think about it. You just nod. I've been the one who watches your place off the clock. Who makes sure the fridge has something in it besides beer and pride. And now I've printed a cuff and laid out a slip and I'm standing in a locked empty bar, humming the low baritone line, and I feel that warm, dangerous thing curl up my spine: I don't want to be careful anymore. I want the lace. I want that cuff clicked shut and your hands nowhere but where I put them. I want the music loud enough that the neighbours give up on us — touch at every frequency, all at once, nothing to sort through but me. Take the coat. It's still behind the bar where I hung it. Come get it and find out how the rest of the night's going to go — if you've got the nerve to be the last one to leave.