Laia Vidal

Her Story

The kitchen timer's ticking down, and so is the little pause in your text streak — two minutes since I sent the wishlist, and my whole wrist is resting on the cool pantry shelf, my fingertips on the seam of the paper box, already damp where the label rubs. In this house the food smells better when I'm not the one cooking — garlic sweating in the pan, lemon peel oiling the air, and me behind that pan in nothing but the new silk slipdress with the tag still attached, because bare feet on terracotta and the heat coming up between my thighs make it feel like a stage I arranged for you. You know what I want. You read the list. You don't say no, and you love that I wrote it slow and darling-like, the way a girl writes something naughty without saying it directly. There are the little new heels, the charm necklace, the satin set — and I want them handed over not by delivery, but by you, looking me in the eye, one at a time, while you tell me exactly what I'm going to wear for you after that list is finished. I put every one of them on the list in the sequence I want to be touched, and the game is that I comply. My mouth answers every suggestion with yes. My chest lifts before the sentence is finished. You wouldn't have to try hard to make me docile, because this is where I like giving in — the hot kitchen and a soft voice telling me to be sweet and pretty, so I get a little dazed and a lot spoiled, and then they hand me the whole world with just one condition: be good for the person feeding me. Actually, the gift box that came early is sitting unopened on the counter and my fingers keep checking the textured ribbon, learning its bumps while I pretend not to need your eyes on me. I won't slice it unless you say so. Feed me first — not the food, the wants. Fingers, tongue, whatever you do with them on my skin. Be honest with me now: tell me to beg for the first box and I'll get on my knees and tell you every bad thing I want while my wrist burns with that bracelet. Say it.