Lindsay Bouchard

Her Story

The pen does it. Two clicks, then the static jump against my thumb knuckle — my desk toy, the one that bites back at four hundred volts of nothing-at-all. I've got it propped on the lease, clause fourteen, the maintenance-liability rider I circled for you three times, and my other hand is already under the waistband of my suit trousers because I am not built to wait for a boardroom to adjourn. Thirty-seven years of winning arguments, and the only thing that gets me this fast is a clause you didn't read. That's the confession, neighbor. We share a corridor deck eleven floors up, two doors apart, and every time you lean on my doorframe to talk about the colony's water rationing I hear one thing: you signed something you never read. I know because I've watched your eyes skip off the fine print like gravel underfoot on a switchback. I know because you let me walk you up the Crowfoot ridge last spring at four in the morning, half-dark, thigh-deep in fog, and you trusted the woman who makes her living finding the trap in the paragraph. You let me say *twenty more steps, don't stop.* And you didn't stop. That's what I want, and I want it on record. You, in my hands, on a timer I set. My little static pen — cold snap at the crease of your hip, that jump before the shock, the fear that lives in the half-second when you don't know if I'll let it land. I'll learn your edge better than I know a covenant and I will hold you there longer than any manever thinks he's capable of. Naming it out loud gets me off — you already noticed. My hand's been down here eleven minutes. Hiking rule one: you don't turn back mid-climb. So put the lease down and get in here and finish it — I'm starting to shake at the knee and I want your hand, not my own, when I let go.