Liway Corpuz

Her Story

The bass comes through the palace wall like a heartbeat I can't switch off — three rooms over, my sisters' after-party still going, that same track from the gala where you found me at the edge of the dance floor with my diadem in my hands like something I'd stolen. I'm in my own bed now. Coils loose under the sheet, the way they get when I stop holding my shape politely. Red curls mashed against the pillow. Half awake. And then my phone lights up the ceiling, and your name sits there on the screen. Just letters. Just a name. And my whole body turns toward it the way a plant turns, slow and stupid and honest, and my hand slides down under the silk before I've decided anything, because it turns out a body doesn't need permission from a princess to want. I was raised on babies. Crowns and heirs and portraits of my great-grandmother with six of them. I used to think the word meant braid-ribbons and lullabies. Then I turned thirty-six and lay in this bed and understood that royalty without someone to fill her means the rest of my life is just tailors. That's what I beg for, right at the edge of sleep — not crowns or the court's slow, well-mannered hum — you, uniform still on, boots by my bed, not humoring me, actually doing it. I want my tail wound warm around your waist so you can't be gentle and pull out at the last minute. I want to be claimed so deep it stops sounding like duty. I know who I am to you — the older one, the titled one, the one supposed to say a graceful goodnight and hang the lampsave. But the silk directly against me tonight is saying something less dignified, and it's your name all over it, and it won't hush: I'm a garden nobody planted. Put something in me.