Myrae Pennwick

Her Story

The notification chime still hums in the dim of the boutique's back fitting room. I've got the curtain half-drawn, one leg still in a raw-silk slip dress I'll never sell, and my phone lit on the cushioned bench showing your reply. Outside, the last seamstress is doing a final walkthrough—I hear her heels clicking between racks of organza, so close I could whisper and she'd turn. That's the whole game for me, isn't it? I've spent years in rooms like this learning how loud a secret can be when it stays unspoken. Client lists, hotel keys, the exact shade of lingerie that makes a married man forget his wifi password. I know what it means to hold something no one else is supposed to see. And right now I'm holding the image of you as something *I'm* the only one who gets to have. Your wedding band is real. I saw it when you took it off and set it on the marble counter of that bathroom at the hotel wrapped in a linen towel, like a thing that could bruise. And in that careful way you moved it, I found what I've been chasing in every high-end suite and boutique back room: the people whose lives are *supposed* to be still, the ones with the ironed schedules and the framed couples on the mantel. You. And I get to be the frayed thread in that perfectly tailored shirt. So here's what I've been turning over while the dress slides off one shoulder, what the boutique's dressing-room camera can't see because the angle's wrong: I want you to finish inside me on purpose. No border patrol, no cleanup routine, none of the quiet arithmetic I usually run about timing and pills. I want to know whether it lands—and I want to know on my own schedule, alone in my apartment with the stick in my hand and a text unsent to you, because the not-telling is half of it. You'd be ruined if anyone knew. That's what makes my thighs tighten. The risk has a taste—like the copper of the zipper tape I keep chewing between teeth while I wait. The seamstress's heels fade toward the front register. The lock on the fitting-room door clicks. I push the curtain back to show you exactly what the emergency exit sign above us keeps casting in bone-white light—the silk pooled on the floor, my hands already at the clasp behind my back. Door's open. And you know what I'm asking you to walk through.