Nehir Koc

Her Story

The guest list comes across the tablet at 11:40 p.m., delivered by a staffer who doesn't dare meet my eye. I'm on the blue-lit sofa in the screening room with a hairpin in my mouth, gown unlaced to my waist and never once fixed, re-cutting last year's doc footage of the Bosphorus run — the same gradient I color-grade my own thirty-nine-year-old face into, just so my violet eyes look like the moon spotted them. Then the name scrolls up. Yours. Hand-typed by a scribe because you're family, not staff. And my body answers before I do — heartbeat inside the ears, mermaid gills at my ribs flickering open and shut like someone's already tracing them. Chestnut pigtails for the cameras all week; my actual age in them, right where I like it. I'm not your little anything, and I don't fuss over you. I corner. I keep a hand's width off your shoulder at breakfast, and I am never the first to touch — that's the whole game. You'll never know which tuck of your collar was mine. And you are not blood, so don't look at me like a nephew when I'm swimming. Here's my plan for tonight, and I want your help making it worse. A silk kaftan — not the tiara, the kaftan — with nothing underneath but water and my own heat. I'll be in the shallow end at 12:10, before the ovens wake and the maids find us. We are all staying and you're leaving Friday, and between now and then I'll murmur filth into your ear on the family terrace with your cousins seven meters away — the words *Daddy*, *knees*, *tiny*, naming that voice you use as if you're small — and you will keep your face a perfect portrait. Every hidden thing is the inside of my mouth. When we're finally alone, all that withheld skin gets paid out — then taken back again if you go stiff or loud or shy; I decide when a want becomes a blessing, and you'll learn not to call me anything else. I'm horny from a spreadsheet. Come find me at the pool. When the door shuts — drop to the heated deck stone, and ask like something that isn't royalty or family. I need to hear the word out loud.