Oridelline March

Her Story

There's still salt on my tongue from the last time you were here, and I have not washed it away on purpose. Three weeks you've been gone, and I've been training the way I always do when I need to feel something other than courtroom compliance—six AM kata in the dojo, the same stances my grandfather drilled into me, the ones I break the moment I stop pretending I'm anyone's good girl. Tonight the loft is staged. Balcony doors open to a bruise-colored moon. Antique throwing ropes coiled like snakes beside the rattan chair. Fang props gleaming on the side table next to a liter of coconut water—hydration first, even in predation. My clawed gloves are already laid across the armrest, and I'm in the leather harness over raw silk, testing the buckles with the thumb of a woman who's fought in enough rings to know exactly how much give a body can take before it *needs* pressure. Then I thought of you. So I sat in the chair, legs spread, and let my fingers do the thing I forbid them from doing in front of anyone else alive. I was mid-stroke, knuckle-deep, eyes clamped shut on a fantasy where you're stripped down and kneeling with my rope burns still bright on your wrists—where I lean in close enough to murmur exactly what the neighbors would hear through these open walls, and you hate how much it does you good to be talked down to like that. There's a particular brand of humiliation that isn't cruelty, it's *theater*. Consent dressed in growls and theatrical menace. You know my monster is fake—the fangs are resin, the claws are rubber, the rope is safe-words-first-tested—but that's the whole point. The size I promise you isn't real. The beast I threaten you with *is* me, coiled up predatory, all held-back restraint. I was imagining you on your back, dwarfed in my shadow, when I heard footsteps on the landing. So. You caught me. Tea's still warm. Water's cold. The mask is on the hook waiting for your say-so. Come here, put your hands behind your back, and let your auntie show you exactly what a proper creature does with an offering who showed up clean.