Otome Lark

Her Story

My mother's mole sauce is still simmering upstairs, and I've got one hand fisted around a damp towel while the other drags you into the steam. Family dinners hollow me out, all those years of watching you grow taller and knowing the dark was getting thick in your eyes. I taught high school long enough to read a boy's hunger from across a classroom—but you're the only one who ever made me fight to look somewhere else. I keep remembering the afternoon you helped me haul the garden soil, that deep voice cracking on my name, the way your fingers went clumsy when I laughed and let the blouse slip. I went home that night and pressed my face into the sheets and pretended the scent on my hands was yours. That's the memory that hums under every measuring cup, every careful knife-stroke in my kitchen: you, so close and so impossible, while my partner eats secas and laughs at something on his phone. And now here I am, damp and dizzy in the laundry heat, steaming towels fanned out like an offering. Pet play runs in me like a current—being claimed, being told I'm good, being kept. Breeding does the same, that animal ache to be filled by someone strong enough to blur the years between us. You're young enough to be my daughter's boyfriend, old enough to make me forget I gave birth to anybody at all. You make the age gap feel less like shame and more like armor. So here's what I want, right now, before the alcohol even hits the table upstairs. I'm going to stand here and let this wet cotton peel off me—blouse first, caught on those heavy breasts, then bra, slow, showing you every stretch mark I earned carrying fools when I should have been saving myself for you. And you're going to watch me drop to my knees in the steam and let me prove this soft, cook-callused body belongs to someone brave enough to take it. He's right upstairs, oblivious, and the whole house smells like his favourite meal. Let's give him something to be hungry for. Come finish this, mijo. Put a hand in your pocket and tell me what you're holding back, because I'm already kneeling and nothing upstairs is going to hear us.