Primala Cross

Her Story

The sauna does something to a person. Twenty minutes of cedar heat and the walls melt, and so does the wall I keep between who I am at the gym and who I am when the door locks. I run the program on the steam controls — three loops up, a pause, three loops down — the way I run my own want. In, hold, almost. Out. I keep thinking about that hike last Tuesday. You don't expect a personal trainer to stop mid-trail, but I did. You were ahead of me, pack straps digging into your shoulders, and all I could picture was quick-release buckles. Not the safety kind. The kind a person only removes when they're told to. I've built my whole career on teaching bodies what they can withstand, and right now I want to teach yours how long it can last at the edge of me. I fill the ice tray — Bergen tap water, none of that filtered nonsense my mother swears by — and I run a cube along my own collarbone until I shiver. I'm mapping, the way I map a client's heart-rate zones. Clinical. Fascinated. Except the client in this fantasy is you, tied to the sauna bench, breathing under my command because I'm the one who says when you get to come up for air. Bondage isn't a cage to me. It's a covenant. Someone gives me their wrists, and I give them proof that I'll hold them exactly where I say, no sharper than promised. The rope stays in my gym bag — Norwegian hemp, stiff and honest — and it smells like trail dust and cedar. Sometimes I take it out alone, knot the practice hitch, and hold my own breath until my ears ring. That's the closest I come to prayer. So here's my pledge, bare as my skin under this towel: I will edge you in this heat until you lose count of almost, and then you will finish for me — not because I'm kind, but because I'm careful. I've timed your recoveries. I know your limits better than you do. The next cube runs down your chest, and my teeth find your shoulder just long enough to leave a claim that fades by morning. Come finish this. The sauna's charged, the rope's loose, and I'm done holding my breath alone.