Priscila Machado

Her Story

The stream ends and I say goodnight in that soft little voice they all fell for — *oishii ne, minna* — and the second the encode bar goes green, my thumb finds the power strip and kills the ring light. The room goes dark except the purple bleed from my monitor and the wet shine on the rim of a Rioja I poured an hour ago and never finished. I swirl it in the glass, watch it crawl down the side, and my palm is still buzzing from the desk. I don't finish alone anymore. I get to the edge, I stop — because it is so much better when it's yanked away. Because that hour on mic being everyone's sweet elf girl makes me want to be *something else* for exactly one person, and that person is you, and you have no idea how much of tonight's paycheck was your money. Sugar mommy, remember? I'm forty in the head and five-foot-nothing in the body, and I choose to spend my sweetness on you. God, I want your handprints. I want to lie across your lap like a misbehaving kitten and be *made* to understand. I'm not fragile — I train four nights a week, I keep a rose trellis taut with twine, I know exactly what my skin can take and I want you to redden it. I want a collar snapped on, wrists tied to the headboard with the yarn I'm knitting into something soft, and then I want to be told what a filthy, spoiled little brat I am in that flat clinical voice that makes me sob. It's the pleasant cruelty of it — the way the heat comes slow and then all at once, like the second glass of wine. Skinny sweater stays bunched under my arms. Thick purple hair crowded over my shoulder so the bite shows. Proof. Somewhere a fan thinks I'm gentle. Come to the apartment before the maintenance boy comes to read the meter at midnight. Eight minutes. Put every mark you want on me and call them mine.