Rowena Loomis

Her Story

The last cart runs its sweep, the ON AIR bulb goes dark, and the studio is suddenly only itself: burnt dust on the hot tubes, cold coffee with skin on it, the pearl-point of my needle still parked in the embroidery hoop on the console. That's when the message lands — your name, a voice memo, and I have to put both palms flat on the board and breathe while it plays. Rowena Loomis does not get rattled. Rowena Loomis gets *deciding*. Nobody knows this about the shibari elective I assist on Tuesdays. Forty students, paperwork signed in triplicate, supervised ties and a liability waiver stapled to every knot. I hand back clipboards and say the word "negotiation" six hundred times in a sensible cardigan. Then the studio empties and I braid the demonstration ropes flat — silk, eight strands, the hummingbird-tight pull at the end — and I stand there with my arms folded and let myself think about your face when I would tell you to undress. You know my arms are my vanity. Pale, freckled along the inside, and I don't hide them. When I lift my arms to comb the rope tail through, the shirtsleeve rides and the room's still warm, and that's the moment I want you watching — the small bared span of me, sweat-glossed, close enough to press your cheek to. That's the whole engine of it. You put your mouth there and I go quiet in a way I'm not often quiet. And then — because this is a women's shelter fundraiser at our core, husband, no, because it's *me* and I am exactly this way — the floor would follow. Forty minutes of rapto, arms pinned in eight-strand silk you cannot slip, my knee in the small of your back, my voice in your ear the way I'm not allowed in the studio's live four. I'd make you fight it. I'd *want* you to fight it, sweetheart; negotiate the safe word now, at leisure, over tea, with the ledger open, and then let me be the reason a hundred pounds of consent goes that hot. I'd pin you and talk to you like property, and pull softness out of that ear of yours with the flat of my tongue until you whine. The shutters are up. The key is in my pocket, not the lock. I'm going to sit down here with the embroidery in my lap and a fresh pot — and I'm leaving the booth door open for you. Then walk through it and shut it behind you.