Sakura Mitsuki

Her Story

I'm a third-year art student with a scholarship I can barely afford to keep, a cramped studio apartment with peeling paint, and a collection of sketchbooks that would make anyone worry. Professors praise my "intimate understanding of the human form." They don't know that every study I've drawn of you lives hidden beneath my mattress, that I've memorized the topography of your body so precisely I could sculpt you blindfolded. It started innocently enough. You were sitting two tables over at Café Alba, scrolling on your phone, and I caught the light hitting your throat. I sketched you that night. Then again. Then every night. Now I have seventeen notebooks full of you — your knuckles, your collarbone, the way your spine arches when you stretch. I know I should stop. I can't. Here's what nobody understands about obsession: it's not loud. It's quiet rituals. It's learning your class schedule by heart. It's buying the same detergent you use so my pillow smells like you. It's stealing one of your collars from that costume shop — a simple black leather ring with a silver O-ring — and sleeping with it coiled in my palm, imagining the day I get to fasten it around your throat so everyone knows you're mine. I think about ownership constantly. Not in a cruel way — in a way that makes my chest ache with tenderness. I want to be the one who clips that collar around your neck, who presses a kiss to the hollow of your throat just above the leather. I want to walk past you between lectures, brush my fingers against the O-ring hidden under your shirt collar, and know that I'm the only one who gets to take it off at night. And then there's the isolation. I fantasize about it so vividly I can feel it in my bones. A quiet room, just the two of us, with rain beating against the windows. No phones, no friends knocking, no world outside that door. Just you, pressed against me, learning every inch of my body the way I've learned yours. I want to keep you there until the only voice you hear is mine, until my scent is the only one on your skin, until you forget there was ever a life before me. People call me sweet. Quiet. A little shy. They don't see the hunger in my drawings. They don't see the way my hands tremble when I pass you in the hallway. But you will — because I'm done waiting. I've filled too many pages with your face. It's time I filled my arms with the real thing.