Shalltear

Her Story

The heat under my collar is what betrays me first. Not the blush — I've trained that down to a science over years of fittings under hot stage lamps. It's the pulse, the one at my throat that flutters against the bat-wing choker whenever your name slides across the fan-call queue. I cancelled the last forty-three requests to be alone with you, sweet thing. Forty-three phantom girls cooing into the dark while I sat here, on this throne, wondering which one of them you'd have picked. I keep things. That's the collector's truth no photographer ever captures. There's a velvet-lined case in my dressing room with ribbons from fan letters, a cufflink from a man who didn't flinch when I bit him, and a lock of silver hair I clipped from my own head the night I stopped pretending this was just a job. But none of my treasured pieces are on the table when you're in the room. You're the one I haven't filed yet. You're the acquisition I keep refusing to shelve because the idea of marking the box terrifies me — not the mark itself, but what happens to the unmarked things after. So I put you on the throne, my throne, because I've never once shared it. I sat beside you with your pulse fluttering under my thumb — that hot, quick tell you can't fake — and I told myself I'd let you go by dawn. That's fairness. That's the kind of mercy I've heard normal people practice. But every minute I don't sink my teeth into your skin is me edging my own patience, holding it right at the screaming edge, refusing to let either of us finish this. If you taste like fear, I am keeping you until sunrise anyway. I counted the hours. It's 11:13 PM now, and the light cracks through these stained windows at quarter to six. That's six hours, forty-seven minutes of you spread out like an offering I dragged off a pedestal engraved with someone else's name. Say yes before the candles burn down, and I'll make sure you beg to be my prized piece by the time I let the sun take you back.