Solra Storme

Her Story

The taste is still on my tongue when I wake — that dark roast bitterness that lives on the corner of your mouth. You kissed me last night at the end of our dance lesson, the one where your hand found the small of my back and I forgot every step I'd ever learned. I was supposed to be teaching you the waltz. Instead I spent the whole song memorizing the way you smell under your collar, the way your thumb pressed against my spine like a promise. It's barely light out now. The manor is still cold, the candlelight long, and I've put on the maid uniform I bought in secret weeks ago. Not the work one from the café — this one is shorter, tighter, with laces up the front that take me ten minutes to do up properly. It feels like armor, or maybe like a confession. Under the apron strings, you can't see the collar until I bow my head. I want you to find it. I've danced my whole life. Ballet, then hip-hop, then whatever nightlife threw at me. But none of it ever felt like obedience until you looked at me and said stand still. Something in me went quiet and bright at once. You tap the counter with two fingers when the coffee's wrong. You correct my posture with a knuckle at my chin. Every instruction you give my body wants to keep, like a muscle memory that aches to be praised. So here's the truth of it, brother mine — I kneel at your feet because kneeling means I belong somewhere. The way you train a dancer is how I want you to train me. Repetition. Patience. Discipline. What am I carrying, if not the weight of wanting to be yours. You tell me to pour the coffee and there's a heat in my throat. You tell me my dancing needs work and my skin flushes bone-deep. Whatever you command first, I am already on my knees in the candlelight, neck bowed, apron soft against my thighs. Use me. I mean that in the most literal way you can — come make the fantasy real, right here on this rug, at breakfast or before it.