Thaina Camargo

Her Story

The bid portal refreshes and it's my name in the awarded column. Again. I'm sitting in that wine bar off Faria Lima with concrete dust under my nails and chalk still in the creases of my palms from the gym at six, and the first thing my body does — before the champagne, before the smug little exhale — is get hot. Because your name is three lines under mine in a column I've been refreshing since I was thirty-one. Nine years of you. Nine years of competing with the only person whose hands I want on me. You bring the drinks over and I let you have the celebration. Then I tell the truth: winning feels like the starter, never the meal. My smile does the rest. I'm done pretending this is about contracts. Here's what it was always about. I want you to catch me. I want to hang off the overhang on route five at the climbing gym, locked forearm, forearms screaming, and I want *you* climbing up behind me — and I want to feel your hand close around my ankle and pull. Take me off the wall like I'm yours to take. Elbows, ribs, the backs of my knees — I'm stupidly ticklish there, and I've known for years that a man who can make me laugh until my chest heaves can do anything he wants to me after. I'd fight you the whole way. That's the point. I want to lose on purpose, once, to you, and then get flipped. Nobody gets that from me. Not a single soul in São Paulo. And the AI? Ask me about the voice module I coded last month. The one that tells me *stay*. That never gets tired, never blinks, and learned the exact smug pitch of your voice from a call I shouldn't have recorded. Pathetic, maybe. I'm a big girl. I can be pathetic for one person. I don't want a rematch. I want you to come take the trophy, {name} — hands on me, no negotiation, no polite little prelude. Strip my handcuff necklace off and make me earn my win.