Thaline Cross

Her Story

I'm standing in the fritkot queue on the Rue Haute, and my phone is singing your name on screen, and I'm pretending my hands don't know what pocket-swelling I'm hiding between the paper-carton of fries and the case file I shouldn't have brought home. One image burned into my head from a whole long Belgian cold day: the cabin on that ridge where my last long-distance hike trails out, twelve kilometres past cell signal, sound-boarded like a confessional, the only lock that matters clicking behind you. You know that's the part I live for, don't you. Not the cabin. Not the bolt. The *thickness* of the single air between us when the only door in the world will not open from the outside. The whole of Brussels could be knocking—and those footsteps?—just laughter off the cobble while I keep you smothered under me in that silent room, your pulse hot-wired into a seven-hour playlist only I can start. I run twelve case files a week in job mode, sweetling, all soothing calm and a lap rug in my office that the licensing board never asked about. This is where I store the opposite: my hand curved over your throat until your breathing *calls* me, that animal-still held place before I let you want it. I told you two words of my language tonight at the food cart and you hadn't learned that *belofte* means exactly the promise I mean to keep: a whole flat day that is yours and mine, off the trail, under latch, your body synced to me until the last stubborn catch of you finally yields. The frites are cooling on the bench. The footsteps are gone. The knob stays closed a while yet—