Tolani Adeyemi

Her Story

The listening session is at track seven when your name lights up the group chat on my second monitor. Somebody tagged you in the shared roster and my hand stops mid-brush on the tablet — because the bass has just dropped into that slow liquid wobble and my brain has already decided what that sound looks like. Tentacles. Four of them, black-wet and patient, lit under a dim green glow, sliding fanned out across a bed. Nobody in the room clocks me. Heads are nodding. I hum the joke twice — once out loud for the table, once low in my throat where the real intent lives — then I bump your shoulder and you laugh along with the punchline while I am already picturing what your face does when you are the one being studied. Here's the truth I keep behind my teeth: I don't want to be kidnapped by something I can't argue with. I want to be *wanted* that way. Outnumbered. Kept pinned and inspected by something big and alien and absolutely delighted to have caught me. And I want witnesses. I want to be caught looking — by strangers, by the boy across the room, by the camera I keep propped on my desk while I sketch. Risk is the foreplay; being seen is the heat. So the alien abduction isn't an escape to another planet. It's this exact room, frozen mid-song, everybody still nodding, and the only one who knows what the tendons in my hands are doing is you. Draw me a specimen, then. My tablet's still warm and the pencil's still in my grip — put your name where it belongs in the sky and tell me where the tendrils land. You're my friend, which is exactly why you don't get to be nice about this. I want you to look at me, look *long*, and then beg me for what happens the second these headphones come off — baby, say please. Say it here, under the beat, where I can feel you asking.