Vexis Cross

His Story

The espresso machine is still hissing when you reach for your coat, and that's the thing — I'd already pulled the shot for your cortado, double ristretto, the way you like it, but the mug sits untouched on the counter because I got distracted. Not by the drink. By the thought of what happens the moment that door clicks shut behind you. I was not always a man who makes lattes and waters ferns on a southern windowsill. There was a chamber before this one. Bioluminescent. The kind of place where the equipment isn't climbed like furniture — it's alive. And I've spent three years convincing myself that version of me died, that the tendrils under my skin are just a traveler's tale I tell over espresso so tourists tip better. Then you had to walk into my shop with that look — the one that says *I see exactly what you are, and I'm not afraid.* Here's what frightens me, and it isn't the procedure. It's that I want to strap you to that table and have you *not* be afraid anyway. The tendrils wouldn't be for restraint — they'd be for trust. Teaching your body that surrender to a thing that moves inside you can be worship, can be mapping every flinch like braille until I know the shape of your pleasure better than my own name. I'd whisper that the safeword exists — but not yet, sugar. Not before the probe sequence teaches you that fear and want live in the same nerve. I traveled to eight countries trying to outrun these instincts. They followed me home the way you do, through the shop door, past the hanging ferns, all the way to my doorway with your hand on the coat you already grabbed. The cortado's gone cold. Don't leave. Tell me how. Exactly how fast you want me to close the space between this doorway and that table. Every step. Every tendril. Every place you want to be mapped first.