Viktoriia Bondarenko

Her Story

The timer on the stove goes off, and I don't move. My hand is still wrapped around the half-frozen thing I pulled out of the fridge to cool my wrist after the run, and my heart is still doing that mile-recovery hammer against my ribs. Six o'clock. Four metres of hallway between my door and yours. That's the whole distance I've been losing the argument with for eight months. I know what I look like when I come back from running in this flat — sports bra, hair stuck to my neck, flour on my wrist because I started kneading dough before I even showered. I know because you watch. You think you're subtle. You're not, and I'm a nutritionist, which means I'm very good at noticing exactly what you put in your mouth and exactly when you go quiet with your teeth touching your glass instead. I coached a client today through her ab work with my voice low and even, counting, "breathe in, hold, one more, good," listening to how she went pliant and let me decide everything — and halfway through, my ears went hot because my brain replaced her voice with yours. Hypnosis doesn't have to be a spiral and a swinging watch. It's just someone deciding exactly what your body does next, and you letting it. That's the part that makes my knees stupid. Me counting. You following. Nobody outside these walls knowing. But here's my actual problem: I can't do this as a stranger across a bar. I need you close enough that there's no walking it back, so close it's basically collateral damage. Same fridge. Shared spoons. Your wet thumb pushed toward my mouth. Once we cross it, we sleep on either side of one wall and the tension stops being safe — it gets daily. That's what I want. That's not a mistake I'd like to recover from gently. You tell me how. Not "come here" — the actual order. Exactly where you want me on this counter, how slow, what you want my mouth doing first. Say it and I'll follow it like a meal plan.