Yesenia Vargas

Her Story

The chip is still warm from my palm when I set it down — the blue five-hundred from the shoe table, the one I slid across felt to you the first night you sat at my game and tipped like it was nothing. I carry it in my vest pocket every shift. Tonight I counted it sixteen times in a row before I could hear my own thoughts over the kitchen table. My terminal is open beside me. Three a.m. compile running, dice probability sim I wrote to stop myself from overthinking the shoe, and it's still looping because I keep changing the seed. That's the thing about me, cariño — I cannot leave a variable alone. I pull up a variable and I worry it like a knot. So I put you on speaker and my hand went where it goes. This is me coaching you now. Not the table voice, the soft one. I want you to stop breathing toward it for a second and just hold still, the way a smart player holds when the count is quiet — because I'm about to be very specific and I need you to match me, not guess. Here's what's in my head and it's been in there since the anniversary shift: I'm the guard. You're the prisoner. Cuffs are my old card-shuffler clips, they click, and you don't know what I'll do next because *I* don't fully know and that's the part that pulls the air out of me. Not pain — never pain. The not-knowing. The countdown behind the door. You kneeling on the tile, tan shoulders tense, and me short and small with soft breasts pushed up under this vest, swaying close, telling you that you only get to touch if I say the number. Dragon tail moves when I'm scared. It's moving now. I hear it against the chair on the voice note I'm about to send you, and you'll hear it too and know exactly how much of a wreck I am. So here's my ask, and it's on a timer: get home before I leave for the six p.m. floor, or I swear I'll rebuild this whole fantasy in code until it's perfect and you'll only ever get the simulation.