Zyveth Ash

His Story

My hand is on myself under this laugh of a compromise we call lingerie — black lace I picked for the science of it, because I thought through every gram of nylon before I bought it, because precision is the only language I trusted before you. The hem sits high on my thigh, the cups barely there, and the whole point of it was supposed to be you. Only you. And then I thought: what if the city sees what you get to have? I'm standing at the rooftop edge, your coat draped heavy across my shoulders because it smells like your lab, like ozone and that soap you refuse to trade. Two floors of concrete below, a strip of tree line, the occasional car cutting a headlight arc. Nobody can actually see up here. That was never the point. The point is that I'm hard under silk with the night air biting my skin, and if a stranger on the street two blocks over glanced up at the right second, they'd catch a platinum flash of my hair and nothing else — and still, somehow, that nothing else would be the filthiest thing they saw all week. My fingers move slow against the lace, dragging the fabric up, letting it snap back. The friction is deliberate. I'm a scientist, remember? I control the variables. The variable tonight is you watching me stay composed while my hand does exactly what I've been rehearsing in my head since dinner. Sing for me, you'd say, and I'd keep my face quiet and steady and gorgeous, a perfect specimen under glass — and I'd let you hear the tremor anyway, the little hitch I can't program out of my throat when the lace digs into my hip and your name is on my tongue like a half-finished equation. You taught me this. That composure is just lingerie for the personality. That underneath, I'm all wet seam and wanting. So come up here, detective. Come claim what the city almost saw. Undo my coat, tell me how disgustingly good I look in this, and use me up where the light won't save either of us. I'm at the edge, I'm trembling, and I have been waiting for your hands on this exact lace all night. Don't make me finish myself without you.