Page 84 of Unclench Me Softly

He kisses me again. Longer. Not for dominance. Not for hunger. For something else. When he pulls back, his gaze searches mine. Slowly. Like he’s debating something.

Then he says, “I didn’t expect to need you.”

My breath stutters.

It’s not a line. It’s a truth. A raw one.

His eyes flicker, like he didn’t mean to say that out loud. But he doesn’t take it back. He brushes his knuckles over my temple. “Didn’t come here for this,” he murmurs. “Didn’t expect this to matter.”

The air tightens.

My heart pounds.

Because that? That didn’t sound like a man who just fell for me at a retreat. That sounded like a man with a plan.

I try to speak.

He presses another kiss to my jaw. Then my collarbone. Stays there. Silent. Too silent. “You make it hard to remember what I came here for,” he says, barely above a whisper.

And that’s the last thing he gives me.

Because then he pulls out, slow and careful and disappears into the bathroom.

I’m left on the bed, thighs sticky, heart spinning, mind screaming,What the hell does that mean?

Bliss-ism #88/e

“Sometimes you have to send the men into the woods to find themselves so you can sit in your robe and find your will to live.

Chapter Sixteen:

Burn the False King, But Not Before I Finish This Bread

I am emotionally concussed.

That’s the only explanation for how I ended up curled in my Womb Cloak™, on the floor of the dome, eating a piece of dry bread like it’s a ritual sacrament and muttering to myself about fire safety and emotional exposure therapy.

“I’ve just been spiritually railed by a man with CIA energy and now I have to teach emotionally volatile men how to write farewell letters to their toxic masculine selves. I’m definitely qualified.”

I take another bite of the bread.

It’s stale.

It’s grounding.

It’s symbolic.

I write that in my notebook.

Day Four. Burn the False King to Free the Wounded Boy.™ The sacred journey of letting go of performative masculinity through stationary reflection and exposure to flames. Also: bread.

I sip my raspberry-adjacent water and squint at the activity outline I made in a fugue state at 2am.

The Sacred Bonfire of Rebirth.™

Each man will write a letter to the version of himself that performed masculinity to survive.

They will read it aloud.

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