Page 110 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

Because I have never wanted anyone. Not like this.

Not at all, if I’m honest.

It has never been for lack of offers. But somehow, no matter how soulful the gaze or entertaining the conversation, I can never see my way through to what might be expected on the other side of such social niceties. I can never understand how a person looks at another, comes to some agreement, and starts systematically removing clothes. And then they go and press their bodies together, flailing about until pleasure is achieved.

It’s not that I think that there’s anything wrong with these things. It’s only that each step along the path seems so outside my comprehension. I can’t see the connection between the conversation and the desire to strip.

Or why I would ever allow someone to see me do such a thing, baring myself entirely before them.

Until now.

Because I realize that conversation is completely unnecessary. If he crooks his finger, I am terribly afraid, I would happily strip where I stand and then go to him without question.

I can feel my yearning for him as a physical thing. I don’t care who he is.

Or rather, my body doesn’t care who he is. It doesn’t care what he’s hiding, or what he’s doing here.

Everything inside me wants him, that’s all. That’s everything.

It is as if all those sensations and longings in me are a song, and he is the only one who can sing it, and all I want to do is sing along.

It’s as if everything in me is already his.

I watch as he sets his phone aside. There’s something stark in his expression, austere in a completely different way. There is a knowing there—

And everything in me wants it. Even as somewhere deep inside, something in me shivers, too.

I’m aware of so many things at once. That music, all around me. That look in that steeped-tea gaze of his, highly caffeinated tonight though it seems. Dark but with that gold swirled through it.

And there’s so much of his body on display. That perfect chiseled chest, all ridges and planes, and I have never felt softer, smaller, or more feminine.

When I have never thought of myself as any of those things.

It’s as if looking at him makes me want to be some version of femininity I never quite grasped before now.

As if he is a decoder ring, and now, finally, I understand the entirety of a secret language that was lost to me before.

I can’t tell if I’m holding my breath, or breathing too heavily, because it all seems to be part and parcel of the same thing.

He stares at me, this man of myth that I made up and yet is all too real. This version of Luc Garnier that exceeds anything I could have imagined on my own—and yet, at the same time, is everything I imagined.

I stand there, frozen in place in the hallway.

Myhallway, but right now, that isn’t how it feels.

And even though I can feel the floor beneath my feet and I know that this is not a cliff, but an office, I feel as if I’m poised on a precipice. As if at any moment, I might look down to find nothing but a steep, endless drop into God only knows what.

As if I can feel the wind up here, shuddering on this edge.

It’s as if all it would take is a breath. His or mine, I do not know.

But in the end, there is no wind, no cliff.

The song he’s listening to ends and in the interval before the new one begins, reality asserts itself.

I feel as if I’ve been released from a tight fist.

I suck in a breath, and it hurts.

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