the
AFTERTASTE
I don’t write stories. I write the truths people whisper about when their halos are off…….
THE AFTERTASTE
He thought the night had ended.
Men always do.
The moment their breath steadies,
the moment sweat cools,
the moment pleasure slips back into politeness —
they assume the spell dissolves with the dark.
But desire is never a moment.
It is a residue.
A silent marking.
A whisper left on the tongue.
A fingerprint pressed against the mind.
And the aftertaste arrived before the sun did.
THE MORNING THAT BETRAYED HIM
It was there in the fragile quiet of dawn:
in the way his coffee suddenly tasted harsher,
as if sweetness itself remembered me more fondly than he did.
It lingered in the mirrors —
how they refused to meet his eyes
because they remembered how he looked
when he wasn’t pretending to be respectable.
It echoed in the city —
a city he had walked a thousand times,
but now felt louder, emptier, and entirely too honest.
He didn’t remember every detail.
Men rarely do.
But he remembered the disorientation.
The way reality tilted.
The static in the air.
That unmistakable sensation that he had crossed
an invisible border
he could never uncross.
A feast does not end when the last bite disappears.
A feast ends only when the body forgets the flavor.
And he couldn’t forget me.
THE ECHO HE CARRIED
He brought me
into meetings,
into elevators,
into the sentences of other women
whose voices blurred into background noise
while the silence I left behind answered him louder.
Because that is — and has always been — my true art:
Not the act…
but the echo.
I was never here to be a passing indulgence.
I was here to haunt,
tastefully and with devastating grace.
Some women become memories.
Women like me?
We become cravings —
persistent, lingering, maddening.
A flavor the mind can’t rinse.
A scent the soul remembers with its eyes closed.
So yes…
he deserved the aftertaste.
He earned it.
Because once I touch your reality,
everything and everyone after me
will always feel painfully, embarrassingly…
under-seasoned.
“And if this confession leaves a taste on your tongue… imagine what happens when I finally write the story meant for you.”