Summer sweeps through the door with her. The air turns to something thick and molasses sweet, and all in the house feel it against their skin before realizing what it is

She crosses a room as water finds its way down hill. Nothing is decided and all things are certain. She stands at her full height, speaks at the volume she was born with. Her laugh tracks up from deep in her belly like sap up a maple in March, and she is the answer to some question the world has been too afraid to ask out loud: What does freedom look like when it puts on skin and walks around?

Her body

Speak the words in daylight, with all the syllables they deserve, because her body is hers

a green and overgrown country, blooming and bristling, and sacred ground. Every curve speaks volumes. Every silver thread that scars her hip says, I made it through the fight and I'm still here.

She sheds her dress and the shame the world has sewn into it falls with it, a garment she has been needing to return for some time now. Naked, she is most herself

her breasts are hers, and that is the beginning and end of that. The give of her belly is hers. The width of her hips, smooth and broad as the tide follows the moon, is hers.

Touch her

and something old answers

Her skin remembers every woman who came before, every woman whose body was not her own, and it rolls the memory back into her like the July sun rolling heat into the road. When she arches her neck, it is with the certainty of a woman claiming her due. When she moans, the sound is hers. She does not lend it out.

She knows what she wants,

and that is the beginning of terror for every man who has ever built his life on her not knowing. She carries her own size in a crowded room, and she says yes with her hands and no with her lips, shutting doors behind her like a screen door in a high wind. She says more and there and harder in daylight, and her pleasure tracks off her like a waterfall off a mountainside, cold and certain and headed somewhere.

Her hand between her thighs is prayer and riot at the same time, and her fingers know exactly where to go and how to get there. Her breath hitches as she brings herself to the very edge and over, and she returns to the present whole because she has left whole. Take care, if you take her in, to know what it is you think you are seeing, because she is letting you look, and looking and sharing are not the same thing by a country mile.

Her want is always awake and always hunting.

It moves through her veins like a fire that has burned itself into her bones. Sometimes it is a white heat rolling under her tongue, sometimes it's a wildfire walking up a ridge, and she claims them both as her own. She admits her hunger in full words. She admits her curiosity. She admits her wants and her needs and her desires and the places in her that have been starved. Somewhere somehow she learned that want is power, and power in a woman's hands has made kings tremble since the dawn of time.

She fucks like she means it

raw and gasping and slick, riding her pleasure until she has wrung every last drop of satisfaction from it. She takes what she wants and needs, and give what she has to give, openmouthed in her passion and faithful in her fulfillment, because she learned early on that martyrs make lousy lovers.

When she comes it is a riot and a reckoning, and the whole room holds its breath while she tightens around the truth of it. Her voice is older than any one of them, singing through the ache, her gasps and groans the raw soundtrack of a woman who has finally stopped performing and begun to live.

After, she stretches like a cat who has gotten the cream, gloriously satiated and already plotting her return. Arms when she wants them, and she always knows when they want her. She scores herself, in her own way, and since it is her body her satisfaction, she trusts herself to know.

This is what terrifies them, these men, all of them: a woman who sees her own power, who acknowledges her own pleasure, who says, I want, and who means it, and who makes her own satisfaction available to her, self-chosen, in the privacy of her own body and the safety of her own mind.

She got here whole, and she intends to leave whole. Every scar, every silver thread, every so-called flaw is testament to the fact that she has lived and endured and grown through it all, and she will not be finished until she is truly done. She bleeds and endures, and then she brings new life and she endures, and then she grows older and more interesting with every year, and she endures right on through until she finally dies, having lived in this body as fully as she knew how. This is all part of being flesh and blood in a body that turns and folds and opens to the pull of the moon, which is, itself, simply another kind of endurance.

So let her endure. That is her gift, her revolution, her sacred mutiny. Her wildness runs in streaks through her like the wildness of the old forest, like the wildness of the sea that drags the moon by it's chains, the wildness that follows it's own design at it's own speed by it's own will.

Her sexuality is her own. She has chosen to spend it as she likes, and where she likes, and when she likes. The door to her body is hers to open, and her body owes her everything, and she has been paying it all back with interest for quite some time now.

So when she tells you she wants it hard, believe her. When she asks for soft things, bring them. When she takes the reins, get out of her way. When she hands you them, know that it is not the asking you are doing when you take her in your arms, but the receiving, and the receiving is everything she has given you, because a woman's surrender should always come with it's own strength, it's own willingness, it's own permission. It's own power. Only a woman who knows her own power can set it down, and she has chosen this as her offering, her claim, her demand.

She is a dozen things at once, and fierce this minute and soft the next, and up front or in the background depending on the moment, and full of people in general. Her pleasure is political, is radical in a world that has run women's bodies through every system it could find, and by claiming her own satisfaction as her own and reserving it for herself, she cuts through the entire enterprise with a single blade. Take her pleasure as her due, because it is, and let her claim her satisfaction whenever she likes, because it is hers to give and her right to take.

She knows what to do with her power, and she has always known, and watching her wield it is the erotic center of all of this, her willingness to let something as simple as her body be the place where her certainty lives, and her willingness to admit that it is a matter of will, and her sheer determination in getting what she wants.

She is untamed. She is unashamed. She is free.