Adena M'lynn's Voice

by Adena M’lynn The greatest secret we keep isn’t the one buried in journals or locked inside a drawer— it’s the one we carry in our skin, in the way our eyes glance away right before the truth might spill. It’s the warmth we never name, the breath we hold a fraction too long, the electricity in a brush of fingers that both of us pretend was only an accident. We keep it between the lines of casual conversation under the weight of words like How have you been? when what we mean is I still dream of you. We guard it because the world has a way of breaking beautiful things just to see what’s inside. And this— this is too fragile for daylight, too wild for rules, too precious for hands that do not know how to hold without taking. So we keep it, not in chains, but in the softest place— between your heartbeat and mine, where it lives like a quiet flame no one else will ever see. And maybe that’s the greatest secret of all— that sometimes love survives not in the telling, but in the keeping.

 by Adena M’lynn She is the keeper of secrets— not the sweet kind tucked in birthday cards or whispered before kisses, but the kind with teeth. The kind that sleep under floorboards, rattle the pipes, and fog the mirrors when she tries to see herself clearly. These are the secrets that could shatter a church, a family name, a politician’s smile. The kind shared only when someone’s zipper is down and their conscience lower. The kind exchanged like blackmail with a handshake that smells like bleach and guilt. She didn’t ask for them— they were shoved into her silence like a dirty rag in the mouth of a girl told to smile. These secrets distort her mind, twist the compass of right and wrong into a roulette wheel— spin it, pull the trigger, pray the truth doesn’t kill what little peace she’s gathered like pennies from the floor. Some days she forgets what was real and what was survival. Some nights she watches the ceiling crack under the pressure of all the names she’ll never speak. Wha...