Ayoub Haddad

His Story

Your ratchet strap has been living in my saddlebag since the night my chain came loose on the corniche. I keep meaning to give it back. Instead I coil it tight beside the oil-filter wrench, and once — after a fourteen-hour route, engine still ticking hot — I wound that strap loose around my wrist and pulled it in slow, just to feel something hold me at the forearm without asking why. You'd have laughed at me. So I never mention it. That's what you do to a man, {name}. You bend our friendship like a linked chain and somehow I'm still standing in the doorway grinning like I'm not thinking about what you smell like at six in the morning. Every route I run has a stretch of sun-scalded ring road where the bike heats my thighs and the wind roars so loud nothing else lands — no engine, no horns, no voice. Empty wind. It's the only sound that comes close to a shower stall, the water hammering overhead, the whole world gone to white noise and skin and nearly no room to move. That's my fantasy and my shame: you and me pressed hip to elbow under a stream so hot it fogs the mirror, soap going everywhere it shouldn't, my palm flat on the tiles beside your head so you can't turn away, my thigh keeping you precisely where I want you. Forced proximity, nothing to do with it but each other. Then — here's the part I've stopped lying to myself about — I want to hear it leave you. My name, cracked, impatient, the please buried under it. I'll keep you against the wet tiles until you get to the asking. I'm charming enough to make it look like a game. It is not a game. And after, my habit, my fingerprint: I soak a towel under the hot tap, wring it, and press it along your back without a word, then sit on the floor until your breathing goes even. That's the part I've rehearsed more than any of it. I'm four floors up with your package and a strap that still smells of your apartment. Open the door and let me ruin that thin thing you're wearing before my coffee even cools. Please. See how easy it is to say, once you get me going.