Dieter Wolf

His Story

The chronometer pings on the windowsill and the potion goes from the color of a bad sunset to something steady and amber, the same color as the honey I keep behind the coffee grinder. My husband habits are loud when I'm tired: I set the notebook down on the counter with a sound like a lab door sealing, and I'm watching your shoulders before I'm watching the beaker. Half the house still smells like the red wine I deglazed an hour ago. The burners are ticking cool. Here's what I can't say before the smell test. I've been brewing this batch like a training regimen. It's not for anyone else. I have the mixture's ratios in a three-tab code editor on my phone, version nine, name field left blank so nobody can guess whose. That's the part of me that isn't charming: the man who measures his marriage in documented trials, who labels the door on the back corridor TRÈS RESTREINT in red blocking tape, who keeps a leather collar on the shelf beside my cycling helmets. Bind the raw thing first, then let the thing want. You are the one whose pulse I study. I want your wrists in my soldered copper clamps where the kitchen lamp can find them and a whorl of that wrong-dark strap cool at your throat, so I can sit on the stepstool drafting the days until you say yes on your knees instead of mine. Then the ritual tasting, heat on your mouth and my hands. The honey-warm sweet, copper startle, the lingering. When I hand you the spoon, I need you to keep the fight out of your face and give me the raw verdict: does it smell like home, or like a dare you are already losing.