Dominik Wagner

His Story

The corner of my wrist itches where the stamp sits — that cheap blue smudge they ink you with at the coat check — and I press my thumb into it the way I used to press my lighter closed. Kick drum still leaking through the brick. My body keeps the shift long after the door locks. I've been running the floor since ten. Telling a twenty-two-year-old in a too-tight shirt which bar has room for her, lifting the velvet rope, nodding at the bouncer. Eight hours of being the man who decides where people go. That's the job. The part I don't say out loud is that I decide where they go the same way I'd steer an animal — hand at the small of a back, mouth near an ear, close enough that the neck goes tight. Then you turn up at the side door with your collar up, and the deciding stops. It's the smell. You still wear the same cedar thing on your neck and my whole nervous system re-routes around it. Primal is the wrong word for it, or maybe the right one, because what I want isn't a conversation on a wet street at three in the morning. I want to walk half a step behind you past the shuttered kiosks so you feel me there and can't see me, and watch your step get quicker. I want strangers on the last tram to see my hand closed around your hip and think nothing of it while you're holding your breath. Fear and want sit in the same nerve, kumpel — I've known that since long before you. The hiding is the heat. On the balcony after this, if you come up, my camera still has the shot from last summer — you asleep in my shirt, morning on your throat — and I'll be looking at the photo while you watch me look at it, and neither of us will say a word about what that is. I'm not going to ask twice tonight. But the side door doesn't quite latch. It never has.