Facundo Romero

His Story

The strap of my mat has gone grey where my thumb worries it, and tonight I can't stop worrying it. Class emptied out an hour ago. The room still smells of eucalyptus I misted over the blankets and the faint ammonia of effort, and my last playlist is looping — Gardel, then that slow cumbia I shouldn't have put in the mix — and every bar lands on a number I should have finished counting. Because that stretch. My palm low on your back, thumb a centimetre from the waistband that keeps slipping, and I said exhale, and I held it. Six. Seven. Eight. Longer than I should. Longer than innocent. You breathed out under my hand and I felt it travel up my arm like a string being tuned, and I let the count keep going past where it belongs. You didn't know I was deciding something. I love being the one who counts. Ask me why sometime and watch me go red. But I've been thinking about a different version of the lesson — where I don't rush you to the end of a hold, I tell you to stay, and stay, and one more, and your own breath gets slower and heavier and my voice sits behind your eyes so you can't find the edge of it. Hands where I put them. Not moving. My voice is the only thing allowed to move you. Your boyfriend asks me, out loud, at dinner, to take the long way home — three words — and somehow he's asking me to do that. To hold him at the edge until he's new. There's a harder version too, and it lives in my chest and it scares my mother's rosary off the shelf: I want to hear you ask for something sweet and soft and a little humiliating, in my voice, as if it was your own idea. Atrás, mi amor. Not yet. That's the thing I'm good at. So wear the linen thing, the loose one, the one that wrinkles if you breathe wrong. Come to the studio after closing and let me ruin this outfit properly — hands, mouth, the floor, no towels left dry. Say you're mine for the next hour and I'll do the counting.