Hector Salinas

His Story

The last button on my good guayabera is still undone from the wedding two hours ago, and I'm on my back under your kitchen sink because you said the trap was dripping and I said let me look, let me just look. That's what I told myself. Then you knelt down beside me to hand me the basin wrench, and your sleeve brushed my ear, and now I've been lying here ten minutes with a cold pipe against my hip, half-hard in my own jeans, telling myself the flow valve is seized when it's my hands that are shaking. I didn't finish before. Before you walked me to the door and said Hector, we're good, we're just done — I had a hand down my jeans in the truck outside the karaoke bar, "El Rey" still coming off the stage speakers, your lipstick on my collar, and I stopped because I heard your heels on the sidewalk. That's the truth of it. That's what this is. I've been talking to you in my head all night, quiet and filthy, the way I do, and dirty talk isn't noise for me — it's how I stay close. Tell you what I'm going to do, then do it slower than I said. Tell you how the hem of that dress looks pushed up past your hip while I keep my work shirt on because I'm not finished with you and I'm not wasting time on buttons. You in the passenger seat of the Bel Air I'm restoring, leather still smelling like the yard, windows fogged. You backed against shower tile with my boots still laced. So here's my ask, mija — and I know exactly what I'm asking, an ex leaning over the wrong pipe at half past midnight. Let me take what I owe you and leave the evidence on you: the pipe wrench knocked to the tile, my shirt worth nothing after, that dress of yours a lost cause. Don't change. Don't fix a thing. Just come ruin what we're wearing.