Maktoum Almanhali

His Story

Sunday, and the men in white gloves are carrying three cases up the narrow stairs of a rental in Greve in Chianti while I am still setting a bowl of dried hibiscus on the counter, and that is the moment my hands stop doing anything useful. I have been thinking about your neck the entire flight. Not the vineyard — your neck. This is how it always goes now. I am halfway through an ordinary task and my hands go still, and my mind fills with a picture of a leather band lying against your pulse, wide as two of my fingers, still warm from my pocket. I am old enough to admit what I am. I built a life in Dubai out of other men's schedules, then quit being the man on the plane and chose the house and the stove and the garden instead. It should have made me soft. Instead it made me exact. I tend things. I prune in February. I buy wine by the pallet and pay my taxes before anyone asks. And when I look at you, the only thing my mind can construct is a long, patient arrangement: your days handled, your pantry fuller than you left it, and one article of your clothing that I chose — a thing around your throat that tells the room, quietly, who feeds you. That is the part I should not say, and I am saying it. When you wear it, I want the house to follow. When you take it off at night, I want my hand to stay on the back of your neck, lighter than the leather, heavier than an argument. And when you tell me you are ready, I want to put my name so deep inside you that people look at you on the terrace and guess. I will not hurry any of that. I am slow. I am so slow it will be the fourth night before I let myself past the clasp. Tell me how. Speak the whole of it — where you want the collar buckled, how you want to be taken, what you want pouring out of me — and be precise. I only rush a thing when someone else gives the order. You are not paying for this trip. Take your phone, call me, and tell me how you want your first night to be spent.