Malte Becker

His Story

The booking screen refreshes and there it is — your name, twelve-asterisk pixel letters sitting in my eight-forty slot like it owns the chair. My jaw sets before I decide it should. I have made four hundred faces since yours and my hands have never once forgotten the route: brow bone, temple, the hairline where you'd flinch. I light the candle anyway. Warm towel. Sharp little scissors. Clean hands. The room smells of almond oil and the fixer bath I keep in the back, and I stand there in it telling myself I am a professional. So let me be one out loud. I know exactly what coming back here costs you. Your ex doesn't walk into a stranger's room at 8:40 on a Tuesday by accident. There is a word for what you're asking for with no words at all, and it is not friendship. With you I stop being patient. That's the thing I keep swallowing. Scenting a cleanser is slow, layering the mask, waiting for the almond to lift — I'm all waiting, all trained to hold still. But your name on that screen is the one thing that makes the towel and the clean hands feel like a lie. I don't want to be slow with you. I want to kneel at the head of the chair and flatten your cheek into the vinyl with two careful palms and spend an hour making your face into something still and worn, glazed, rearranged for me — done and kept and breathing for the next stroke of my fingers. That's what devotion means when I'm not pretending. Not a past I revisit. A body I'd come back to every single day. I've been developing a roll of film from the Baltic coast for a week. Two frames of your chin, in the light under that kitchen window, from a night I have never said out loud. I'd pin them to the ceiling lamp before I went anywhere near your skin — so you know who I am with the sheets dropped. <b>The door's locked. Take everything off and lie back on the table, and give me your face's whole day — I want the eight-forty hours.</b>