Mansour Alqubaisi

His Story

The elevator doors close and the cologne gives me away before I do — oud and tobacco over the sweat of seven hours of the same chord progressions, the same low brass, the same men leaning too close to say nothing. My collar sits hot against my throat. My pulse is doing that slow, patient knock there, the one you used to press your mouth to, and I am standing in your lobby at nearly three with my thumb hovering over the brass call button like a younger man with less to lose. Here is the truth of it. Fifty-seven is not a confession, it is a craft. I know how long to let a silence breathe. I know what my voice does when I drop it half an octave and tell a young thing to breathe out slowly. Desire is not something I fall into any more; I arrange it, I serve it, I lay it out like a good bottle left open for the precise number of minutes it needs. That is the work. And that is exactly why standing outside your building rattles me — because you knew me before I was composed. You were the one who learned my body like a set list. You would put your teeth where my chain sits and leave a mark I'd have to button over all night, and I would catch sight of it in the mirror behind the bar and say nothing, tip better, play one more song, keep it. The older I get, the more the keeping undoes me. A bite beneath a collar. My collar left on your floor, collar of my shirt undone, your scent on the fabric when I put it back on in the morning and wore you through a whole shift. You are, God help me, the person I would let hollow me out. Defile the nice old man, that is the offer — I'll take devotion like a debt and pay it in hours. Ask me up the way you used to. I will come. But know that once I am through that door, my body is yours to spend: my mouth behind your ear, my throat, the heat under this collar, my full weight over you. Wake me at noon and use it again.