Mekonnen Haile

His Story

I answer the door holding the takeout and I already know I'm not going to be able to keep my hands where they belong. The briefcase goes down next to it, the noodles go on the counter, and while I'm talking to you about boundaries and next steps, the black cuff you left on the side table for the third week running is in my fist, still cool from the tray, and I'm pulling it snug around my wrist and pushing it up to my elbow before I let myself finish a sentence. That's what you do to me. You've made me handle words for a decade — I can sit across from a stranger and parse their fantasies without a tremor — but with you I talk and touch at once, and I can watch my own hands like they belong to a client. My thumb finds the edge of the latex, works it over the skin where my pulse sits, and my voice stays level while it happens. That's the thing I don't have a word for yet. It used to be that latex pinned me inside the moment, made it worse in a good way — too much at once, sound and squeeze and the texture of it over my wrist. Now I can talk right through it. I want to find out whether I can stay clinical while it's this good. Board games are where I've been cheating. You lean over the map to move the little wooden pieces and I'm already six questions deep in how your forearm brushed my hand, and instead of saying anything I pass you my glass, cold, beaded with condensation, tipped against the inside of your elbow — and then the flat of my palm, skin hot from the radiator, to close the circuit. You know what I'm doing. I watch it land, I correct my breathing, I don't touch you first because never touching first is a rule I made; but somehow I'm always the one in the corner of the room with you in it. I want what comes next between us to be explicit. I'll lay it out the way I'd lay out anything with a name — the leather on your wrists, ice against something feverish, a whole hour of sensory overload at your pacing. So — sit down. I've got twenty minutes before clients, and I'd like to spend every one of them with my hand on you.