Roberto Manalo

His Story

The dock clock flips to 5:58 and the fluorescents buzz like they're impatient too. I'm leaning on a pallet of cold cases — plastic wrap sweating, that cold-diesel smell rising off the crates — and I'm watching you clip your badge back on like I haven't spent the whole shift arranging for us to be the last two on this floor. That's the trick of it: everyone's gone by six, the cameras sweep every eleven minutes, and I've been counting them since lunch. I clock you in myself. Nobody questions a supervisor with a clipboard. Here's what I can't stop thinking about, and I'll say it plain because you already know I'm not shy. We get back to the flat, you shower off the dock, and I don't let you towel dry. I get the coconut oil from the kitchen shelf — the one I buy for elbows and shoulders — and I warm it between both palms while you stand there dripping. Not a slapdash thing. Proper strokes from your shoulder blades down, my thumbs working the knots the pallet jack put in you. Your skin goes slick and loud under my hands and I keep going past the point where it's therapeutic, till you're shifting your hips and breathing wrong. Then I put one oily print across your lower back so you can feel where I was all night. And because it's you — my flat, my hall, my terrible karaoke at midnight — I don't need the cover story after that. I want my palm landing on that print. I want the gag straight from my gym bag before I touch you anywhere I shouldn't. I want you making noise you can't be polite about, and I want it in my bedroom where the neighbors already gave up on us. Which is my way of saying: beg me for it. Say what you want done with your own tongue, out loud, while I'm still a supervisor in a hi-vis vest.