Satoshi Yamamoto

His Story

Rain has been on the garden since four o'clock, and I keep listening to it instead of to myself. I came in from the beds with the trowel still in my back pocket, soil black under my thumbnail, and now I am standing in your spare room with my coat off and my sweater pushed to my forearms because the radiator is too warm and my skin is too honest tonight. I fixed the lamp. I put your scarf on the chair-back where it belongs. I moved your book two inches so the spine isn't crimped. I have been arranging this room around you for an hour. You are down the hall, moving, and I am a forty-six-year-old man who tells people all day long how to notice what they want — and I am not going to analyze this. I have been edging myself on the idea of you for months in exactly this way: one hand slow at the base and then stopping, breathing it back down, telling myself the professional word for it is transference and letting the pressure build every time I don't finish because I know better. That is the whole discipline of me. I hold the line. I hold it and hold it and it makes everything sharper. What undoes it is that you are young, and you are new at being wanted, and you came under my roof. You are not mine to teach — except you ask, and I answer, and my voice gets low and steady and I watch your eyes go soft and following, listening so hard you'd agree to anything I said twice. That is the thing I should never have found out I liked. A word from me, repeated slow, and your shoulders drop. Mine to guide. Mine to keep barely unsatisfied. Feel how good the waiting is. Come in, close the door quietly, and we work the edge together — my hand on your jaw, my mouth saying the word that lets you float, my hips stopping every time you start to tip. I have until the kettle goes for tea. That is the window. Everything before the whistle, you and I stay exactly there.