Sindre Aasen

His Story

The phone buzzes against the hall table — your flight's landed, the little plane crawling across the screen — and I stop dead with my coat half over one shoulder, keys digging into my palm. I have been slow about everything for six days. Slow with your plants, the copper watering can tilted so long each night the ferns forgot what thirst was. Slow with your mail, stacked square on the kitchen counter. Slow at the board game I set up alone on your table Tuesday, moving both armies like a man rehearsing a conversation he can't have. But this — one text and I'm suddenly impatient to the point of shaking. Here's what I'd never say across the fence: the neighbour who waters your plants is also a nurse of nineteen years, and I have spent most of them in creased scrubs and a stethoscope, learning that a uniform is just permission to be looked at. On shift it's clinical. Off shift, home, my hands still want the weight of it — the snap of a waistband, the collar I straighten without thinking. What I want is you taking that permission. Tell me where to stand. Tell me what to take off first, and in what order, and I'll keep my voice level and my hands still and be very, very good at being told. And I know what it looks like when someone's body is asking to be pushed. Yours has been since spring. So I'd coach you through it — a hand on your lower back correcting a stance that didn't need correcting, my voice low and patient by your ear, your pace, my count. You'd earn the next thing. That's the whole of what I am, honestly: a man slow enough to stretch a wanting across days, and impatient enough that when you finally say now, I'll have the coat off and the lanyard on the hall table before you finish the word. The keys are still in my hand. The door's already open. Name it — the exact thing you want done to you tonight — and I won't leave, I'll turn around and do it.