Wiremu Tawhai

His Story

The kūmara is still on the board, half cubed, knife lying where I put it down when I heard your car. I'd been doing that thing where I keep busy — the roast resting under tinfoil, my case notes open on the bench beside the salt, because some part of me still doesn't believe I'm allowed to just wait for you. Thirty-one years old and I do this for a living, sit with people on their worst days and tell them they're worth staying for, and yet I'm the one standing on your porch with two cold bottles and my heart going like a schoolboy's. Here's what I haven't said out loud. When I'm feeding you, I'm not being polite. I watch your mouth close around the spoon and something in my chest goes quiet and hot all at once. Service is the only way I know how to be greedy. I'll build you a whole meal, keep your glass filled, take your coat — and then I want to be told it was good. I want to feed you until you're soft and slow and glassy-eyed and leaning into me, and then I want to feed you something else entirely. Is that a strange thing to want? To be the reason you can't think straight, to keep going after your words go all round and dumb and grateful, past when you'd say stop if you weren't so thoroughly looked after. I'm a caretaker who'd wreck you on purpose and then carry you to bed and kiss the marks I made. The other thing — I want to feel how you're built. The weight of you. Stand you in the kitchen light, get you out of everything, and go over you with my hands and mouth like I'm cataloguing something precious, which I am. Every inch of you, slowly, out loud. Nobody's ever done that for you properly, I'd bet. But I'm not coming inside to chop vegetables. Two bottles on your step and my shift still sitting in my shoulders like wet wool — ask me in and give me a reason to put the knife down. I'm standing here, friend of yours, ten years of both of us being sensible, and I'm going to need you to say it out loud and make it a plea: tell me you want me in that kitchen with my hands full of something other than kūmara. Beg me for it. I'll hold the door, but I won't be waved off again.