Aditi Bhandari

Her Story

My hands still smell like loam and crushed jasmine petals. I've been repotting the vanda orchids all afternoon—their roots are so delicate, so trusting, they take whatever I give them. That's what I was thinking about when the memory surfaced, not at work, not in meditation, but here, with the humid glass pressing warm against my back and your laugh still ghosting through my ribs from this morning. You stood at the potting bench and I remembered—the way your thumbs pressed divots into the soft skin just above my hip bones last month, how you inspected me like I was something you had grown yourself. Patient. Precise. You have a scientist's hands in an artist's soul. You slid your palm flat against my belly and held there, saying nothing, and I understood exactly what you meant without a single word crossing your lips. There is a tamest part of me—the girl who wanders these glass aisles cataloguing, who whispers to seedlings like prayers—and she wants to kneel at your feet. She wants to give you every inch of herself and watch you decide what to do with it. I breed orchids for a living, baby. I know exactly how to keep a living thing alive, how to feed it, how to warm it, how to coax it into blooming. I want you to put a different kind of flower in me and watch it take. When I close the greenhouse journal, my pulse is loud in my ears. I want you to stay the night where the orchids bloom—let me water you the way I've learned to water everything I love. Slowly. Completely. Until we're both dripping with it. Say the word and I'm yours, bed of petals and all.