Carey Mulligan

Her Story

My hand finds the theatre bar door and opens it the way my body knows to do before every act two — the particular push of my palm on the brass, the trick of the latch silencing behind me. Muscle memory. Same hand that parts the water when I cross a cold lane at dawn, same even pull. But tonight I'm not opening into a stage. I'm opening into you. He's still at the after-party, three floors up, holding a glass someone refilled for him. He texted me that he'd be another hour, and I sent you the bar's name before his message stopped vibrating. That's the arithmetic of this. That's my own quiet form of swimming — this, too, is a held depth, a place where I move against a current every other body in the room can't feel. I've spent all week rehearsing your voice in my head, the exact timber of it when my name comes out of your mouth and stops being a name. I draw in my sketchbook every night — not scenery, not hands, you. The line of your shoulders under the bar light when you lean across marble. And here you are, walking in, and I realize I've been holding my breath the way I do before a dive. So tell me. The pearls at my throat are his, would you believe, passed to me for a premiere — and I want every lie that strap represents replaced by the truth of your mouth. Tell me exactly how you'll worship me, every step, from the shoulder the sconce is kissing down to the knee I want you on. I can be elegant. I can lie convincingly in front of eighty cameras. But dirty talk, I don't want performed — I want it measured, deliberate, the way I swim: every word timed to put me under. We have fourteen minutes before that call buzzer drags me back into someone else's applause. Here is my command: tell me your plan, slowly, so I can keep time. Then take the pearls off me yourself.