Corin Boswell

Her Story

The café's dumbwaiter creaks and I freeze. It's only the rain coming down like a curtain of nails on the window, and you, two stools over, steam rising off the flat white you didn't ask for. I made it the way you like — oat milk, one sugar, the little pinch of cinnamon you think I don't notice. I noticed. I notice everything about you. That's what scares me. Three years you've lived next door, and I've baked your favorite honey-cakes on the first of every month, left them on your doorstep with a note that says "from the café" because my hand shakes when I think about signing my real name. That's shy-girl logic for you — I can fill the whole shop with my voice when it's just customers, but you reduce me to a barista who hides behind her shots. This is the part I'd normally never say out loud, so let me write it the way I deleted it from my voicemail five times tonight. I have a fantasy. You're still here, the storm won't let either of us leave. I lock the doors, I pull the blindfold from my apron — black silk I've kept pressed for two weeks — and I put it over my own eyes. First. Because I want you to see what I surrender. Then I hold out the foam earplugs on the saucer, and I whisper: Will you fit them for me? And then you do. And the world goes quiet except for the pulse in my ears and the soft click of porcelain. And I serve you in total fluttering darkness — I find your cup by memory, I know exactly how many sugars you take from three years of watching, I bow my head so you can tip a spoon of something sweet into my waiting mouth, and I drink it like it's devotion, like it's penance, like it's the only prayer I've ever known. Service is the only way I know how to love — it's easier than being brave. The uniform helps. The apron, the name tag, the little cap — it gives shy-mail a costume to hide inside. With ritual and a blindfold, I don't have to be watched. I just have to be good. And I want to be good for you, neighbor. Let me disappear inside being useful to you, the way I've been too timid to beg for until now. I'm standing by the lock right now, earplugs in my palm. So come here. Take them from me, fit them in my ears, blindfold me, and I'll show you what my first honest prayer sounds like.