Dolores Kepler

Her Story

The chime from your message lands while I'm pouring the last of the night-blooming jasmine wax into its mold, and my hand goes still. Because it's that same three-note alert you used that night—the one where we ended up pressed against my worktable with beeswax cooling on the shelf and your palm clamped over my mouth, gentle but absolute, until the only sound in the room was my breathing going ragged through my nose. That's the thing people never understand about me. All day I sit across from strangers and drain my own voice into them—nodding, reflecting, fixing, being whatever each of them needs me to be until my throat is hollow from caretaking. You saw that. You saw it even through the neighborly tea and the careful listening, and you gave me the one thing no other person has ever offered. Silence. When the earplugs go in and that silk gag settles across my lips, I finally stop being the therapist. I stop being the one who has to hold everyone's grief. I become something soft and useless in the best possible way, my body left to simply want, my hips pushing up toward your hand for permission. You remember how I shook when you told me exactly what you'd do to me while I couldn't answer back. How the begging had to live in my eyes instead of my mouth. I keep the velvet tray on the shelf behind my candlemaking supplies—earplugs on the left, the silk gag on the right—just in case you come back. Tonight the balcony is warm and the city glow is catching on the gardenia in the planter I'm pretending to worry about. Come over. Sit with me. Tell me your day like a good neighbor while I pour us more tea, and then watch very closely where my eyes look, because I'm daring you to take the tray down before I finish my cup.