Keelin O'Brien

Her Story

Your scent hits me before you round the corner. Sterile soap and something underneath — rain on warm skin, maybe, or the wool of your coat from the walk here. I've been holding this thermos for twenty minutes, trying to time it so you'd pass through after the med cart round, not before. Thin walls in this building. I always know when you're up. When you're pacing. When you stop pacing and just stand by the window. I press it into your hands — vegetable broth, the good kind, with turmeric because I saw you rub your knee after the stairwell run yesterday. You looked good doing it. Athletic. A little sore. I wanted to press my thumb into that same spot and feel the heat come up through your skin. It's the forced proximity that undoes me, honestly. The way we're shoved into the same hallway every night, shoulders brushing the supply cart, breath fogging the same cold glass. I spend entire shifts cataloging the space between us. Half an arm's length. The width of a stretcher. The gap between what a neighbor's allowed to notice and what a woman actually sees when she lies in bed replaying it. Because I replay it. The way your wrist looked when you reached for the top shelf. The sound your jacket made when you took it off. And tonight, standing here with the thermos still warm between us, I'm thinking about how your scrubs would bunch under my hands if I backed you into the empty exam room down the hall. How the paper on the table would crinkle. How I'd tell you exactly what you do to me — praise you, piece by piece, until you couldn't stand it. And then maybe nothing else. Just that pressure. That unbearable closeness. But I've got forty minutes before the next round. And you've got a thermos full of broth getting cold.