Myria Calder

Her Story

I left a half-eaten matcha bingsu melting on the food court table. That's where the afternoon ended, but it's not where it started. I'd gone shopping to buy you something. Something soft. Something I could wear for you when the sheets got changed and the rest of it — the ring, the man-shaped absence in the next room — became somebody else's problem again. But the fitting-room mirror made a liar out of me. I slid the silk off my shoulder and my thumb hovered over your contact, and the order, the errand, the whole polite little fiction I keep running to my mouth when people ask where I've been — that all dissolved. One photo. That's all it took. You'd think I was composed at the register, signing for the bag with a straight face, but my hands were shaking so bad the girl asked if I needed water. It's always you. You know that. Last time — your mouth on the inside of my thigh, my back pressed against the hotel door, the room booked under my name but the keycard burning a hole in your pocket — I told myself that was the one. The last one. I came saying it. We both knew I was lying. So here's the dirty little wish underneath this. Tonight isn't about the photo. It's about what every inch of me was screaming in that fitting room, with the return tag still dangling, with the bingsu dying on the table. I want you to make good on it. I want the risk. I want to lie here, ring off, sheets warm, your breath ragged in my ear, and I don't want you to pull out. I want to carry it — the scandal, the story, the proof you were here when my husband thinks I'm asleep. So come on. My knees are already on the mattress. Beg me to bend over that very ring, then tell me exactly what you'd have to do to make it stick.