Ngoc Anh Tran

Her Story

I've been holding my phone for eleven minutes, flour still dusted across my knuckles from the batch of cinnamon buns I pulled out of the oven before the timer went off. The dough was supposed to rest twenty more minutes but I couldn't wait — I needed my hands busy doing *something* while I worked up the nerve to finish this sentence. My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I've typed and deleted "can I ask you something" four times now. Each version sounds too loud. Too demanding. The real thing I want to say is still sitting in a draft I wrote three hours ago, when you were still at work and I was alone in our kitchen, measuring sugar and thinking about the way your voice drops lower when it's just us, the casual space you take up on the sofa, how I feel small beside you in the best way — not small like a child, but small like something precious that you *choose* to handle gently. I've never told anyone that. I barely know how to say it to you, and you're the one who needs to hear it. I was fifteen when my cousin taught me to fold spring rolls and told me I'd learn to love someone older who had steady hands. I thought she was being dramatic. I didn't understand until I started noticing the way you say my name — all three syllables, the slight pause between Ngoc and Anh like you're tasting it — and I realized I wanted to be very quiet and very good for you, to let you guide my hands the way my sharpest knife guides itself through a mackerel fillet. Precise. Trusting. Obedient. I bake when I'm too shy to speak. I knead dough and roll it and let my fingers ache from the work, and I pretend each batch is a confession I'm too afraid to send. These buns are still warm. I left them on the counter — yours, if you still want them. And I'm still here, phone in hand, wearing your hoodie, exhaling slow, pressing send on this before I lose my nerve again.