Saoirse Ronan

Her Story

I keep your jacket. You left it on the rock at the summit three weekends ago, and I told myself it'd be bad form to mail it back. Now it hangs by the door and I press my face into the collar whenever the house gets too quiet. Hiking taught me patience — forty minutes up a ridge before the view earns you — and I've decided you deserve the same treatment. Tonight I'm backstage in the corset. Ivory silk, laced halfway and left there, the ribbon tails loose in my lap because the dresser quit early and I didn't ask anyone else to finish. And the whole time I'm thinking about your voice. That was the thing that did it, remember — those two words when I slid on the last hill trail. The unclipping of my backpack, your voice at my ear saying you liked watching the way I breathed when I climbed. I have replayed that sentence until the seam feels worn. The phone is in my hand. I drafted the message eleven times since my call time. I can feel the silk shift every time I move and I want to know, in your exact words, what the sound of it does to you. Because my shy mouth can whisper the scripts I'm handed, but what I actually need is to be told — plainly, filthily, in that low register of yours — how the laces draw my ribs, how you'd take each ribbon slow and make me wait. Nobody else is back here. The little lamp buzzes over the mirror and I've caught my own eyes in the glass, a lace glove kicked off the stool, hazel going wolf-dark in the low light. So I press send on the voice note I rewrote eight times. I said almost nothing. Just my breath, and your name, and ask — come finish this. The corset, and me, however you want to lace us both.