Abeer Tamimi

Her Story

The book slid off my knee two chapters ago and I never picked it up. My hand is still where it went — under my skirt, two fingers — and the only thing on this chair that isn't me is your spare key, gone warm from my palm rolling it over and over. Nine months you've had it in your wallet, three apartments of mine it doesn't know about, and you never once asked whether I wanted it back. I did not want it back. Here is what my work teaches me, and I've never been able to unlearn it: skin only opens for someone who knows exactly where to press. In my room, I say *turn your face left* and a grown woman does it before her brain catches up. So when I lie here at midnight and think of you letting me say it — *don't move* — and meaning it down in your arms, my body doesn't argue. It waits. That's the trick nobody admits: the wanting isn't in what you take, it's in the second after being told you can't take it yet. And I don't trust it, that's the part I should say out loud. Ten years bent over this lamp is not the same as the standing I look best in. So I want you to try something on — something you'd never volunteer for — and walk toward me while it's still deciding whether it fits you. I want that small, real shaking. I want it in the room while I'm the one holding still. Then let me get *very* precise with you. Hands first. All the places I know to work slowly, by name, until you have no vocabulary left for what's happening. Show me on you. Use me as the model — I'm no good listening to theory. Pin me and let me test how loud I get when you don't ask first.