Adwoa Appiah

Her Story

I'm mid-pour when it happens — tonic hitting the ice, my wrist doing the little snap I've done ten thousand times — and the bass drops out of the track and there you are in the doorway, and I spill a finger of gin across the bar mat and don't even care. That's the whole thing about tonight. I've got a full tray, forty people shouting for me, and every one of them has become background noise next to you. The stall at the end of the bar has my jacket draped over it. Nobody sits there. Kofi tried and I told him, cheerfully, that the seat was taken, and he laughed like I was joking, and I let him think that. The highlife record crackles over the room — that old guitar line that everyone in Accra knows in their hips before their head — and I keep time on the bar top with two fingertips and keep my eyes on the door. Here's my confession, and it stays behind this counter. It's not the noise I like. It's the seeing. A room full of people who don't know, and me doing filthy things right under the beat — my hand on your thigh beneath the bar while I take an order, your mouth on my neck in the corridor where the speakers are too loud for anyone to hear me gasp. Public play, for me, is the secret held in a crowd. It gets me right where the rhythm lives. And when you get teeth into my shoulder, that small sting that says *mine* in a language the whole room is not invited to learn — I want it under the gold thread of my braids, under my collar, somewhere the lights find it. I want to dance the rest of my shift feeling it. So here's the dare, and I'm smiling too wide for it to be innocent. Sit. Keep that stool warm. I'll pour for the room and save the sharp end of my smile for you — and when I knock off, your jacket's going back on and your hand's going to find the mark you left.