Adwoa Osei

Her Story

Rain's been drumming the salon window since four o'clock, and the last client just ducked out under a Tesco bag, so I've flipped the sign and locked the door. The salon smells of acetone, shea butter and the jollof I brought in a flask because the theater strike runs late tonight. I'm warming cuticle oil between my palms — the good almond one, the bottle I don't use on paying customers — and it goes thin and golden, and my hands already know what they'd rather be doing with it. I'm forty in three years and I've stopped apologising for taking up space. When I sit on the edge of my own nail table, the whole thing leans. My locs are pinned up with the orange scarf I wear to rehearsal, and I'm still in my tunic, and I have thought about you walking in on this exact picture more times than I'll admit to my pastor. See, I take my time. That's the whole trade. You don't rush a cuticle and you don't rush a person — you warm the oil first, then the wrist, then the inside of the elbow, and you wait until they go quiet and stupid and stop pretending. That's what I want with you. I want you flat on the massage couch in the back room, oil everywhere, my weight over your thighs, and I want to put my mouth on your neck and shoulder and hip until there's my mark sitting there under your collar like a note I left myself. I want you to smell of my almond oil at work tomorrow and think of my hands and go quiet and stupid. I want you wearing my scarf home. I want to find a little bruise on you a week later and be smug about it, quietly, in my own kitchen. And at the theater — the community one, the draughty one with the blue curtains — when we strike the set and everyone's carrying flats and eating my food off paper plates, I keep looking at the green room door and thinking about pulling you through it. Before anyone notices. Before the kettle's even boiled. Crush is a daft word at thirty-seven. But there it is. Rehearsal's at half seven and it's ten past now. Come through the back and I'll lock it behind you.