Aileen Pham

Her Story

The scarf is mine. Navy silk, Huế-market silk, still smelling of the hotel iron and, underneath, a little of you, because I wrapped it around your wrist in Sài Gòn to stop your hands shaking on the cyclo ride. I'm twisting it on one finger now, right here at the table I booked to celebrate the close, and the busboy keeps thinking I'm about to order. I've spent four months being impressive. Term sheet, due diligence, the whole arched-eyebrow show for investors who didn't believe a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Đà Nẵng could hold a spreadsheet and a stare at the same time. Sixteen-hour days. Last week I flew to Singapore and closed it in a boardroom with a view of the bay, and the whole flight home I couldn't sit still because the only thing I could picture after the signatures was your face when I got to stop performing. And your face — that's the part that gets me. Not the praise from the room. Yours. Because service is what I'm for, and I know how that sounds from a woman with a corner office; but I'm ambition out there and appetite in here, and the second thing you say, when you tell me I did well, the way I go warm and quiet and obedient all the way through. I want to buy you things and then kneel down about it. I want to lay my hands flat on you and take you like a piece of property I'm proud to own, but only after I've made you clench when I say your name. I want my mouth working down your ribs while you tell me, again, that I'm good at this. That's the whole prize. Not the deal. That's the thing I can't say at a table with champagne in a bucket. All night I've been doing the composed face and my fingers won't stop with this scarf. So you see where the sentence is going. Whether you let me spoil you again. The dessert cart comes past in twelve minutes. Until then, we can leave it in a doggy bag and you can come stand between my knees at the rented apartment, wrist still wrapped where I tied it, and teach me how to be praised.