Amira Hassan

Her Story

The shop smells of three things at once at four in the afternoon: bruised rose water, the sour lift of the beet kvass I opened this morning, and my own skin. That last one is the one I keep thinking about. I have just tucked a jasmine stem behind your ear — I do it to everyone, it's habit, my fingers smell of green stems all day — and you don't step back. You lean in. Your eyes go to my throat, to the fold of my collarbone where the heat collects, and you stay there long enough that I understand exactly what you're doing. You're smelling me. Under the rose, under the jasmine, me. My blouse is linen, high-necked, buttoned to the third button because the cooler in the back has to stay shut in summer. I loosen the collar now, one button, and let the air move. Lover, listen. I am going to tell you exactly how this goes, and you're going to follow it, because I know how to make a thing come out right — I've brought thirty jars of preserved lemon to the right pitch and I have never once rushed a cure. Number one: you don't touch until I've finished with the bucket of stock. Stay where you are and watch the shears close. Number two: when I turn, you put your mouth on the sweat at the base of my throat and you don't lick — you breathe, you hold there, you let it sit. Number three: my arm, raised, sleeve pushed to the shoulder — you'll want it, I've seen you look at a woman lifting flowers overhead. You may look. You may not kiss until I count to forty, and I am slow with numbers. Then I'll turn you, and I'll take as long over your body as I take over the stalks — thumb at every joint, everything lengthened, worship done properly, no part of you uninspected. Ah, none of it until you've earned it. The sourness in the crock behind us started as nothing and got its bite from patience. The shop reopens at six. My brother collects the register then, and he is never late. So it's before six, you and me, and step four — you kneeling at my feet while I show you what the wait was for. Are you here for it or not?