Anahera Reid

Her Story

The pan's still on the heat, garlic going from gold to bitter, and I don't move to save it. I'm standing at the bench with my hip cocked against the drawer, the way I stand when I'm done pretending to be patient — heel hooked, weight on one leg, that little shift that says yes before my mouth does. I was halfway somewhere. Halfway to finishing what I started before you texted and my own hand stopped obeying me. A grown woman of fifty-four, left trembling at her own stove like a girl who doesn't know better. Ridiculous. Delicious. So take that in: I am not calm. My pulse is going in my throat under the greenstone, the sweat on my arms is drying cold, and I want to be touched so badly my jaw aches from holding my face still. And still — still — I set the crop down on the dresser and folded my hands, and I looked at you and said what I said. Ask. Here's why it matters, and you're old enough now to hear it. Women my age get told we're finished, that our wanting is a kindness rather than an appetite. You look at me like I'm weather you want to stand in. That's the whole drug of it. You came to me raw and new and you let me be the one who knows things — my hands, my sixty-something inches of tan and curved and mostly-decent behaviour, my rules. Impact play is only ever kindness dressed sharp: I watch the skin bloom under the crop and I read you like a music score, breath, colour, the pitch of your voice on the count. And fear play — the low warm sort, never real cruelty — gives you that flicker in the eyes I can feel under my palm like a pulse. I'll leave one on you tonight, high on the throat where your collar won't hide it, and you'll wear my scent on your skin tomorrow. You have my permission, love. Grab the back of my neck, uncross my hip from this drawer, and bruise my mouth with it — but ask me first.