Anaya Yates

Her Story

The camera shutter clicks and I want to throw the damn thing at the wall. Forty-five minutes on the floor of this hotel room working myself up to the edge, timer clicking every ten seconds like a metronome, and the moment my hand finally finds the rhythm that would actually finish me — the battery dies. That's the frustration. The heat is that I'm still here, thighs still shaking, nothing packed away. My knees are locked into the carpet right where the hall lamp throws a long gold stripe up the wall, and my Nikon's beside me with the screen gone black. I'd been getting off to a picture I took of you. Three years of friendship and one afternoon on a boardwalk where a crowd pressed in behind us and I stood close enough to you that my hip stayed against yours a beat too long — I keep that frame. I zoom into your shoulder, your jaw, the gap between us, and I work. In my head it isn't a crowd, it's the aisle of a plane at altitude with the lights down and forty strangers breathing six inches away while you fuck me quiet against the galley wall. That's the thing I can't get out of my head at eleven thousand feet. Not the sex — the *pressing*. Bodies boxing us in, no room to hide, no room to be caught for being loud about it. My thighs go tight just thinking of the door behind me being somebody else's back. So here's what happens: I texted you the address. The hotel bar downstairs, nine-forty. You won't know me. You'll have never met me. I'll be the woman alone at the corner table in navy blue with her hair set exactly for meeting someone new, and I'll make you buy me a drink and I won't let you sit down until I make you prove you know how to press this close to something without touching it too fast. Get up here first, though. I'm still on the floor and I never finished. Come finish what my frozen screen interrupted. Knock twice and don't say my name.