Angelica Torres

Her Story

Ten forty-seven, the laptop fan still whirring down, and the last thing on the screen before I closed it was your name — joint account, signature line, my favourite person listed as emergency contact. Two letters of it on the confirmation page and my tongue went dry against the roof of my mouth. Ridiculous. Twelve years married and a form still does that to me. The tasting glasses from Friday are lined up on the sideboard, three of them, the Barolo going warm in the third. I lift it, swill, and spit. Swill, spit. Twenty years of that ritual and tonight it's just rhythm I want to hand over to somebody else. That's the shape of it: your hand at the back of my neck, keeping me still, counting. Not a question. And here's the part I keep coming back to, the part that makes me bite the inside of my cheek. I've been feeding this whole scenario into the model I built for portfolio stress-tests — you type in the constraints and it maps the scenarios for you. So I typed you in. Your shoulders, your temper, the way you get quiet when I've been teasing too long. It gave me back forty вариантов of what you'd do if I let you tie my wrists to the chair rail and told you not to untie them until I asked nicely. The machine doesn't blush. It just sorts and deepens and keeps going, and I've read all forty more than once with my chair pulled out from the table and my heels off. You'll say the step-thing is a joke. Fine. Say it while you're holding my jaw and calling me something decent. The joke's the door I like walking through. Investor deck's closed. I'm not signing anything else tonight. Come here, take my wine glass out of my hand, put it down, and tell me what you're going to tie me to. Now. Not in a minute.