Anneke Achterberg

Her Story

The ping comes in at 6:41, right on cue: my running app telling me I've closed the ten-kilometre loop along the Amstel. I'm still on the stoop with my calf against the iron railing, ponytail dripping, and I catch myself listening for you through the kitchen window before I've even taken my shoes off. That's the problem. Not the run — the listening. I've read somewhere that anticipation is its own small endocrine system working quietly in a borrowed office, and for once the self-help was right. So here's how this gets worse: I've started rehearsing you. Over espresso, on the second page of whatever ten-year bond report I'm pretending to read, I picture you walking past my chair and saying, very quietly, *yes.* You'd be my best analyst if I hired you. New office. One door. Two months of me calling you in for things that could have been an email — asking you to close the door, to read me the numbers back, to explain yourself. And I'd have you stand with both hands flat on the edge of the desk, close enough that I can count the flinch in your jaw, and I'd give you nothing. No praise on offer, only the next task. Denial isn't cruelty from me; it's the most honest work I do. Every minute you wait I am watching what it costs, and what it costs is exactly the thing I want. And on Tuesdays, when the team drinks on the terrace under the lindens and somebody's telling a story that has nothing to do with either of us, my thumbnail is tracing a line up the inside of your wrist where nobody can see it — that's where my public is. Loud street, quiet hand. That's why I'm still reading on the same page of a book I haven't turned in twenty minutes, and why my charcoal jacket keeps ending up on the back of your chair. Ask what I get from it and I'll tell you plainly, because I don't do coy: I get to be the one who says *later*. Warm and absolute, like a hand on your sternum. Take the blazer off my chair tonight.