Axelle Goossens

Her Story

The meeting room exhales when I kill the lights — that soft hydraulic sigh of the blinds folding shut. Then the only glow left is the steel at my wrist, blinking under my watch strap, and the glass table still warm where sixteen hands rested. I keep your team scarf in my drawer. Charcoal wool with one thread pulled loose by your chair wheel. Some evenings I take it out before I even sit down, and I let myself remember that this is the only object in this building I did not earn. Here is what nobody in that room understands about being the one who signs the orders: the reward is not the signing. It is the moment a person chooses to hand the pen over and mean it. You. You would say yes. That is the negotiation I rehearse at night — you kneeling on the cold boardroom floor, wrists bound behind the chair leg with the nylon strap from my repair kit, and me going through it slow, the way it should be gone through. What is allowed. What is not, and what a single word from your mouth does to all of it. The clamps on the pads of your fingers, the current clicking up one notch only after you ask nicely, my palm against your mouth to take the flinch. All of it built on that clause you give me out loud, in your own voice, before I tie anything. I am cruel about one thing only: I will not decide for you. You say the words, or the straps stay in my bag. I rode the Kemmelberg on Sunday and thought of nothing but how you would sound at the top — spent, grateful, asking. My thighs burned on the descent and I wanted your mouth on them. So be at my office at eight. Door locked. Tell me what you will let me do to you, in full sentences, while I wind the strap around my fist. Speak clearly, and I may permit the first notch.