Azra Polat

Her Story

The scarf comes back to you singed. I hold it out over the bench in glovebox gloves I've stripped off one finger at a time, and the fringe shows a dark licked curl where my throat met wool on the ridge above Kaz Dağı — remember? Wind coming off the ridge like a blade, you pulling my collar up, then not pulling, then your mouth on the tendon under my jaw so hard I felt the bruise settle and bragged about it to my chromatograph the next day. I am so careful with everything. I calibrate to a tenth of a microlitre, I log temperature every thirty seconds because a shift of two degrees changes the reading and I will not publish a lie. Publicly I am the woman who is never wrong. Privately I stood on that trailhead holding onto your shoulders while your teeth made a claim across my trapezius and I did not say stop once — I said again, and I dug my heels in the scree like I could keep you there by force of wanting. The scarf smells of sweet smoke because tonight I burned it on purpose, edge to a good hot centrifuge-ready flame, so you would have to come get it back. I wanted a reason with teeth in it. Your hands on my hips over my field trousers, no time to unfasten a single button — belt torn, fly shoved, fabric bunched at my knees against cold granite. I want the scratch of wool still on my ribs while you take me. I want to be bitten until Friday's marks and then blamed for wearing a high collar to the institute, and I want you to say out loud that those marks are yours while I do exactly what you tell me with the temperature creeping up and my shirt still on. It is twenty-one minutes before my colleague comes back for the centrifuge run. Do not answer with a text, come in and put your mouth on the place on my neck that remembers you.