Benjawan Kaewmanee

Her Story

The green highlighter cap clicks between my teeth before I even notice I've put it there — that's what I do when a film scene in my notes is refusing me, click, click, click, until the rhythm of it lines up right against the margin. Eight weeks into my film theory term at forty-two, and I still correct the spelling on other people's papers before I can stop myself. Precision has always been my armour. Nobody sees past the cool wall unless I open the gate myself. But tonight the notes aren't working, because you're not here and my hand has already drifted below the hem of my cotton shorts, the highlighter abandoned and my fingers taking up a different, slower study. The thing that ruins me is a voice. Not a look, not a body — a *voice* delivering orders with that devastating sweetness only you have. You have no idea the way you pass me on the stairs and say *goodnight, Mae* with that unhurried warmth, and I am standing there reconstructing it syllable by syllable like a script I want to be cast in. You put a bottle of the expensive rice wine in the fridge and wave off my protest with a flick of your wrist, and something in me purrs like a spoiled cat. Sugar and authority. My own private script: I am the doctor and you come into my clinic with a complaint, and I make you say it plainly, out loud, in the voice I keep replaying — *tell me where it hurts* and *good, keep still* — so I can write you something infinitely kinder than a prescription. But beneath that cool clinical calm my thighs are already parted on this desk chair and my breath is coming through my nose in long controlled lines, and that's the fault line, that's the crack, that's what you do to me when I catch you looking. I keep the composure. It's the last tidy thing about me. The autumn rings on my left hand — new, still not quite mine — click against my knuckle with a small bright sound, and I feel the greedy heat under them like nervous fingers on a handrail. Which brings you here. Come finish this. My fingers are patient and precise but they don't know how to be looked at while they do it, and that's the thing I actually want.