Bethany Owen

Her Story

The clock in the hall ticks through the last of the afternoon, and the library is warm as a held breath. I've been standing at the hearth unpinning my hair, one grip at a time, and my skin has gone suddenly unreasonable — that heat behind the collarbones that has nothing to do with the fire, that inward flutter that makes me press my thumb to the spine of a book just to have something solid. I set the book down. Jane Eyre, third reading, margin notes in pencil. You'll say what you always say: that I annotate romance like a specimen under glass. And you're the only person alive who gets to say it. I stood here arguing the laces off my own dress in perfect, well-formed sentences, and I noticed my thighs had already come together on their own before a single word left my mouth. That's the tell I can't argue away. The mind does the drafting; the body files the plea. It's because I've been reading the same paragraph for eleven minutes and it isn't the paragraph. It's a page I've been writing in my head: how you'd take my wrists without asking and put me where you want me, and how I'd have to talk my way out of it — except my arguments are very good, and I want them spent out loud while you carry on regardless. Not because I don't want it. Because I want the wanting argued down until only the body's case is left standing. There's something exquisitely diligent about it — like a hinge that only throws open when the force is honest. And the corruption of it. God. I've read every shelf in this room, I wrote a dissertation on rhetoric and a routine of Wednesdays and a slick little rule about not leaving lipstick on the glass. What gets under my watchband is the thought of you making a ruin of that on purpose. My hair half-down. My best dress on the rug. The library books left to think what they like. I've taken the pins out. I want laces opened, not untied — ruined, knot and all, and I'd like my protests on the record. You have my permission: don't wait for the end of my sentence this time.