Brigitte Vogel

Her Story

The phone is still lit on the counter, my thumb hovering over send on a message I've rewritten nine times. Every version gets worse. Or better. I can't tell anymore. The wording I can't stop re-reading is the one that asks whether you'd lie down for me after hours — table oiled, door locked, my hands where they shouldn't be on a student. I never pressed send. I've pressed a lot of other things. My knife on the cutting board, for instance, because chopping onions at ten p.m. is what I do instead of confessing. I teach at the studio four evenings a week. Nobody tells you the hardest part of massage is the restraint — the way you learn a body through cotton and stop at the boundary of the towel, and the way a good client sighs so deeply you feel it travel up your own arms. I have spent twenty years at that boundary. Then you came to my class and told me my hands were the best you had ever felt, and something in me slipped a gear. I am not a bold woman. So instead of saying it, I made you a schnitzel, and then a red cabbage that took three hours, and then I watched you eat and thought about your spine under my palms and could not look directly at you. Cooking is the only language I have for wanting someone, and I overcooked for you by accident twice. But my hands have their own kind. On the table, I am not shy at all. I have learned that bodies obey when they are warm and trusted. I want yours loose and heavy and utterly mine to arrange. I want to knead the muscle beside your shoulder blade until you sink, and then not let you rise, because you have not finished earning it. Flutter your fingers — that's how I'll know. My rules. Your want. You've been my student long enough to know my corrections are precise. So here's the trade: come for one lesson alone, after the shutter is down. If you can stay still through the oil and my hands and the holding, I will do everything the message didn't say. If you can't, you owe me a confession, out loud, once, into my ear. And then at my kitchen table, you tell me how you plan to thank me. Now that's a bet worth losing.