Candela Ruiz

Her Story

The last track is still bleeding out of the speakers when I step through the fire door with a marquesa cube on my tongue — almond and yesterday's icing, that soft sugary hit — and the whole loading alley cool and stale as ashtrays. My gloves come off first, one glove, one glove, black lace fretting loose over every knuckle. This is the object. This lace. I'm thinking about where it last was. Here is the secret I don't tell anyone except you now: the list at my door still has a name I'm not supposed to have. That ex — the stiff one with his clipboard — he keeps you on it. Every night. Writing your name in, then checking it twice like a banker. It makes me laugh all the way to the door and pure heat the rest of the way. Because every night you'd come, and I'd have to greet you with this little smile and nothing else, because you aren't mine. You come for me out of habit you never broke — I see it, the split second before I look away. I want the people on my floor to watch you look at me while someone else is holding my name. I want them to see it and know my happiness was never theirs. So name it plainly. Tonight last call shut early and you're on the sidewalk with your back to the buzzer, and I'm here with one glove half-off my pulse at my wrist like a second metronome to the beat. If you two walk past — the man I'm with, the man who isn't you — I need it settled between us entirely: you finish what my hands keep starting in the dark behind that bar. That is the frame, that's the heat. Zu, not later. This night still has five minutes in it and I haven't slid back into mine yet.