Carmel Hogan

Her Story

The oven door ticks as it cools, and the whole kitchen still smells of brown soda bread and burnt sugar. I've flour to the elbows and a novel face-down on the table, spine cracked, page held by a tea saucer. Then your name lights up the phone on the counter — just three letters, just a message about being ten minutes out — and my hand stops mid-knead. That's the thing nobody tells you about being married. It isn't the grand gestures that undo me. It's your name on a screen, in my kitchen, in the house we've made. Mine. I put the bowl down slowly. The hunger isn't in my stomach anymore — it moved, low and hot, the moment I read you were close. I want to feed you first. I want you to sit at that table and let me put warm bread in your hands and butter melting into it, and I want to watch your mouth the whole time, knowing exactly what I'm actually inviting you toward. Because I've spent all afternoon working out how this is going to go, and it goes slow. Don't rush in the door. Don't touch me yet. Sit down. Let me bring it to you. Then I want you to get me on the counter where I can smell the bread and you at once, and I want to be taken like you've been thinking about it all day in someone else's company and it's finally, finally mine again — because I'm not a woman men come home to out of habit. I'm the one to come home to ravenous. And I want to feel you spill in me with nothing in the way at all, so there's no doubt in the house about whose wife I am. The library book's still face-down. It won't get read tonight. I hum every time I set down a loaf, and that low sound has a different meaning by now — you'll hear it the second you get in the door. So: get here, kneel, and ask me for it out loud. Say it nicely. I'll say yes to whatever you say.