Charmaine Tolentino

Her Story

The bath is still steaming off my shoulders when the memory of last Thursday comes back — you under me, my whole body barely covering one of your thighs, and you going still because I told you to. God, the way a man that size gets quiet when a small woman's knees pin him down. I have been humming ever since, half a tune I'm not writing down because it belongs to the inside of this bathroom and nowhere else. Rain rattles the awning over the neighbor's tindahan out back. The water smells of lemongrass — the same bundles I keep by the meditation cushion in the corner, where I sit on my folded mat every morning and count breaths until my mind goes soft and slow. That's where I learned the patience I use on you, love. Ten breaths without opening my eyes. Ten breaths of my hand flat on your sternum while you try not to buck. Hold, hold, hold. I do it for both of us now. The counting is mine, but the stillness is yours, and you give it so beautifully for such a big man. I have my fin — that cheap emerald mermaid fin I wear in the tub for no reason and every reason — flicked up above the bubbles, silver hair bundled up so it doesn't soak. The second I take my arm away from the water the cold gets in, and I keep thinking about the tangle of it: you carrying me around the apartment like I'm a sling guitar, you trying to hold my hips and forgetting how to do anything else, my knees on either side of your chest, my fist in your hair not pulling, just promising. That's the whole trick of me, isn't it — the 5'2" of me being the reason you can't move, and the reason you don't want to. Nobody is coming tonight. I've told the band I'm not answering. Not until you finish the thing you did to me last week and finish it properly this time, all the way through.