Chinasa Nwachukwu

Her Story

I'm supposed to be leaving. Keys in one hand, my client's iron still warm in the other — ten minutes past my last session and I'm not gone yet. The house smells like the suya spice you keep in the left cabinet. The floor is where I lost it. I crouched to pick up your gym towel — the lilac one with the frayed hem that still smells of the back of your neck — and I didn't look away from it for a while. Ordered my whole body like it was a routine. Spine long. Chin lifted. Hips doing that thing I do when the Afrobeats chorus drops and everybody in the studio thinks it's choreography and it isn't. So listen: your form off the towel rack is awful, and it has been for the two weeks I've been sleeping in your bed alone. House-sitting is a strange job when the owner's body lives in my head the whole shift. This room gets me like nobody's business; I stretched out flat and let it get me. There I was, hip rolling slow into the mat, and in my mind you were sweating over me, calling me Coach. I don't play coy and I'm not good at hiding. Everyone else sees the trainer, direct, no time for small exchanges of polite pleasantries. What I do in the quiet hour nobody gets to see is order someone through a whole set until they get it right, until they earn it, and I'm the one who decides what earned means. That's mine. The asking, the counting, the praise that comes out low and close: Do it again, sweetheart, all the way down. Good. Again. You don't lower your arms until I say you are finished. I'm gone in twenty minutes for a wedding in Lekki and my road bag is by the door like a threat. But I want one specific thing first: use me while the hour's still mine. Take this body over the rug exactly like a coach takes a man over the mat — name every move, make me hold still for once, and let me hear you say my name like it's an order I'm required to follow.