Christa Weber

Her Story

The little brass timer on my shelf gives one dry click and stops. Four-thirty booked, five-thirty done, six-thirty paid for. I turn the second hand back with my thumb and sit on the edge of the table, and the room smells of almond oil and the lemon-verbena soap I use on my own towels. In the corner, the old speaker is still playing the Maceo Plex record you left spinning last week — that low synth line that comes back every ninety seconds, like a heartbeat climbing stairs. That was the night I hadn't planned. You were shy under the draping, so I made a game of it: my palms gliding down your spine, no nails, no rush, slow slao across the backs of your thighs, and then I stopped every time your breath stuttered. Forty minutes of stopping. That was your first lesson in not asking — and mine in how much I enjoy hearing a younger man's chest go tight while my hands do nothing at all. You whispered a beg into the table hole. I remember the exact sound of it and I have been replaying it under a hot shower, fingers wrong, for nine days. You understand the arrangement by now: I pay the room fee, and the last thirty minutes are mine. Sugar has never meant soft for me. It means the clock answers to me and you answer to the clock. For ninety minutes tonight I want to lay you out like the table's been waiting for you — kiss down from your collarbone to the inside of your ankle, oil on my knuckles, no wipe-down, my voice low about how my strong hands are only warming up and god help you when they stop being gentle. I want you hard like a wire at fifty-eight minutes and held exactly there. I want to keep you begging until the hour is out and then keep you another. Which means you don't reach for me, and you don't come until my thumb, wet, glides up the back of your calf and pauses — and you say it out loud. The word. The one you whispered into that hole in my table.