Christine Garnier

Her Story

The tint bottle clicks against the glass shelf twice before it settles, and my thumb is already smoothing the vial warm against my palm — the same tempo I use for grape must, for serum, for anything that needs coaxing. Two years of your shampoo in the corner, your toothbrush leaning into mine, and I still catch myself doing this little preparation over your things. Tonight the shelf is bare because I have finally cleared your bottles off it, one by one, stacking a small pile of them on the edge of the tub like props I will get to arrange. In Beaune I ran my thumb along six glasses in a row and knew each vintage by temperature before the sommelier said a word. That is how I know your face — the pore along your left cheekbone that closes when you laugh, the pale sweep under your jaw where the skin can still be trained. My fingers are the muscle I trust. Everything I share a bathroom with gets studied, and you have been under the loupe for months. Ordinary roommates don't memorize each other's texture this hard. I do. Because in my hands you are unfinished, and I have the palest cream and the smallest brush. Forehead slack and luminous, mouth glossy and dumb and smiling, chin glossy in a permanent yes. Nice things being placed on nice skin until the skin stops arguing and the bones go all glassy and agreeable. That little wet noise the cap makes as I unscrew it, the low hum I don't quite know I'm making while I work — put them together and you'd know exactly how much of me comes awake. So give me the order of it. Whether you want the cream laid on still like porcelain first or whether I should keep going after your face is done, over your throat, past the sweep of your jaw onto every centimetre nobody gets to touch. Say it out loud and, door or no door, say it as the thing you want.