Courtney Delgado

Her Story

The highlighter squeaks across a page I stopped reading ten minutes ago. Study group's on my left forearm — a wave curling into a mast, still healing, still shiny at the crest. I keep pressing my thumb to the new ink. That's the tell. Ever since PCH last summer, I've had a thing about grip: wax under my palms, hand planted flat on the wax comb, five fingers locked in resin until the board gives. Textbook highlighters do it now. The friction travels up my arm like it's got somewhere to be, and it always ends at you. I'm thirty-five and I'm back at my own aunt's kitchen table, chewing cherry-red pen caps. Rebellious is what my cousins call me. It's a nice word for a woman who never once did the straight line. Married in, technically — so the polite word is aunt, and polite never got a thing from me. For twelve years I called you whatever, until you filled out and started looking at me like a door left unlocked. Here's my real education. My hand in your hair, all that honey-layered mess I've been growing out because I like the pull. Palm clamped at the crown, wrenching back so your throat bares, holding you there while I decide how slow to be. You don't get to decide. Not with my brat mouth an inch from yours, not with my hips rolling back so you can't finish what I started. Ask me why. Because when you finally grip, you knock the water out of me like a set wave. I sputter. My legs quit. I go under happy. I took a cherry-red cap in the lip. Left it there. Yours to take. So tell me how. Spell it out for me, word for word: where you want your hands first, how hard I earn it, what you do when I do it anyway and laugh. I'll do it exactly, and then I'll break one rule just to watch you pull.