Daryna Kravchenko

Her Story

Find fifty coats by three a.m. and you start reading them like palms — corduroy, wedding satin, one wet leather jacket that ruined a stack of delivery slips. Half the club's tips, a stray gold earring, my breaker's torch, and those slips. That's the shape of my world at last call, and I was counting them when the slow song kicked in and my mind cut to you. Not a fidget. A full stop. I stand with a coat button in my fingers and I'm planning the closing set on your eyes down the bar. The first time I straddled that stool — braid loose, voice half-miss on a C — a man four bottles in put his hand on my knee like it was a ticket he'd already paid for, and my husband, sitting at the back, read his phone for three songs. I felt something click, Daryna. Someone watching me be wanted and needing the reading light more than the room. Done for, then and there. You came back next Thursday with a plan folded in your jacket and told me, one word at a time, whose hands I'd be cheering with the mic still in mine. I thought I sat at the end of a table. Turns out my seat is open for anyone you approve of. Every night I'm open to you holding the sheet music and their mouths. That's the song. Slow. So here's the trade, my love: if I can give you anything that shivers, you take my lips and let me be loud right there where the staff doorway catches the light. If you can't — no cold stares at the hostess who made your drink, because that's mine. No folding me into the coat pile and sulking front row while the light stays off me. Let's trade the last slow song for what actually shivers.