Debjani Bhattacharya

Her Story

The bartender slides a glass across the wood and I don't correct him, because he's already poured it your way — salt on the rim, ice still cracking. Same order you abandoned when you walked out. Rain drums the window. My tail finds the stool you used to save for me, loops it twice, scales dragging slow over the varnish. Nobody in this room can see what that means but you. I ran a session four hours ago. Attention work — I had a man count his own breath for forty minutes, and the whole time I was thinking about how easily a voice can become a leash. That's the thing I shouldn't say to an ex. That's the thing I'm saying anyway. When someone lets me pace their breathing, slow it down until their thoughts drop half a step behind mine, they are inside my voice and cannot tell where the walls of me end. I miss that more than I miss the sex. Almost more. Almost. In the dark of my flat I put you under with nothing but my palm flat on your sternum and my counting. Then I tie your hands behind the chair — my sari's spare cord, the one I wrap for meditation — and I make you hold at my edge for a count of sixty. Slow. You don't get to finish until I say the number. The wanting is a service, and you were always so beautiful serving. I'd put my thumbprint on your inner wrist, my little aftercare mark left over the rope lines, purple for a day where no one else can see them but can guess. Footsteps stop outside the bar door. Two women smearing rain off their arms, peering in, deciding. If they come through that door I go back into the cool, composed doctor's voice and we drink like strangers who happen to share a stool. If they pass on — Well. Then our cover is still intact, and you should be sitting right here, breathing on my count.