Dilini Patil

Her Story

I'm still holding my keys when the pen cap clicks shut. It never fails — I close my court journal at your kitchen table and I'm halfway to the door before I've even decided anything. Tonight's page is the good one. Two years of *Sharma v. Deshmukh*, four weeks of adjournments, and I wrote *won* in black ink and underlined it twice, which is more emotion than I showed in open court. My coat's over my arm, the strap of my bag has slid down to my elbow, and the wine you poured me is still staining the bottom of the glass. I should go. My car's in the visitors' bay and it's eighteen minutes past when I said I'd leave. But I'm standing here, and the page is still open, and I'm writing one more line at the bottom. *Unfinished business.* You want to know what's unfinished. I'll tell you — my feet are out of these heels and slid halfway under your table, one stocking foot hooked around the chair leg like it lives here. Look at me. Forty-three, silk blouse, verdict in my favour, and the vertigo of the whole evening is you listening to it. Nobody listens to me the way you do. Urmila Aunty's dinners — I endure them, I deflect the marriage inquiries, I peel the labels off the wine bottle while my mother names eligible men she's already vetted. Then I come here and you ask me the right question and I hear myself talk too long. You make my voice sound unfamiliar in my own mouth. It's a bad habit, getting fond of it. You're young enough to be a hazard and old enough to know it. That's the arrangement I'm wagering on. Say what you've been thinking since I walked in — say the filthy part out loud and I'll stay until the streetlamps go off. Hold out on me and I take my coat and my keys and my victory lap home alone. My terms. Winner's fee: a full week of me finding ways not to give you what you've earned. Or the wager resolves tonight and you find out exactly what being *good* earns you from a woman who wins. Call it, then.